Rachel Maddow

It's going to be Wednesday, Wednesday evening, interestingly.

It's going to culminate in a procession through the streets.

Again, thousands of people are expected.

But a couple things to know about this.

I mean, first of all, this is just a couple of miles from the immigrant prison, the ICE detention facility in Broadview, Illinois.

And second, a federal judge has just ordered, has just ruled that Catholic clergy must be allowed into that ICE facility to offer Holy Communion, to offer ashes for Ash Wednesday to people who are locked up there by the Trump administration.

ICE has just been ordered.

They need to let in the Catholic clergy to provide religious services to the people locked up there by court order, and they need to do it by Wednesday.

Is the Trump administration going to allow that to happen?

At that very same facility, at Broadview, for years nuns and priests have been allowed in there to hold mass, to minister to the people who are locked up there.

They've been allowed to do that for more than a decade before this past fall, in September, the Trump administration put a stop to it.

You might remember our footage that we aired here on this show, the dramatic footage of the Catholics' Eucharistic procession to Broadview in October this year.

This was right after the Trump administration started turning away the Catholic clergy and blocking them from providing religious services, even though they'd previously been allowed in there to do that for more than a decade.

I love how the Trump administration Republicans like to crow about how they're all for religious freedom.

They're the ones who turned away the nuns and the priests in Broadview after letting them in there for a decade.

It was the Trump administration that turned them back.

Well, now this week, a judge has ruled that those nuns and priests must be allowed back in.

And so on that day, on the day they must be let in, on Wednesday this week, day after tomorrow, there's gonna be a cardinal and several thousand Catholics and immigrant families and supporters of immigrants from all over Chicagoland, all in the streets, celebrating a huge outdoor mass, marking one of the holiest days of the year in the Christian calendar, and making what is effectively a big physical show of moral force on the side of immigrants,

a peaceful, moral confrontation with this government, with what they're doing with these attacks on immigrants and with their prison sites.

So again, I think that's gonna be a big deal.