Meet The 91-Year-Old Nun Standing Up to JD Vance

As America's most notorious Catholic convert in power stays silent, a 91-year-old nun shows what living the Gospel really means.

Image Credit: The Daily Beast

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While JD Vance talks about faith, Sister JoAnn Persch lives it. Nearly two decades ago in suburban Chicago — on a 20-below-zero morning in January 2007 — Sister Persch and her fellow Sister of Mercy, the late Pat Murphy, showed up at Broadview detention facility for the first time.

A deportation lawyer had asked them to pray for immigrants being shipped out, and what they witnessed that dawn was heartbreaking: families being torn apart at the seams.

Shivering in the predawn dark, the two nuns looked at each other and made a pact: “We have to be here every week.”

And so they have — every Friday at 7:15 a.m., for 19 years straight, in rain, snow, ice, or blistering heat.

As she recounts for The Daily Beast, They began what Sister Persch calls a “hug ministry” outside the facility — comforting traumatized wives, husbands and children with a warm embrace when words fell short.

“Families were traumatized, and what could we say but just hold them and let them express their grief,” she remembers.

From day one, Persch and Murphy refused to take no for an answer.

When ICE guards told them they couldn’t enter to visit detainees, the sisters got to work.

They teamed up with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and helped push through a state law guaranteeing religious workers access to those in detention.

That law passed unanimously in a divided legislature — a testament to the unifying power of simple moral truth.

When they discovered the new law didn’t apply to the feds’ Broadview processing center, the undaunted nuns went back to peaceful agitation.

Persch likes to joke that they presented ICE with a scenario of “two spry elderly nuns” lying down in front of deportation buses,

ICE got the message: the local field director agreed to negotiate rather than risk that optics nightmare.

The sisters won a remarkable concession — permission to pray with migrants on the buses and vans just before deportation.

Week after week, they boarded those buses to offer prayers, a kind word, and friendship with shackled immigrants behind plexiglass.

The detainees were deeply grateful; some even clapped and shouted “Thank you!” to these two women who refused to forget their humanity.

“We just wanted them to know there are people who care, people who see them as human beings,” Persch says.

By steadfast, respectful persistence, the sisters turned a bureaucratic “no” into a small miracle of compassion — all without breaking a single law or window.

As Persch puts it, “peacefully and respectfully, we never take no for an answer.”

For years, Broadview’s ICE staff and the nuns developed a working trust. “We built a relationship,” Persch recalls — the officers stayed on their side of the processing table, the sisters on theirs, but somehow it worked.

All that changed when the Trump-Vance administration took over.

The new regime launched Operation Midway Blitz this fall, flooding Chicago with aggressive immigration raids. Broadview — which was designed as a short-term intake center — suddenly became an overcrowded holding pen for hundreds of migrants caught in the sweeps.

The collaborative spirit evaporated. “To see what’s going on now…” Persch says, dismayed at the transformation.

ICE officers at Broadview now appear in riot gear and masks, anonymous and unapproachable.

Detainees are jammed into a facility with no beds, no showers, overflowing toilets, sleeping on floors or plastic chairs.

Clergy and volunteers who used to come freely are now barred at the door.

It took a federal judge’s Nov. 5 emergency order to prod ICE into providing basic bedding, hygiene and three meals a day — a court ruling that essentially confirmed how inhumane the conditions had become.

Still, Sister Persch did not back down.

Now working with the Coalition for Spiritual & Public Leadership, she helped organize the Nov. 1 outdoor Mass that ended in that haunting “miracle of silence.”

“That really touched my soul,” she says of the crowd’s reverent quiet when told of ICE’s refusal.

What drives a 91-year-old to keep up this fight? For Sister JoAnn, it’s simple: the core of her faith.

She’s animated by Scripture itself — the words of Jesus in Matthew 25: “I was a stranger, and you invited me in.”

She also was inspired by the late Pope Francis’s plea that the migrant “is your brother… You can’t just walk past him. You have to respond.”news4jax.com.

And she’s energized by the next generation. Just weeks ago at a Chicago Catholic high school, a student asked Persch what keeps her going at her age.

She replied: “If not us, who? If not now, when?”

In Sister JoAnn’s eyes, the whole human family is connected: “When one part of the family’s hurting, we’re all hurting.”

That conviction propels her forward, cane in hand, into one battle after another on behalf of the “little ones” the world forgets.

A Convert’s Crossroads

For Vice President JD Vance — a self-professed champion of family values and 2019 convert to Catholicism — Sister Persch’s witness poses an uncomfortable challenge.

He has stood by in silence while migrants in his custody were denied the most sacred sacrament of his faith.

He’s lent his prestige to an administration that celebrates cruelty, even as the pope has decried it.

Pope Leo XIV has pointedly asked how any supporter of such inhuman policies can dare call themselves “pro-life.”

Indeed, Leo’s message could not be clearer: defending migrants isn’t partisan — it’s pure Christianity.

Meanwhile, Sister JoAnn Persch is showing the world what “pro-life” truly means beyond the womb: standing with the immigrant, the refugee, the despised and dispossessed.

Vance now finds himself at a crossroads of faith and power.

Will he continue to cling to a hollow, selective religiosity — misattributing ancient saints to justify brutality — or will he heed the example of this 91-year-old nun who practices what the Church preaches? The contrast could not be more stark.

Sister Persch walks the walk that Vance only talks. She has poured nearly 20 years into hugging brokenhearted strangers, fighting unjust laws, and literally warming the cold feet of the exiled.

And Vance? To date, he has offered no public objection as his administration strips immigrants of dignity and even their religious solace. Every day Vance persists in this complicit silence is a day of deepening shame for him.

Yet even an errant convert can find a path to redemption — by following the example Sister JoAnn Persch has set.

When The Daily Beast asked Sister Persch this week what message she had for the newbie Catholic in the White House, her answer was as simple as it was devastating.

She chuckled softly and said, “Pray, I guess.”

In that gentle reply lies a world of wisdom.

Pray — for the courage to do what’s right. Pray — to see Christ in the suffering stranger. Pray — to turn conversion stories into conversion actions.

JD Vance might begin by praying for the grace to become a Catholic leader who actually lives out the faith he professes.

And if he needs a living, breathing tutorial on how to do that, he can start by looking to the 91-year-old nun up in Chicago who’s been busy shaming him with the Gospel truth.

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