Hot-pink ribbons adorned dozens of people holding bundles of colorful flowers on a warm sunny day this week outside the federal building in downtown Los Angeles. They gathered for the weekly Godmothers of the Disappeared interfaith vigil, led by women faith leaders, to honor those who have been detained by federal immigration agents.

“We come to pray, to sing, to testify. We come to demand the release of those being disappeared by our government,” Rabbi Susan Goldberg, the founding Rabbi of Nefesh, said Tuesday to the circle of attendees getting ready to move their procession up Los Angeles Street.

The vigils began after federal immigration agents started arresting people outside of immigration courts in May, a change in policy that many advocates say has has terrified immigrant communities. Los Angeles religious leaders with the Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, or CLUE, began organizing in response.

“There was a feeling that people needed to do something. People were starting to be taken,” Goldberg said.

Raids in various parts of Southern California continue as part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown. An estimated 2,800 people were detained by federal immigration agents in the LA area between early June and late July, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump campaigned on the promise of targeting violent criminals to secure American streets, though the government’s own data shows that over 70% of people detained by ICE at the end of June have no criminal record.

Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but the departments have previously defended immigration enforcement operations and the handling of detained individuals.

“Every day the brave men and women of ICE go out into local communities across the country and put their lives on the line to bolster public safety and national security by apprehending transnational gang members, foreign fugitives and other dangerous criminal aliens who are in the country illegally and preying on law-abiding citizens,” said an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson in a statement from early July.

Goldberg along with other CLUE members formed The Godmothers of the Disappeared, inspired by the Argentinian human rights group called Madres de Plaza de Mayo, created by a group of mothers in 1977 demanding answers about their children believed to have been disappeared by the country’s military dictatorship.

“The reason why we use that word ‘disappeared’ is because so often when someone is picked up now [by federal immigration agents] … it’s very hard to find them,” said Reverend Dr. Alexia Salvatierra, academic dean of the Centro Latino at Fuller Theological Seminary and an associate professor of Mission and Global Transformation, and a member of the Godmothers of the Disappeared.

Salvatierra said she has worked on immigration issues for 45 years under both Democratic and Republican administrations. “I’ve never seen anything like what is going on now,” she said.

She also said the vigil is important on both spiritual and strategic levels. “When we come together to pray fervently, I believe that there’s a way in which God responds to that. … We are very passionate about all the people who are being detained unjustly, whose human rights are being violated, and whose families are being separated.

Salvatierra believes the vigils help educate the public, especially evangelical communities, about the realities of immigration enforcement. “There are people who are married to American citizens, who have American citizen children, who’ve never committed a crime in this country, who’ve been working for 30 years, and those people are being picked up and deported,” she said. “And I think that your average person in a church doesn’t know that, and that the only way they’re going to know that is if they see church people.”

As the group of singing vigil attendees made their way east down Aliso Street towards Alameda Street, several Department of Homeland Security agents stood guard outside the Metropolitan Detention Center.

The group clutching flowers dressed in pink ribbons formed a circle next to MDC’s driveway before they sang Down By The Riverside and prepared to lay down their small bouquets dedicated to those who have been taken by federal immigration agents. “As we sing, we know the folks who are held in detention can hear us. We’ll also be sending up our prayers and song towards God,” said Rabbi Goldberg.

DHS agents and National Guardsmen watched as the group continued singing and as the pile of purple, white, red and yellow flowers grew on the concrete federal grounds.

“We ain’t gonna study war no more,” the group sang as two DHS SUVs drove into the MDC’s subterranean basement.

Meanwhile, the 24/7 hour Occupy ICE LA protest across the street continues. The protest moved a few hundred feet north up to the corner of Alameda and Aliso Streets, with activists citing trouble with the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD did not respond to a request for comment. An upside-down American flag flapping in the wind remained at the initial protest site.

The Godmothers of the Disappeared will continue holding weekly vigils for the foreseeable future.