The Rev. Gary Graf, a Chicago Heights Catholic priest, began a 50-day pilgrimage Monday from Pope Leo’s boyhood home in Dolton to New York to bring attention to the cause of immigrant children.
Graf’s planned destinations are Ellis Island, formerly the country’s primary immigration processing center, and the Statue of Liberty, a national symbol of freedom.
“There’s no real path to citizenship for millions of people,” Graf said. “The process is pretty much stagnant. And there’s really no, on the Google map, route from here to Ellis Island. You got to kind of create it.”
Graf said one reason he is undertaking the walk is because his own great-grandparents were immigrants who arrived through Ellis Island.
“My great-grandparents, who came from County Cork and County Mayo, Ireland, and Stuttgart, Germany, their story isn’t very dissimilar,” Graf said. “The southern border now is really the present-day Ellis Island. People come here with the same hopes and aspirations and desires and fears.”
He expects to arrive around Thanksgiving. To make the journey in the planned 50 days, he will need to walk around 18 to 20 miles a day.
Graf is planning to undertake the walk largely alone, but said he is hoping others might join him along the way and take up parts of the walk in his stead so he can rest for periods of time.
He plans to stop at churches and other places of worship along the way to meet with local faith and immigrant communities.
“The idea is to try to make connections and have those conversations along the way with some of those faith communities, that they would literally take me in and allow me to spend the night,” Graf said.
Graf is the head pastor of Our Lady of the Heights, in Chicago Heights, and a member of the group Priests for Justice for Immigrants.
Many who came to see him off were members of his congregation and others from the faith community who knew him from his history working for immigration justice.
Sister Jean Keeley, of the Dominican Order, said she has been active in immigration work for about 20 years. For most of that time, she has been a member of a group that prays the rosary weekly for immigrants at the Broadview Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center.
“We’ve been praying there for 19 years, for the safety of immigrants and that people who are in ICE treat them respectfully. That has happened in the past, but it is definitely not happening right now,” Keeley said. “They’re grabbing people all over town, in masks and no identification. No other police officer in the U.S. does that. It’s like armed robbers.”
Graf’s campaign is called Step Up, Speak Out. Graf and his supporters will track and document his journey and his interactions with the people he meets online, on social media and on the website stepupspeakout.org.
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There will also be a donation page, where people can donate for every step Graf takes.
“You can donate for steps, every step,” said spokesperson Lauren Foley. “One hundred percent of the proceeds of those donations go toward helping immigrant children who have been separated from their parents.”
Before his departure, supporters, community members and faith leaders gathered to bless Graf and his journey.
The Rev. Larry Dowling, moderator of Priests for Justice for Immigrants, opened the event.
“Father Gary has spent his life walking with others,” Dowling said. “This is not only a physical act of endurance, but a spiritual act of solidarity, a prayer in motion for the innocent victims of injustice in our world.”
One of the speakers was Imam Hassan Aly, a leader of the Chicago Muslim community, who emphasized the interfaith nature of immigration justice work.
“Today we gather as people of faith, all faiths and all traditions,” Aly said. “We stand here at the beginning of this sacred journey, one that echoes the footsteps of all prophets and messengers and righteous people, men and women who walked for justice before us.”
Graf spoke about a time he walked from Mexico to Arizona across the Sonoran Desert, entering the country illegally as an act of protest.
“An illegal act does not make someone ‘illegal,'” Graf said. “If that were the case, how many of us, who at any time in our lives have offended or violated or broken a law in this nation of laws, would be in the same net now and be sent away?”
Graf also read segments of the 1883 poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, which is cast on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The poem famously states, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
“This is the message that we carry to Lady Liberty; the truth that all immigrants are not strangers, but rather our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters,” Graf said.
Deborah White, co-chaplain of the village of Dolton, was among several faith leaders at Graf’s sending-off.
“What we’re facing now in this country is inhumane, and it should not be happening,” White said. “We are all created in God’s image, and this is not his plan for his children. And so to have someone sitting in authority and dictating what’s going on, and treating people as though they’re inhuman, that’s not of God.”
White also said she is glad to see the faith community take up the pope’s childhood home as a site of importance, and that she hopes to see more such events in Dolton. She said plans are underway to make the house a historical landmark and open it to the public.
“Today is just a beginning of new things,” White said.