Traveling ‘Immigrant Crosses’ memorial of ICE-involved deaths launches in Illinois

FRANKLIN PARK, Ill. (OSV News) — Under intermittently sunny and cloudy skies above a patch of grass on a busy main road in Chicago’s western suburb of Franklin Park, Dominican Father Brendan Curran tidied a makeshift memorial. Its flower vases kept toppling over amid strong gusts of wind.

A wooden cross painted white with black lettered decals marked with the words “nunca olvidado” and “never forgotten” stood behind the flowers, next to a decorated white poster board with the handwritten name of Silverio Villegas González.

The memorial at the corner of Emerson Street and West Grand Avenue is a block east of where Villegas, a 38-year-old father of two, was shot and killed in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation Sept. 12, 2025. This was in the early days of the Trump Administration’s forceful crackdown in the Chicago area — called Operation Midway Blitz — on people alleged to lack legal authorization to live in the United States. On Oct. 8, 2026, the family of Villegas Gonzáles filed a legal claim against the government alleging that misconduct by its employees led to his death.

These types of memorials, Father Curran told OSV News, sparked the idea behind the three-foot by two-foot white cross for Villegas González. It is part of a growing collection of more than 100 identical crosses, each bearing the name of someone who died while in an ICE detention center or during enforcement operations since 2020.

According to the National Immigration Project, at least 28 people have died in ICE custody in 2026 as of Oct. 5 — and 33 people died in 2025, the highest number of deaths in two decades.

The actual number of deaths related to ICE custody may be higher, as the Department of Homeland Security abolished rules requiring ICE to report and investigate deaths of people that took place within 30 days of their release from detention.

Traveling crosses exhibit meant to highlight human toll

Father Curran, the North American promoter of justice and peace for the Order of Preachers, brought the cross to the Emerson Street location in advance of the unveiling of an exhibit of the crosses. It was organized by a Chicago-based group of clergy and religious advocates to mark World Day of Migrants and Refugees, which took place Sept. 27.

The plan is to replicate the exhibit in several major cities across the country, including Seattle and Baltimore, well into 2027.

The “Immigrant Crosses” traveling exhibit will first stop weekly at parishes, schools and campus ministries in the Chicago area through 2026. The Dominican priest said it was crafted by immigrant painters and carpenters, some whose loved ones were deported, with donated wood from the carpenters’ union. This same model will be used for other dioceses around the U.S.

Father Curran said it is meant to put people in the pews “absolutely directly in touch with this human toll.”

Father Curran said he wanted to be clear that the exhibit is not meant to impose faith on anyone, or claim that those who died in ICE custody are all Christians. But he also highlighted a statistic from a joint Catholic-Evangelical report published by World Relief that found 80% of those at risk of being pursued in deportation operations are Christian, and 61% are Catholic. The report found one in six Catholics (18%) are either vulnerable to deportation or live with someone who is.

More than 65,000 people, as of July 11, are in ICE detention according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

‘We are not documents, we are not numbers’

Father Curran acknowledged that every country has a sovereign “right to make rules to recognize that we need to have a formal process of vetting and welcoming immigrants.”

But he also drew attention to the fact that nations must answer to God’s higher laws.

“Let us never forget that our Catholic teaching consistently reminds us that (there) is also a right for a family who is fleeing a country, sometimes for their very own lives, death threats, and other very serious conditions that lead them to need to migrate around the world,” he said.

“That is a right they have as people of faith,” continued Father Curran, 56, who describes himself as “first generation” born of an Irish immigrant father.

“That right comes from the fact that there is no one who is less filled with human dignity based on a passport, a processing of visas, or other documentation. We are not documents, we are not numbers,” he said. “We are first formed and shaped in the image and likeness of God. And in that gift of life, we are gifted with human dignity, that no one, no border, no peoples can take away from us.”

Conciliar and and papal magisterial teaching

Father Curran’s words reflected Pope Leo XIV’s message on human relationships at his general audience Sept. 16, when he quoted from the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution, “Gaudium et Spes.”

Pope Leo quoted, “Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed.”

St. John Paul II referenced the same entire passage in his 1993 encyclical “Veritatis Splendor” (“The Splendor of Truth”), calling all of those actions examples of “intrinsically evil acts” and then again in his 1995 encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” (“The Gospel of Life”), calling them all “crimes and attacks against human life.”

Father Curran said in relation to this conciliar and papal magisterial teaching, “The question of people living in threat, going to work in the community, in these repeated offenses are absolutely what the spirit of ‘Gaudium et Spes’ was written about.”

He continued, “Where people are living in peril, to not have the free ability to set up what is a decent, viable, and dignified place they call home, without an ability to attempt to thrive, is a priority of us as Church to assist in alleviating.”

Simone Orendain is an OSV News correspondent. She writes from Chicago. OSV News staff contributed to this report.