CHICAGO (OSV News) ─ A Chicago priest completed a 900-mile walk from Chicago's south suburbs to New York City Dec. 2 to highlight the difficulties immigrant families are facing under the current immigration crackdown across the United States.
Father Gary Graf, pastor of Our Lady of the Heights Parish in the suburb of Chicago Heights, was back at his church when OSV News talked to him Dec. 7. He had flown back to Chicago from Washington, where he spent a little time after taking a train there from New York.
"It was an eye-opener for me to come across parts of the country that I hadn't visited before," said Father Graf. "And to come in contact with people that at times I had probably judged without knowing. They had been here for generations that traced their earliest roots even to the Mayflower."
Father Graf said some of these people along the rural path he took had a lot of pride in their generations-deep roots, and he said they had little contact with people of color.
He said, "It's not, I don't think, (the kind of) hatred or rejection of someone, that I think we're sensing in this country right now. It's more not knowing them and, at times, fearing the unknown."
Father Graf has served most of his 41-year priesthood in Spanish-speaking parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago and also served briefly in Mexico. A significant number of the faithful he serves do not have proper authorization to be in the U.S. Clergy have described drastic reductions in Mass attendance in their Spanish-speaking parishes and the immigrants have been afraid to go to work and take their children to school because of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement operations.
In the early days of his walk, he told OSV News he had visited "friendly parishes," meeting parishioners at rural Catholic churches, who expressed concern over families being separated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's "Operation Midway Blitz" in Chicago that started in September. In the October interview, he said he expected to encounter some tension the further along he went on the pilgrimage.
But five days after setting foot at the base of the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of welcome for the country's new arrivals, he said, "In those conversations that I had with people, not just speaking from my perspective and speaking on behalf of those that I've known, particularly the immigrant community, but listening to them (generations-deep Americans) also … allowed us to hear each other in a way that there was a lot more … mutual respect, and some compassion and empathy.
"People felt that it was very life-giving. And I saw the goodness in people, and it helped me to not be so quick to judge," he said.
Father Graf, 67, said he also met people during a talk attended not just by Catholics but also agnostics, atheists and people who reject organized religion. He said the common denominator was that "all of us had a real love for humanity, a love for neighbor" and "a desire to be a welcoming family, community, church, town, for those who desire to make a new home here."
He is a member of the Priests for Justice for Immigrants, a group that ministers to and advocates for Chicago-area immigrants. The group has been calling for "comprehensive immigration policy reform."
According to the Pew Research Center's most recent Catholic fact sheet posted in March, more than 4 in 10 Catholics are either immigrants (29%) or children of immigrants (14%). Of this group, 80% of Hispanic Catholics were either born outside of the U.S. (58%) or were children of immigrants (22%). Ninety-two percent of Asian Catholics in the U.S. were either foreign born or children of immigrants. In contrast, 83% of white American Catholics had both parents born in the U.S.
Eighty percent of those targeted in the current administration's immigration crackdown across the country are Christian, with the largest proportion being Catholic (65%), according to a joint Catholic-evangelical report published by World Relief.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a Nov. 12 statement that in Chicago, Operation Midway Blitz has achieved what the city's "sanctuary politicians have failed to do for decades: decrease crime, remove the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens, and put Americans first."
In New York, Father Graf and some priests, along with other faith leaders held an interfaith service and they signed a pledge to continue the conversations.
Now, after returning to Chicago, he said organizers of the walk will be looking at ways to do that.
"This isn't an aggressive, you know, militant approach to attack those that we see as abusing human rights," said Father Graf. "But how do we do it in a way in which we change minds, enlist more people, get more people talking, and hopefully enact some changes, not out of aggression and violence, but rather in a very peaceful way, but in a very concise way."
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Simone Orendain is an OSV News correspondent. She writes from Chicago.
