Each Sunday at 4 p.m., religious communities and people of conscience gather at Payne Park in Sarasota to pray for our immigrant neighbors and for those who are detained.
We gather because Florida officials have not answered months of clergy requests to offer nonpartisan, individual spiritual care to any person detained.
They have not said, “Yes” – and they have not said, “No.”
Such silence is not bureaucracy; it is a moral failure.
Dignity and the free exercise of religion should not stop at a fence line.
We are clergy, chaplains and faith and community leaders who carry sacred mandates to stand with the vulnerable. We are prepared for every requirement: background checks, screening and coordinated schedules.
Our purpose is spiritual care, not politics.
Yet doors stay shut while the public square hardens its language.
There is no such thing as an “illegal” person.
Even if people lack papers, they do not lack breath, story or worth.
Blocking pastoral presence diminishes us all.
Recent briefings show how swiftly complex operations can be organized.
If the state can organize operations of that scale, it can coordinate something as basic and constitutional as allowing vetted clergy to pray with those who are detained.
The measure of a community is not how efficiently it processes people, but how fiercely it protects their dignity. On that measure, the unanswered letters speak volumes.
Some will ask, “What difference will prayer or presence make?”
We answer that question from hospital rooms and jail pods and gravesides. And our presence says, “You are not disposable”
It tethers a terrified soul to hope.
It keeps a name from disappearing into a number.
When letters go unanswered, we will not return silence with silence.
We will answer by spending our time on justice.
Join us in a creative witness that flips the script on time.
During the Sunday vigils, we use our time to pray, to stand in public to love, to insist that compassion belongs in our community.
Beyond the park, you can take a simple act of protected expression that “wastes” the time of those who might otherwise target our neighbors.
You can place a Latin American bumper sticker on your car as a sign of belonging – for we are incomplete without our immigrant neighbors.
If visible solidarity makes officials spend a minute on us instead of targeting our neighbors, that is a minute less spent advancing dehumanization.
This is not an obstruction – it is public courage.
We commit our minutes to dignity.
Let those who deny it have fewer minutes to spend on harm.
We will not be quiet or stand idly by while people are fenced off from prayer and presence.
We invite this community – by conscience and creativity – to make those who deny dignity spend theirs elsewhere.
We urge officials to answer our requests.
Until then, we will keep watch at Payne Park.
We will keep praying.
And we will keep practicing imaginative resistance that witnesses to the future we intend to build: a Sarasota where dignity is not negotiable and the free exercise of religion does not stop at a gate.
This guest column was authored by the following area community and faith leaders:
Sarasota faith leaders call for access to detained immigrants | Opinion – Sarasota Herald-Tribune
