Sebastián Quinac takes a sky-blue tissue paper flower and walks toward the chain-link fence outside the Latino supermarket El Super. He carefully places the flower on one of five white pennants that flutter under Tucson’s intense sun. Inscribed on them are the names of migrants captured by immigration agents at this site and others, or who died in detention centers across the country.
Quinac does not know these people, but to him they represent families who do not know where their parents, children or siblings are. “But we are here to help them,” he says in a firm voice.
He is among the attendees at the first May vigil in a series of gatherings that will take place every second Saturday of the month. The interfaith effort will focus on different parts of Tucson, where members of Southern Arizona’s immigrant community have been taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s second administration.
The Good Neighbor Interfaith Coalition and other community members unite outside the El Super grocery store, at the corner of South Sixth Avenue and East Benson Highway. It’s Saturday, May 9, and they want to make visible abuses against immigrant communities.
“The word solidarity is very powerful among people who seek unity, justice and love; that’s why we are here,” Quinac tells Arizona Luminaria.
The Kaqchikel Mayan activist from Guatemala, provides translation and assistance to local Indigenous migrants who speak neither Spanish nor English. Quinac works for the Alianza Indígenas sin Fronteras, or Indigenous Alliance Without Borders in English, and is part of the local Rapid Response Team, observing local ICE operations.
“Families who were separated, who were deported, need to hear from us that we are here, even if they are in their countries, even if they are here sad, abandoned — but we are with them in different ways,” Quinac tells Arizona Luminaria, with a gentle voice and face shaded by a straw-colored hat that protects him from the unforgiving sun.
This first vigil is at the Tucson site where Steven Davis, also a Rapid Response volunteer, recorded agents wearing masks to hide their faces. They followed an older Latino man carrying a small bag of groceries. They stopped him across the street. Agents smashed the man’s truck window and detained him.
A community network shared the video on Jan. 18, showing ICE agents pulling a man from his vehicle outside El Super. Four months later, in that same place, dozens of people — including Davis — now gather to raise their voices and offer prayers and songs of faith for those they say have been “kidnapped and disappeared” by the U.S. immigration system.
“‘It was really devastating for me. Being back here today has brought back all those feelings of grief,’” Davis says, noting that memories of witnessing the government take one his neighbors continues to affect him.
Credit: Beatriz Limón
Retired Pastor Tina Schlabach said the next vigil will take place in the Menlo Park neighborhood, where hundreds of residents have gathered to express concerns about immigration operations and organize coordinated responses in their neighborhoods.
“We will hold them every month. We are going to choose another place where people have disappeared, where ICE has detained them,” says Schlabach, who has spent years advising families affected by deportations.
Immigrant advocacy groups in Southern Arizona have a long tradition of fighting for the safety of migrants, as well as honoring those who died crossing the desert or in detention centers. Now, they say, they are also being forced to build altars and organize vigils for those taken by ICE on the streets of Tucson.
“We do this because otherwise these things are invisible; they happen quickly and people don’t know. So we have decided that once a month we will be in these places,” Schlabach says. “We will pray for the families of the people who have been detained and tell the stories of how immigration authorities have carried out violence, with a lack of respect and due process.”
To select vigil locations, the interfaith coalition will use the newly published Tucson Migra Map, a community documentation project built from reports by hundreds of residents seeking to expose the scope of immigration enforcement operations and the violence they say immigrant communities face daily.
People interested in attending the vigils can contact members at goodneighbortucson@gmail.com for more information.
“It is very important to us that this not be forgotten or made invisible,” Schlabach says while holding a white pastoral stole hand-embroidered by migrant women in shelters in Mexico.
She chose a shortened biblical verse from the Book of Deuteronomy stitched into the fabric in black and red capital letters: “I HAVE SET BEFORE YOU LIFE AND DEATH… CHOOSE LIFE. SO THAT YOU AND YOUR DESCENDANTS MAY LIVE… Dt 30:19.”
“It is blessed,” Schlabach says with a slight smile before walking away.
Behind her, the white pennants crowned with paper flowers sway on the chain-link fence. Names, written in black marker, remain visible: Miguel Ángel García Medina. Emmanuel Damas. Parady LA. Chaofeng Ge.
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