Sister JoAnn Persch was a nun who spent 18 years serving and praying with Chicago-area immigrants and refugees detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency at the Broadview processing facility, as part of a lifetime devoted to serving the less fortunate.
“She wanted to respond to the suffering of people and especially the immigrants who needed so much help,” said Sister Rita Specht, a longtime friend and fellow Chicago-based Sisters of Mercy nun who joined Persch in praying for migrants at the ICE processing facility. “She was tenacious and was very committed.”
Persch, 91, died of a thoracic aorta dissection on Nov. 14 at OSF Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Chicago, said Bob Keenan, a spokesman for the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas order. Persch had been an Alsip resident.
Born in Milwaukee in 1934, Persch graduated from Mercy High School in Milwaukee and entered the Sisters of Mercy in Des Plaines shortly after she turned 18 in 1952. She earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics from Chicago’s St. Xavier College, and then earned a master’s degree in religious education from Loyola University Chicago.
Persch took her perpetual vows, or final vows, with the Sisters of Mercy in 1958. She began her career by teaching in Catholic schools in Wisconsin and Chicago, including a three-year stint from 1959 until 1962 instructing pupils in Fox Point, Wisconsin, outside her hometown of Milwaukee. While there, she met a future partner in ministry to migrants and refugees, Sister Pat Murphy, who soon moved to Peru to become a missionary.
Persch later taught school in the Chicago area, and she reconnected with Murphy after Murphy moved back to Chicago from Peru in 1969. In the 1980s, the duo ministered at Little Brothers-Friends of the Elderly. Both had been drawn to the Sisters of Mercy because of the order’s responsiveness to the surrounding world, and they had a longstanding bond owing to their mutual deep call to justice, Persch told the Tribune earlier this year.
“It was amazing,” Persch told the Tribune in January. “We were able to pick up where we left off. And we were able to do more of what we knew had to be done.”
Long before the fairly recent wave of migrants into the U.S. followed by ongoing raids and deportations, Persch and Murphy felt called to serve those fleeing to the U.S., whether or not they arrived through traditional channels. In the late 1980s, Persch and Murphy opened Su Casa Catholic Worker House, a home in the South Side New City neighborhood for Central American survivors of war, torture and political persecution, where they served for the next seven years.
From 1997 until 2002, Persch and Murphy ministered together at Casa Notre Dame, a Chicago shelter for women fleeing domestic violence or recovering from addiction. Later, encouraged by a frustrated, faith-based immigration lawyer, the two began organizing weekly prayer vigils in January 2007 in west suburban Broadview, outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center — where migrants and immigrants were sent before being deported. They also fought for better conditions for those who were sent to another ICE processing center at the McHenry County Jail, where some detainees were placed in solitary confinement.
“It was her commitment that got me involved in immigration ministry as well,” Specht said. “That’s the influence that her passion and her commitment had on me.”
From the outset, Persch and Murphy found themselves frustrated that they and other faith leaders were not allowed to provide spiritual care to people facing deportation inside the Broadview center. They prayed with families outside the building, but weren’t able to offer clergy visits.
“There have been suicides,” Persch told the Tribune in 2008, referring to detainees. “People are very distressed.”
Persch and Murphy pushed for state legislators to make a change. Passed unanimously in the Illinois House and Senate in November 2008, the Access to Religious Ministry Act of 2008 paved the way for religious workers to have reasonable access to meet with detainees in local facilities.
“The immigrant detainees are different than the criminal detainees,” Persch told the Tribune in 2009, the year that the law became effective. “They most likely are never going to see their families (in the States) again. They’re going back to places that they don’t know. … They’re afraid. They’re very sad for their family, very worried about their family. It’s like in an emergency room when they bring a chaplain in. There’s nothing you can do, but your presence, your compassion, your prayer, that brings comfort to them.”
Persch and Murphy appeared in a 2012 documentary, “Band of Sisters,” about their efforts to bring the Access to Religious Ministry Act into being.
The pair continued their efforts. In the late 2010s, they went several times to Washington, D.C., to protest, including for the Catholic Day of Action for Dreamers in 2018, and the Catholic Day of Action for Immigrant Children in 2019. They were arrested during a nonviolent civil disobedient protest during that 2018 visit to D.C., as well as for protesting at a nuclear test site in Nevada.
Persch and Murphy wound up appearing on comedian and political commentator Samantha Bee’s TV show “Full Frontal” in 2021 to discuss the experience.
“This is exactly what we were doing when we were arrested. We were singing and praying the rosary,” Persch told the Tribune in 2019. “We just know in our heart that this is what we have to do. These last two times, it was filling God’s call to us to do something more. … How could we say no? After being arrested, we were taken by a bus to a processing building. The little bit of discomfort we felt that day (from being arrested) is so minimal (compared to) what the immigrants go through there.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, clergy visits were barred, so Persch and Murphy began holding Zoom calls and online prayer sessions. After the pandemic, clergy visits resumed, and clad in jeans and sweatshirts, Persch and Murphy regularly could be found at the Broadview ICE facility. In 2022, they formed a nonprofit group called Catherine’s Caring Cause, which helps asylum seekers settle in Chicago.
“Our goal now is to help (asylum-seeking families) get prepared for life under Trump,” Persch told the Tribune in January. “We want to have parents put in writing who they’d like to have custody of their children if they are detained and sent away.”
In July, Murphy died at age 96, surrounded by loved ones, at the Alsip apartment that Murphy and Persch shared. Persch continued advocating for migrants and appearing regularly at the ICE processing center in Broadview. On Nov. 1, she was part of a delegation of clergy leaders who attempted to bring communion to detainees in Broadview but were denied.
“She was on the rosary that we pray every week, some on Zoom and some in person,” Specht recalled. “And she was on that rosary the day she died. She left the rosary early, and we were still having a discussion, and I said, ‘Are you not feeling good?’ and then she said, ‘No, no, I’m preparing for a press conference.’ She died with her boots on.”
In a statement, U.S. Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., called Persch’s death “the end of a life of kindness and caring. But it is more. It is a reminder and a challenge to each of us to welcome the stranger and choose kindness over hate and fear.”
In 2023, the Archdiocese of Chicago awarded Persch and Murphy the Cardinal Blase Cupich Lifetime Achievement Award.
There were no immediate survivors.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
