Rise And Resist organizes a weekly spoken vigil every Friday evening between 5:00 and 6:00 PM outside the subway station at 96th Street and Broadway here in New York City.
Drawing on the BLM memorial tradition, the group publicly reads the names and stories of some of the people who were killed by ICE agents or died due to inhumane immigration enforcement during Trump’s second term in office.
The names are backed by photographs of the dead, drawn from Rise And Resist’s visually-powerful ICE Vigil posters (11×17 PDFs), which are also used in the group’s weekly silent vigil at Federal Plaza.
Printable Documents for Spoken Vigil
The documents below cover the same list of deaths as the posters, in several different formats.
Handouts
Volunteers can distribute around one or two flyers per minute in a high-traffic location during a busy time; a handful of volunteers might distribute hundreds of fliers in an hour.
- Double-sided flyer with introduction, names, and snapshots (2-page PDF)
- Single-page flyers with names and a few snapshots (2-page PDF)
- Plain list with just the names and dates (1-page PDF)
Reference
It helps to have some printouts of the pronunciation guide for participants who’d like help with the names.
Scripts
For those reading the names, you can choose between these scripts depending on how much time you have.
- Short script with the agency responsible for each death (1-page PDF) — around 10 minutes
- Medium script with notes on how each person was killed (4-page PDF) — around 15-20 minutes
- Full script with introduction, individual stories, and closing (7-page PDF) — around 20-30 minutes
If the group repeats each of the names, or punctuates them with a bell, that adds about 10 minutes per reading.
- For example, two complete readings of the full script, with call-and-response repetition and a chime between names, rotating between multiple readers, might take somewhere around 75 minutes.
Available for Use or Customization
These documents were developed for use in our local vigil, but you’re also welcome to download and adapt them for use in your own work. The full collection is available in a Google Doc that you can copy and modify.
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