Vigil for Democracy holds weekly protest outside Sunset Park’s MDC

Immediately after the Trump administration took office for the second time, the President announced that “at-large” arrests of undocumented immigrants — arrests that are carried out in public spaces — were going to ramp up significantly. The new goal was 3000 arrests a day.

Human rights activists responded quickly, organizing protests and denouncing the policy. Nonetheless, eleven months in, on December 14, 2025, the Washington Post reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was holding 68,400 men and women assumed to be undocumented in detention facilities throughout the country.

Among those facilities is the 32-year-old Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Sunset Park.

All told, eight federal detention centers or correctional institutions currently hold immigrants who have been deemed unlawful entrants into the US. Moreover, while the government has rushed to build new prisons (among them the pejoratively-named Alligator Alcatraz in Florida, Indiana’s Speedway Slammer, and Nebraska’s Cornhusker Clink) to accommodate escalating numbers of newly-arrested immigrants, ICE has also increasingly relied on private prisons run by the GEO Group and CoreCivic to house them.

Detention and deportation do not come cheap. According to the American Immigration Council, Trump’s most recent Congressionally approved budget bill earmarked $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement, with $45 billion specifically designated for building new immigration prisons and jails.

Rev. Juan Carlos Ruiz, pastor at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Bay Ridge, calls this “shameful.” As the cofounder (with Indivisible Brooklyn) of a weekly Tuesday night Vigil for Democracy at MDC, Ruiz notes that law-abiding immigrants throughout Brooklyn — and in the rest of the country — are living in fear of apprehension and removal from their adopted country. This, despite the widely reported fact that the majority of asylum seekers enter the country because of poverty, violence, or a lack of opportunity in their countries of origin.

The Brooklyn vigil, Ruiz explains, is one of more than 100 community actions taking place nationwide to peacefully protest the arrest, detention, deportation, and family separation policies promulgated by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. Now in its eighth month, it draws people from throughout the five boroughs and aims to show detainees and their families that they have not been forgotten.

That said, what is actually happening inside MDC remains a mystery. While advocates describe the conditions inside the jail as deplorable and say outbreaks of violence are routine, requests by Ruiz and Congressmembers Adriano Espaillat, Dan Goldman, and Nydia Velázquez to see conditions firsthand have been denied. This has left policymakers and activists with more questions than answers about a facility that held 1336 people, including more than 100 ICE detainees, on Jan. 1.

Bryony Romer, a member of Indivisible Brooklyn, has attended the weekly vigil since it began in July. “We’re standing up for immigrants, but we’re also standing up for our own humanity,” she told the Sunset Post. “We come to MDC to say ‘NO’ to ICE raids, deportations, and arrests and show solidarity with the immigrant community.”

Rabbi Stephanie Kolin of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope agrees with Romer and calls defending immigrants a moral imperative for people of faith. “The Jewish tradition calls on us to love the stranger, to care for the stranger,” she says. “Jews have often been outsiders in our communities, so we know what it feels like to be vulnerable. Our sacred texts and history call on us to show up for neighbors who are being targeted, dehumanized, threatened, and taken from their children.”

Another protester, retired attorney-turned-musician Paul Stein, brings his accordion to the vigil each week to boost the morale of attendees and perhaps entertain the people inside the jail. “MDC is known to be a really bad place,” he says. “Even though it is intended for short-term stays for people awaiting trial, it is one of the highest security facilities in the country. I hope it lifts the spirits of those inside to know that people outside care about them.”

As Stein speaks, horns from passing cars beep in support of the vigil, adding to the cacophony of songs, chants, prayers, and brief speeches that decry what protesters describe as the mistreatment of asylum-seekers who, they say, want little more than to live in safety and peace.

For Rabbi Kolin, the vigil also gives participants a chance to collectively imagine a different political landscape. “We as a country can create a sense of belonging, a sense of love and welcome, for refugees,” she says. “We can’t close the door behind us.”

The Vigil for Democracy takes place every Tuesday from 6:00 to 7:00 PM on the corner of Third Avenue and 29th Street.