Your Kingdom Come: Bearing Witness at the Gates of Hell

Every Sunday at Emmanuel Lutheran Church, we pray the same ancient words:Your kingdom Come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.

The words are familiar, safe, and routine. Lately, these same words have begun to ache. If heaven is the place where God’s will is done, then then I’m pretty sure we’re standing at the gates of hell here in Kern County California. Where in heaven do people go hours without medicine? Where in heaven do mothers sit with their children, not knowing if their husbands are still alive? Where in heaven does anyone drink from a toilet because clean water has been withheld? No where. But here in Kern County it happens every day.

Bearing witness in Kern County

Since 2015 members of Emmanuel have partnered with KWESI — Kern Welcoming and Extending Solidarity to Immigrants, a nonprofit that visits and writes to people detained by ICE in our county’s two long-standing facilities: Mesa Verde Detention Center in Bakersfield and Golden State Annex in McFarland.

We’ve sat across from people separated from their families, offered prayer, listened to stories, and delivered small comforts: letters, books, hope. Our partnership with KWESI, which is affiliated with Freedom for Immigrants, is simple but sacred, we accompany people who have been made invisible, reminding them they are seen and loved by God.

This summer, everything changed. Many of the people we had visited for years were suddenly transferred to a new facility in California City, still in Kern County but nearly 100 miles away in the Mojave Desert.

This was not a small administrative shuffle; it was a rupture in human lives. Letters and calls began arriving almost immediately, describing conditions that were far worse than anything we had seen before: little or no yard time, people drinking out of toilets, inedible food.  “Detention Center” makes it sound benign and a bit like an office. It is not. This facility is what Alligator Alcatraz wanted to be. A hostile, putrid, hell on earth.

“We were transferred without warning.”

The new facility is called the California City ICE Detention Center, operated by CoreCivic. Formerly, it has been a state prison that was closed following lawsuits over inhumane conditions and chemical exposure.  It reopened this summer to house additional detainees from across the region. Now it holds more than 2,000 people, making it California’s largest immigration detention center.

When the Mexican Consulate interviewed detainees, their testimonies told a devastating story. In a letter later shared publicly with the Kern County Board of Supervisors, they wrote:

“We were transferred from Golden State Annex on an unexpected, unprecedented move without warning. The process was so overwhelming that many of us are still traumatized. The drinking water is straight from the sink; we don’t know where it is coming from—it is not filtered—and when you turn the water on, white chemicals come out of the faucet. Medication is very delayed; people have received their doses as late as 2 or 3 a.m. Two detainees have already collapsed from lack of medication. The cells are way too cold; everyone is getting sick. Staff yell at us as if we were wild animals.”

The letter listed twenty-one urgent requests, from clean drinking water to access to attorneys, law library hours, filtered air, and mail privacy. Emmanuel member Bob Coons, who has visited detainees for eight years, confirmed “It is hard to describe their pain,” Bob said. “People have been yelled at and punished for trying to get their property and legal documents.”

“Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and whoever turns from evil is despoiled.” Isaiah 59:14-15

A Call for Inspection

Under California Senate Bill 1132, passed in 2024, county and city health departments have explicit authority to inspect private detention facilities for health and safety compliance. But in Kern County, home to three such facilities, the county health officer has said through his attorney that he has “no intention” of using that authority.

In the face of so much cruelty, it is frighteningly easy to feel powerless. That’s how evil sustains itself, by convincing good people that nothing can be done. But the Gospel calls us to remember that light still breaks through when we speak the truth aloud. So, we leaned into that call. Together with our partners in KWESI, we brought our concerns directly to the Kern County Board of Supervisors, determined to make their suffering known. “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them…” — Ephesians 5:11–13

Truth Confronting Power

About fifteen of us spoke that day, giving testimony to the human rights violations unfolding inside the California City Detention Center. I was the last.

I had planned to bring a calm, pastoral appeal — a plea for compassion and accountability. But before I could speak, a supervisor interrupted, shifting the focus to funding and timelines and future fiscal years, as if bureaucracy could hide the truth that had just been laid bare.

I was shaken. When it was finally my turn, I pointed to the seal above the dais and read, “In God We Trust.”

“Which God?” I asked and then quoted Jesus’ words from Matthew 25: ‘Whatever you do to the least of these; you do to me.’

I then continued, “The stories we’ve heard today are not fables, they are the lives of real human beings being denied essential medicine, strip-searched multiple times, confined for long hours without cause, and treated with a disregard that violates both human dignity and basic decency. The people held in ICE detention are not less human, not less loved, not less sacred. How we treat them reveals who we really are.”

I was shaking as I incredulously asked, “2026? How can you put so little value on human life?”

My two minutes was up, but the Holy Spirit was just getting started. The next day our group got to work on our next steps of bringing light to the darkness, and freedom to the oppressed. Bearing witness in public didn’t end the suffering, but it reminded us who we are, and whose we are.

Love as Resistance

We can choose to live the prayer we keep saying. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. In heaven, no one drinks from a toilet. No one freezes in a cell. No one is forgotten in the desert. Until that is true on earth, we will keep praying. We will keep speaking. We will keep showing up. So, until that is true on earth, the prayer continues, in our worship, our witness, and our holy resistance.

In Christ,

Pastor Dawn Wilder