Cristiana returned to a jail in Adelanto, California, for the first time in over a decade at the end of September. She used to make the roughly two-hour drive from Los Angeles to Adelanto’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center complex when her three daughters were young so they could see their father, a migrant from Mexico who was jailed there in the 2000s before being deported.
When she returned this year, she gathered in front of the complex alongside faith leaders, migrant justice organizers, and members of her church to begin a 96-mile pilgrimage that ended on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.
“I remember them being so young and not understanding why their dad had gone to work one day and never came back,” said Cristiana, who is using a pseudonym to protect her family’s privacy. “I see the trauma that it caused.”
Today, over 2,000 people are jailed at the three detention centers that form the complex in Adelanto. The sites have repeatedly come under fire for holding migrants in inhumane conditions and denying them access to medical care, resulting in at least two deaths in the past year.
“For me, walking the 96 miles is a testament to the men and women that are in Adelanto and any other detention center in this country, and for all the families left behind, the children, and the grandchildren,” Cristiana said.
The eight day-long “Clear the Road to Freedom” Interfaith Pilgrimage left Adelanto on September 26 with a core group of more than a dozen faith leaders and migrant justice organizers committed to walking the entire route to downtown Los Angeles. The pilgrims donned sun hats and hiking shoes to cover Southern California’s desert, forest, mountainous and urban terrain in record-breaking heat. Nonprofit organizations Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE Justice) and Nefesh, which serves Los Angeles’s Jewish community, spearheaded the event alongside Sacred Resistance, a social justice, solidarity, and accompaniment ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.
The pilgrimage is one of the most high-profile actions yet in a string of clergy protests against the Trump administration’s ramped-up crackdowns on migrant communities. Previously, faith leaders have been arrested for demonstrating against conditions at Delaney Hall, a migrant jail in New Jersey, ICE training facilities in Williston, Vermont, and ICE raids in the Minneapolis area.
“Many spiritual traditions have traditions of pilgrimage as a sacred practice,” CLUE Justice Executive Director Jennifer Gutierrez said. “It’s typically to a sacred site, and the idea is that while you’re physically traveling to that site, you are also on a spiritual journey getting closer to God. This is us taking a spiritual journey and a way of calling out where we have been separated from God, where we have failed as a culture, as a society, as a country to follow God’s commands, to care for our neighbor.”
The groups organized the pilgrimage to bring awareness to the ballooning number of migrants jailed nationwide and the grim conditions in detention centers. More than 65,000 people were held in ICE detention nationwide as of July; the number of migrants jailed previously reached a record high of 73,000 in January. Eight detention centers across California were holding more than 6,400 migrants as of July.
“We are holding the third-highest number of detainees in the country, and the fact that more people are not enraged is devastating,” said Michelle Arkin, a lead organizer with No Concentration Camps California. “This pilgrimage is a peaceful, beautiful, and dramatic way to encourage people to learn more, to get engaged, and to see how we can be of service to people.”
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No Concentration Camps California and Shut Down Adelanto Coalition, along with nonprofits Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice and Matthew 25, also partnered with CLUE Justice, Nefesh, and Sacred Resistance to organize the pilgrimage.
CLUE Justice has been organizing with migrant workers in Southern California since 1997 and has ramped up support for migrant community members since federal agents launched a series of violent raids in Los Angeles in June 2025. Agents abducted more than 1,300 people during a months-long operation in the city, according to reports from community groups compiled and verified by L.A. Taco. CLUE Justice now runs an immigration bond fund to help migrants afford bond and return to their communities, as well as a program to train clergy and other volunteers to visit migrants jailed in the area’s detention centers.
“We’ve been very, very aware of the human rights abuses that have been happening inside the detention center, the medical neglect at an extreme level, the spoiled food, lack of access to clean water and sunshine, no air conditioning when it’s 100 degrees out in the desert where the detention center is located—just terrible conditions,” Gutierrez said.
Two people have died after experiencing medical emergencies in the Adelanto detention center in the past year. Last October, 54-year-old Gabriel García-Avilés died from cardiac arrest less than a week after arriving at the facility. Last month, 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe died after medical staff at the detention center flagged an abscess on his buttock as potentially life-threatening but did not transfer him to a hospital for surgery. When he was finally rushed to the hospital three days later, it was too late.
Walkers who joined the interfaith pilgrimage carried placards with photos of García-Avilés and Ayala-Uribe, as well as those of others who have died in ICE jails or been killed by federal agents during recent crackdowns. Each evening along the way, local sacred spaces hosted the core group of pilgrims for shared meals, prayer, song, and storytelling about those enduring cruelties in the nation’s detention centers and those organizing for freedom and justice.
On Tuesday, around 200 people walked the final stretch from Alhambra to downtown Los Angeles. Gutierrez said that musicians greeted the group as they neared Plaza de la Raza in East Los Angeles, cars honked throughout the city, and children stood outside their schools to watch the pilgrims pass and show their support. The walk culminated in a vigil, where women of faith sang and prayed for those who have been disappeared by ICE.
“The final day of the pilgrimage was the most impactful for me,” Gutierrez said. “There are so many disparate people and groups doing their part to protect their neighbors, and I am grateful that the pilgrimage seems to have brought them together.”
Many who joined the week’s events welcomed the chance to share how their faith informs their commitment to social justice and to push back on the Trump administration’s embrace of Christian nationalist narratives. “It’s such a trend within the MAGA movement to use the Bible to push an agenda that is so antithetical to the teachings they claim to adhere to,” said Arkin. “To be able to claim our faith, and the Bible, and the teachings of Christ and to stand to protect people and act as Christ calls us to act, that to me is a huge gift.”
For Cristiana, the week was also one of hope and repair. “Walking the 96 miles, reliving driving my girls to see their dad, it is extremely painful,” she said. “But at the same time, knowing that God is walking with me and holding me in his arms is a healing process, [and] it warms my heart to know that people are stepping up and saying ‘enough.’”
