NEW YORK (RNS) — On a recent Monday evening as commuters hurried past, a group of faith leaders set out a microphone and battery-run candles at the Columbus Circle entrance of Central Park in Manhattan for their weekly prayer vigil and held up a worn-out banner reading “Multifaith Monday: Witness for Democracy.”

Within minutes, nearly 30 people had assembled, greeting one another as organizers handed out signs with slogans such as “Justice Matters” and “Witness to Democracy.” The Rev. Jacqueline Lewis, senior minister at New York’s historic Middle Collegiate Church, kicked off the night’s service by declaring, in her clarion voice, “This fascist administration is wreaking havoc on freedoms left and right.”

Though surrounded by the sounds of the city, the vigils’ organizers aim to re-create the atmosphere of a sanctuary. Music, sung a cappella save for a drum and guitar accompaniment, consists of songs clergy have sung in Minneapolis while protesting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On a recent Monday, attendees chanted Minneapolis worship director Katie Eckeberger‘s anthem: “We are many, we are one. We won’t stop fighting until ICE is gone. We won’t stop until love has won.”

Hundreds of religious activists have taken part in Multifaith Mondays since the vigils began in March 2025, answering what they see as the Trump administration’s overtaking of democracy with spiritually centered protest. Lasting just 30 minutes, the service includes prayer and singing and plenty of impassioned sermonizing on topics ranging from food insecurity to affordable health care.

As the Trump administration ramped up its immigration enforcement operations, the vigils’ focus has gravitated toward mourning — and organizing — for immigrant communities.

The vigils, said Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, senior rabbi emerita at congregation Beit Simchat Torah, break with the narrative that “everybody in America agrees with what Donald Trump is doing.” They also, she added, offer attendees a space to dissent publicly.

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“You can’t just sit in your apartment and scream at the TV or throw the remote at the wall. We have to be outside,” she said. 

The founders of the group represent the Interfaith Center of New York, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the Episcopal Diocese of New York. But other prominent New York clergy soon joined them. The Rev. Adriene Thorne, senior minister at Riverside Church, a congregation with a long history of opposing racism and war, recalled feeling weary as she thought about how the government’s policies might affect marginalized communities.

“As an African American woman, it was sort of like a deep breath and ‘here we go again, or here we continue to go,’” Thorne said in a recent interview. “I was thinking mostly about how we were all going to weather what was coming.”

The initiative grew out of ties among their institutions, some dating back to the Civil Rights Movement, and, in more recent decades, from their cooperation on prison ministry and migrant rights advocacy. But it relies also on the group’s long-standing personal bonds and a commitment to interfaith work, which requires believers of different traditions “to build relationships and get to know people as people,” said Thorne. 

“The vigil that we do on Mondays is not new,” said Imam Ammar Abdul Rahman, director of Muslim life at Fordham University. “It’s just a repurposed effort and energy.”

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Though infused with religious symbolism, the services — featured on the city’s list of frequent protests compiled by Hands Off NYC, a grassroots mobilization group — have also attracted passersby and nonreligious activists.

“There are people who come who say, ‘This has become my church, this is the place I come weekly to get fueled, to be reminded, so that I can get back on the field and do the good work of love and justice,’” said Thorne.

Attendance at the vigils surges or wanes with the news cycle as New Yorkers are inspired to express their feelings about the immigration crackdown. “Because this has been going on for a year, it also becomes a really great place to hold anything that’s happening,” said Thorne.

Willa Shiel, 27, who attended a vigil in mid-February, said the values promoted at the vigil inspired her to “find other ways to connect … with people around both the spiritual and emotional and social element of sort of reckoning with what’s happening.”

Days after the death of Renée Good, the 37-year-old woman fatally shot on Jan. 7 by ICE agents in Minneapolis, more than 200 people attended a Multifaith Mondays memorial service, where the names of those who have died in ICE custody over the past year were read aloud, along with Good’s.

Sunita Viswanath, the executive director of Hindus for Human Rights, a nonprofit advocating against Hindu nationalism, sees the vigil as “a public platform of prayer and resistance.” The Hindu teachings she shares at the vigils come from her lived experience with Hinduism, she said.

At Good’s memorial service, Viswanath invited those gathered to reflect on the image of the Hindu goddess Durga Shakti Kali, often depicted with blood dripping from her mouth, holding a beheaded head and a knife in two of her four arms. Kali, said Viswanath, is an inspiration to resort to “rageful resistance.” The prayer vigils, she continued, are a way to “tap into that fierce prayer, which is resistance of these days.”

Kleinbaum, one of 140 rabbis who recently took part in a three-day National Jewish Clergy Convening training, says she anchors each of her speeches denouncing the immigration crackdown in the Jewish people’s own immigration story. “We know what it is to be immigrants without a home, without papers, without security,” she said.

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The vigils’ organizers have worked together since they began meeting in Central Park to hold faith-based forums of other kinds in the city. In June, the organizers held a mayoral forum ahead of the June 24 Democratic primary at St. John the Divine Cathedral. Throughout the evening, they asked candidates about their plans to protect sanctuary and their attitude toward the Trump administration.

In October, the group held a special vigil before the No Kings national rally that aimed to denounce some of the Trump administration’s policies. 

A few went to Minneapolis to show support to residents and clergy activists. Minnesota’s widespread network of anti-ICE activists convinced New York clergy to focus on organizing rapid-response groups among residents on the same block or in the same building.

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Nearly a year into the initiative, the group hopes to include more representatives of Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist clergy, said the Rev. Chloe Breyer, executive director of the Interfaith Center of New York and an Episcopal priest.

After Oct. 7, 2023, Abdul Rahman said, certain interfaith coalitions have excluded some members because of disagreements over the war in Gaza. He’s witnessed some voices being pushed out of spaces that have “started suddenly having selective sympathy or empathy,” he said. The Multifaith Mondays have continued for so long, he said, because of the group’s insistence on being open to anyone who shares its values.

On returning from Minnesota, Viswanath said, she learned of the death of Alex Pretti, the intensive-care nurse who was fatally shot by ICE agents two weeks after Good’s killing. The Multifaith Mondays vigils gave her a place to absorb the violence.

“There’s no time to process. We have to process while we’re praying on our feet, with our feet,” she said, citing civil rights activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. “That’s what this moment calls for.”