Pastor Curtis Smith began to cry when he heard the voices coming from within the walls of an immigration detention facility.

“We hear you,” the people shouted back in Spanish at him and the more than 1,000 protesters chanting and singing outside the Otay Mesa Detention Center on Saturday.

Smith, director of Faith in the Valley-San Joaquin, was among a contingent of people from Stockton who drove to San Diego over the weekend to take part in a faith-based protest organized by PICO California. Clergy from different religious denominations joined at the U.S.-Mexico border to march, rally and protest President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

Trena Turner, executive director of Faith in the Valley, said it was important and critical for her and the organization, which has chapters in five Central Valley counties, to join the public outcry.

The people being detained are not just numbers, statistics or stories, but real people who are fleeing dangerous conditions looking for safety and asylum, Turner said. Trump’s executive order to stop family separation is not enough because it does not speak about the hundreds of children already removed from their parents.

She said 50 leaders from Faith in the Valley joined the movement to say “this has got to stop.”

“We are in a moment where disorganized truth cannot stand up against organized lies,” Smith said. “So we must be sober-minded, strategic and united so that organized truth will be heard in our city streets and congregations.

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