This past Sunday, the Quaker Walk to Washington, a Project of the Brooklyn Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (or Brooklyn Quaker Meeting), completed the first day of its sojourn to Washington, DC.

Walk participants started the day at the Flushing Friends Quaker Meeting House in Queens, proceeding on foot to 110 Schermerhorn St in Downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Meeting has been hosting the New Sanctuary Coalition’s meetings and work sessions. They were escorted by allies including New Jersey’s Winds of the Spirit, an immigrant resource center that has been serving its community for 25 years.

As walkers celebrated the first 13-mile leg of the 19-day trek to Washington DC with a meal, they were joined by New Sanctuary members, many of them Quakers themselves, who spoke about the organization’s ongoing initiatives to fight deportation, including the burgeoning court accompaniment program and the upcoming Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) training on May 12.

The Quaker Walk concludes on May 22, when participants will unite with the DC Interfaith March for Freedom. That afternoon, they will walk to the United States Capitol Building and present congressional representatives with the Flushing Remonstrance, a 1657 document authored by leaders in the town of Flushing (now Flushing, Queens) to the Director-General Peter Stuyvesant, then the top colonial administrator of New Netherland. The document expresses the town’s rejection of Stuyvesant’s order to forbid Quaker worship and asserts their desire to foster religious and ethnic plurality, to “soe love,” and to “doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us.” It is considered a precursor to the Bill of Rights.

At present, the Quaker Walk is on its third day, traversing southward from Plainfield Friends Meeting House to Blackwell Mills Canal House (both in New Jersey). We wish them Godspeed!