Vigil for Immigrants at the Elizabeth Detention Center

Please join IRATE (the Interfaith Refugee Action Team - Elizabeth) and Pax Christi NJ at 1:30 pm on Sunday, October 12th as we march with the flags of the nation to honor our immigrant heritage and protest the treatment of immigrants held at the Elizabeth Detention Center. We will assemble on Progress Street, just off Dowd Avenue in Elizabeth, NJ and march two blocks to the Detention Center where we will hold a vigil to remember those who are being held inside and at similar facilities across the country.

About Immigration Detention
Immigrants in detention include families, both undocumented and documented immigrants, many who have been in the US for years and are now facing exile. They include survivors of torture, asylum seekers and other vulnerable groups including pregnant women, and children. Individuals who are seriously ill are held without proper medication or care. Immigrants detained during this process are in non-criminal custody because being in violation of immigration laws is not a crime. It is a civil violation similar to a traffic ticket.

About IRATE
IRATE is an alliance of grassroots organizations whose members believe that the current U.S. policy of detaining immigrants in prison-like conditions is contrary to our tradition of welcoming refugees. Currently in New Jersey, the Bureau of Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) has some 300 people detained at the Elizabeth Detention Center and an unknown number of people in county jails throughout the state.

For more information on the vigil click here

For more information on immigration detention go to
www.irateweb.org
www.detentionwatchnetwork.org
www.cliniclegal.org

February's Peace Vigil

Although it was terribly cold and our numbers were small at our most recent vigil in February the Summit Interfaith Peace Vigil still took place. I know that those of you who weren’t with us physically were with us in spirit. I would like to share with everyone our peace prayer for February.

Let us invoke the Love that moves above us and below us, around us and within us. Let us invoke the living spirit of the peacemakers who have gone before us; Philip Berrigan, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.. Let us invoke their spirit. Let us invoke the Spirit of Love that is lived as solidarity of each with all, of one with the other:

man with woman…
adult with child…
black with white…
Christian with Buddhist with Jew with Muslim…

Let us invoke the Love that moves above and below us, around us and within us.
Let us invoke the Spirit of Love that is greater than us, but which is made real through us -- and only though us.
Let us invoke that human solidarity that makes justice possible and through which by making justice, we make peace possible.

Let us invoke love and live it as solidarity.

Our lives are our prayers.

Amen

Adapted from Peace Meditation
by the Rev. Anthony P. Johnson
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Essex County,
Orange, New Jersey

Our next vigil will be held on Thursday March 8^th at 6:30 pm. We will gather as always in front of the war memorial on the village green in Summit (at the corner of Elm & Broad Sts.)