08451
June 13, 2008

Clergy struggle to meet detainees’ spiritual needs

by Gregory Trotter
Religion News Service

WOODSTOCK, IL — The eight men in orange jumpsuits quietly filed into the classroom at the McHenry County Correctional Facility, each one earnestly shaking the hand of the Rev. Jim McLoughlin on the way in.
   
McLoughlin handed out English- and Spanish-language Bibles as the men sat in blue plastic chairs inside the stuffy classroom. The prison guard shifted his weight by the door.
   
Many of the men did not speak English or understand McLoughlin’s homily on betrayal and redemption. Yet they prayed with their heads bowed, a few of them clutching their hands to their foreheads, rocking back and forth.
   
They are just a few of the 31,000 foreigners nationwide who are currently detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Most are not hardened criminals but are being held for sneaking into the country illegally, overstaying their visas or are waiting for asylum.
   
ICE officials say some 300 state and county facilities across the U.S. currently house detainees for ICE, including McHenry, located about 50 miles northwest of Chicago. And while state and federal prisons have long been accustomed to meeting the religious needs of inmates serving long-term sentences, short-term detainees pose a different set of challenges.
   
The detainees are Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Baha’is, Christians, Jews and more — people of many faiths and nations, locked away from their families for days, weeks and sometimes years until their immigration status is determined.
   
“There's a profound sense of isolation for the detainees,” McLoughlin said later, noting out that most of them are much farther from their family and friends than the other inmates. “And spiritually, that is very hard on them.”
   
The visiting volunteer clergy say they face three main challenges to ministering to immigration detainees: access, resources and diversity.
   
At the state capital in Springfield, activists and religious groups are pushing a bill that would allow ministers greater access to the detainees. Opponents of the bill say increased access would mean increased costs and higher security risks.
  
“Their needs are being met,” said the Rev. Michael Love, senior chaplain at McHenry since 2000 and pastor at Trinity Baptist Community Church in nearby Crystal Lake.
   
Volunteer chaplains who visit the detainees, however, aren’t so sure.
   
“Our access has been very limited,” said McLoughlin, the pastor of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in nearby Richmond, who has been visiting the jail for eight years. “And that hasn’t changed much over the years. It’s been very stagnant.”
   
McLoughlin said Catholicism, with its emphasis on physical sacraments like Communion and confession, demands a certain level of personal contact. It’s a big problem among a detainee population where many come from heavily Catholic Latin American countries.
   
“I understand that jail policies change,” he said, “but the Catholic Church doesn’t change that much. It is a sacramental faith.”
   
But even if he had unfettered access to all the detainees, McLoughlin said there’s only so much one person can do. He’s working with the local diocese to hire a full-time bilingual Catholic chaplain at McHenry, but until then he relies on volunteers like 80-year-old David Warren, who visits the facility every other Tuesday.
   
Warren, a member of a lay Franciscan order, says his mission is to promote peace in the cellblocks by providing religious materials and other assistance, such as ESL books, counseling and $10 checks.
   
Warrens gives each new detainee $10 to buy extra food or hygiene products at the commissary. “Our mission is to supplement the care that the jail provides,” said Warren, who operates as the primary missionary at McHenry for his order.
       
Recently, Warren arrived at McHenry with a bag full of Bibles and Qurans in English and Spanish. Slightly stooped from age, Warren wore a wooden cross as he was led to the same small classroom where McLoughlin had celebrated Mass the week before.
   
Warren was not pleased when he got there.
   
“For seven years, we used to be able to go right into the cellblocks,” he said, “and it was much more effective.”
   
In the cellblock, Warren could meet the needs of a greater number of detainees, he said. Fewer inmates make the trip to the classroom, and transporting them from the cellblock eats away precious minutes of his allotted hour.
   
Warren meets with small groups and frequently relies on detainees to serve as translators. He led a small group of women through the “Peace Prayer of Saint Francis,” in English and Spanish, and wrote each person who had no money a check for $10. He urged them to be sisters to each other. Then he asked if there was anything else that he could do.
   
“Yeah,” said one stocky bilingual Latina woman with a laugh. “Get us out of here.”
   
After the last group returned to their cellblock, Warren appeared discouraged as he gathered his materials.
   
“They are depressed, despondent and sometimes suicidal,” he said later.  “We have to get back into the cellblocks to really help them.”
       
Detainees, meanwhile, say it matters little how many resources the chaplains have if they are unable to meet the various needs of an increasingly diverse prison population.
   
Mohammad Azam Hussain, a 39-year-old Pakistani, spent more than three years in various detention facilities, including seven months at McHenry in late 2005. He was recently released from a facility in Wisconsin, according to his lawyer.
   
Hussain, a devout Muslim, was arrested after allegedly concealing his ties to a volatile political party in Pakistan on his naturalization papers. He was taken from his home in Des Plaines, IL, where he lived with his wife and 7-year-old daughter.
   
Hussain said he repeatedly requested the kosher meal plan since McHenry had no halal menu that meets Islamic dietary laws. He eventually gave up, settling for vegetarian meals, after filing more than 50 complaints.
   
“The food was horrible and the officials were ignorant,” Hussain said.
   
Though ICE’s policy requires facilities to provide detainees “reasonable and equitable opportunity to observe their religious dietary practice,” kosher meals are provided only to Jewish detainees, said Gail Montenegro, an ICE spokeswoman.
   
The food was not Hussain’s only complaint. He also had difficulty obtaining an Arabic-language Quran, and though Muslims were allowed to have congregational prayers once a week, there were no visiting imams for religious counseling.