CEDAR RAPIDS — Immigration advocates and local faith leaders gathered with hundreds of community members on Tuesday to accompany 56 immigrants without permanent residency status to their annual check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents.
Despite below-freezing temperatures, attendees rallied outside the U.S. Department of Homeland Security office in Cedar Rapids.
The rally, organized by Escucha Mi Voz, an Iowa City immigrant advocacy organization, included nearly 200 supporters holding signs and singing hymns as immigrants waited for their appointments.
The large number of check-ins, organizers said, increased the risk that an immigrant would be detained, as the number of detentions has risen 40 percent this year, according to the ICE office’s website.
The increase comes as the first year of President Donald Trump’s administration nears its close. Trump set lofty goals for mass deportations, with the U.S. seeing a large increase in the number of detentions and deportations since he took office, but he has not met the more than 11 million he promised on the campaign trail.
Iowa saw 456 Iowans deported by the end of July 2025, which is more than double the number of Iowans deported in 2024.
Advocates called for federal law enforcement officers to give immigrants the “dignity, safety, and respect, values that should be inherent to every human being.”
“We are here to remind ICE that those values and basic human rights are not optional — they are fundamental,” Escucha Mi Voz Organizer Getsy Hernandez said. “Nobody should be detained for simply trying to build a better life for themselves and their children.”
The group called for law enforcement officials to let all of the immigrants stay in the U.S., since they have complied with ICE orders. Organizers said the outpouring of support gives immigrants power.
“This is how we stop deportations and keep families together, and this is how we ensure our community safety and well-being,” Hernandez said. “Whatever actions ICE may take today or any other day, we will not be silent, and we will not disappear.”
Faith leaders from across eastern Iowa came to support Escucha Mi Voz and called for an end to deportations at the rally on Tuesday.
“It’s our responsibility and our right to continue to show up and to be a picture of a better world,” Rev. Jonathan Heifner, of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Cedar Rapids, said to the crowd on Tuesday. “And to keep fighting for that world by our presence, by our witness, by using our voices, by being together in this work.”
The office opened at 8 a.m., letting each immigrant with a scheduled check-in appointment in one at a time, leaving others to stay out in the cold.
“I want to thank God because I’m out of that office,” Alberto Juarez said in Spanish after leaving his appointment from the Homeland Security office on Tuesday. “It’s just amazing, like we are a whole family, because community makes us strong together. We are strong together. We have the power.”