Commemorating immigrants that have died while in US Detention Centers during a Day of the Dead vigil in Grand Rapids

On Saturday over 100 people gathered outside the ICE office at 517 Ottawa NW in downtown Grand Rapids to participate in an vigil cosponsored by Movimiento Cosecha, GR Rapid Response to ICE, No Detention Centers in Michigan and the ACLU.

The vigil was part of a national Communities not Cages campaign that was coordinated by the Detention Watch Network. In the Detention Watch Network toolkit for the event it states:

The Day of the Dead National Days of Action is designed to honor lives lost to immigration detention as a part of the Communities Not Cages campaign. Immigration detention is deadly and inherently inhumane — what we’re seeing now is heightened cruelty under the Trump administration. Shockingly, there have been at least 25 deaths in ICE custody since Trump’s inauguration, a record number of deaths within a calendar year since 2006. Take action as we collectively honor, remember, and grieve lives lost in ICE custody.

ICE detention centers have always been cruel spaces of oppression directed at undocumented immigrants since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was created in 2003. In “Deadly Failures,” a 2024 report by the ACLU, American Oversight, and Physicians for Human Rights, independent medical experts found that 95 percent of deaths in detention were deemed as being preventable or possibly preventable if ICE had provided clinically appropriate medical care. Additional investigations into deaths in immigration detention include Code Red: The Fatal Consequences of Dangerously Substandard Medical Care in Immigration Detention, Fatal Neglect: How ICE Ignores Deaths in Detention and Systemic Indifference: Dangerous and Substandard Medical Care in US Immigration Detention. These reports have found that ICE medical care has contributed to numerous deaths and that the agency lacks urgency and transparency when reporting deaths in its custody.

The Day of the Dead vigil outside of the ICE office at 517 Ottawa was facilitated by Rev. Greta Jo Seidohl, who did a great job of creating an atmosphere of grief and mourning, for those that attended the vigil.

Gema Lowe with Movimiento Cosecha then provided clarity around the importance of Dia de Los Muertos in Mexican culture, which included handmade crosses that Cosecha members made to honor the 25 people who have died in ICE Detention Centers since the beginning of the 2025. Gema also talked about the work that Movimiento Cosecha is involved in, including the boycott campaign that is targeting the businesses that Grand Rapids Mayor David LaGrand owns.

Pastor Ricardo Angarita then addressed the crowd with additional comments about the significance of the Day of the Dead and how it relates to the national campaign to reflect on and remember the 25 immigrants that have died while in ICE Detention Centers throughout the US. Pastor Ricardo then offered up a Christian prayer.

Rev. Nathan Dannison from Fountain Street Church was the next person to address the crowd, specifically to read the names of the 25 immigrants who have died while in ICE Detention Centers in the US since the beginning of the year. Rev. Dannison asked people to say the word Presente! after each name was invoked and the location of the ICE Detention Center they died in. He also asked people to lift up the 25 crosses that Cosecha members had made while everyone said Presente!

Here is the list of those who have died in ICE Detention Centers since the beginning of the year:

After acknowledging those who have died in ICE Detention Centers a representative from No Detention Centers in Michigan played audio from someone who had recently been released from the North Lake ICE Detention Center in Baldwin, Michigan, followed by a second audio recording of someone who is still locked up there. Lauren Ann Coman then read in English what both men had said in Spanish.

Lastly, a representative from GR Rapid Response to ICE spoke to offer up ways that people can become actively involved in resisting ICE in the Grand Rapids area. One thing that they emphasized was that they did not want to come back here next year and listen to a new list of immigrants who had died while in an ICE Detention Center, saying, “we need to move from protesting ICE to actively resisting ICE terrorism.”

People who held up the handmade crosses when the names of the immigrants who have died in ICE Detention Centers since the beginning of this year were then asked to place them in front of the ICE Office at 517 Ottawa.

Someone from Movimiento Cosecha videotaped the entire vigil, which you can watch here, with the formal part of the vigil begins at 25 minutes into the video.

Photographs taken by Viviana Rubio