Dear Westwood Family,

At the monthly CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice) meeting in July, I connected with a team of people planning a walking pilgrimage from the Adelanto Detention Center to the Los Angeles Detention Center in downtown LA. The route is just over 80 miles, and the group will be walking the distance from September 28- October 6. People are encouraged to join for any portion of the walk, or for any of the evening programs along the way. I was immediately drawn to the project. It is a modern rendition of a sacred tradition- pilgrimage as protest, intended to garner media attention for the deplorable conditions in the detention centers and the ongoing unjust profiling, abduction, and imprisonment of immigrants, as well as to raise money for the immigrant bond fund, used to free migrants being unjustly detained.

As Michael Battle writes in “Recovering Pilgrimage in Dystopian America,” a spiritual pilgrimage “deepens sense of the sacred,” “sharpens one’s focus on the needs of the world,” and “brings the vision of God into our own lives – and increases the recognition of the sacred within ourselves.” As the team has worked together preparing for the pilgrimage, I have considered the ways in which the pilgrimage is both inward and outward facing- asking each of the walkers to consider what their own solidarity means and what their individual journey embodies while inviting others to join in, witness, and ask the same questions of themselves.

At the CLUE committee meeting in August, organizer Cameron Kash spoke about his experience visiting the Adelanto Detention Center earlier this year. “The thing you have to understand, the thing you can’t really prepare yourself for, is that no one who is held there deserves to be there,” he shared, recalling his time with a woman who hadn’t had a visitor from outside the detention center in almost a year.

Nationwide, over 300,000 people have been detained by ICE in the United States since the beginning of 2026. Detainees at Adelanto are held in cramped cells with limited access to clean water, basic medical care, food, and contact with their family or outside resources. It is one of the biggest detention centers in California, but it is only one of many such prisons around California and the United States.

When faced with both the scale of these numbers and the hopelessness of each individual story, resistance can seem almost impossible. But I have found, especially in the past year and a half, that hope emerges from spaces and people who continue trying to find justice, persisting in spite of how large the crisis is, insisting on even the smallest progress as progress worth pursuing.

In August, I attended a letter writing event centered around one woman, a Korean grandmother named Auntie Jo. She had been abducted from her neighborhood and was being held in Adelanto without access to her medication or reliable communication with her family. There were about thirty people at the event, all writing letters to The Korean Consulate, Representative Maxine Waters (The representative for Auntie Jo’s neighborhood in Los Angeles), and Auntie Jo herself. The mood in the room was both somber and hopeful, as we gathered together in an attempt to help just one of the thousands of people currently detained.

This past week, Auntie Jo was finally released from Adelanto. I received a video of her sitting down to eat her first Korean food in three months, reunited with her family. While I cannot speak to how much of a role our letters played, I can speak to the joy on her face, the feeling of relief I had knowing that even one person had been returned to freedom.

The efforts to seek justice for immigrants in this time can feel arduous and exhausting, but it is victories such as these that remind us to stay hopeful, to keep fighting, to keep seeking justice for our neighbors, even if the progress is slow. It is journeys such as the pilgrimage that remind me that justice takes all kinds and happens slowly- one step at a time.

I invite you to support the pilgrimage in any way you can:

Our Westwood Community has signed on to provide dinner for the walkers on the evening of Saturday, October 3. If you’re interested in helping prepare the meal and joining the evening program on that day, you can reach out to me directly, and I can add you to the team!

If you are interested in walking for any distance, helping to support the walkers, or volunteering to support the pilgrimage in any way, you can fill out this form.

If you’re interested in donating to help provide dinner and support the immigrant bond fund, you can donate here.

To learn more about conditions in Adelanto, you can read this article, featuring letters from detainees.

Everest Harvey