Jim Harney, center, with hat, entered Rhode Island yesterday on his walk to publicize the plight of immigrants.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

Over their armor, knights of old wore a tabard, a short, sleeveless, fore-and-aft cloth bearing their coats of arms. Jim Harney’s is only a half tabard — a sheet safety-pinned to the front of his shirt, bearing his hand-inked coat of arms: Walking in Solidarity.

Harney is a former Catholic priest. He has terminal cancer of the salivary glands. He is marching from Boston to New Haven, Conn., to advertise the plight of undocumented residents, a trek inspired by his illness.

Harney, 68, who lives in Bangor, Maine, took a break yesterday and chatted about his pilgrimage as about 30 supporters, many of them Hispanics, and many of them children, sipped soft drinks and sprawled on grass in the shade of a verdant grove of evergreens off Wilbur Avenue in Warren, a few feet from the Swansea town line. The occasional car drifted past, slowing as a curious driver tried to calculate why a cluster of people carrying signs would gather by the side of a secondary highway in the middle of the day.

It had been two weeks since Harney had set off from the steps of the Massachusetts State House, he said, and he thinks it might take a month, or a month-and-a-half, to make it to New Haven. His estimate fell within his assumed lifetime budget: “I have four months, maybe. Who knows?”

Gaunt, unshaven and wearing a floppy hat, Harney spoke earnestly. He said he once thought he was free of cancer, but it returned, and he knows it will kill him.

“My idea is to spend my last days with the undocumented human beings of Central America who are walking to get to the United States,” he said. Some of his followers had been with him two or three days, he said, and some were residents of Massachusetts, others of Rhode Island.

“The important thing is the issue of twelve to fourteen million human beings who are considered illegal — if you can consider a human being illegal,” he said.

“Immigration raids are going on in Boston,” Harney said. “A thousand were captured in Mississippi just yesterday, the biggest yet. I’m trying to say this is wrong. This is inhumane. This is breaking up families.”

He said the immigration authorities are acting against the interests of the country in rounding up and deporting undocumented residents, “some with the potential to become our best citizens. And they are putting them in detention camps. Basically, people who are here are trying to help their families.”

Harney is no stranger to controversy. Ordained in 1968, he quit the priesthood in 1973 to protest the church’s refusal to ordain women. Before that, he spent 18 months in jail for tampering with draft board records in Milwaukee.

“I covered the war in El Salvador in the 1980s,” he said. “I went to the funeral of Bishop [Oscar] Romero, who was murdered because he cared for his people.”

Harney said he barely escaped with his life on several occasions, including one when the Salvadoran air force dropped a bomb “from an A-37, an aircraft given to them by the United States.”

In the course of his research into the problem of undocumented residents, he spent time in Central America, producing a documentary in 2005. That work one day brought him into contact with a man from El Salvador, he recalled.

“He had set off to walk from El Salvador to the United States,” Harney said. “Nineteen of his friends died on the way. Tears were pouring down his face when he told me of this. The story may be extreme, but it brings out the dangers of this kind of trip — robbery, rape, murder.”

He said he knew of migrants who lost arms and legs when they fell from trains or trucks on which they had hitched rides toward the U.S. border, “all because they wanted to get to the United States and do something decent.”

Harney said he made a decision years ago “to live hand to mouth, a decision to live in poverty.” He said he lives on $10,000 a year, mostly from “passing the hat around the United States,” a practice he has continued on his journey to New Haven. “I feel it is solidarity with the planet,” he said.

He said people have been generous in giving him shelter and food along the way. “I believe in The Lilies of the Field,” he said, referring to the book by William Edmund Barrett that was made into a movie in the early 1960s.

“Most of the people in Central America live on two to three dollars a day,” he said. “Today, Salvadorans are eating half as much as they did last year.”

He said these conditions, which he blames on the North American Free Trade Agreement, adopted during the Clinton administration, are responsible for spurring so many to try the hazardous journey to a country whose government does not want them.

Then he turned and resumed his own journey, perhaps not as hazardous, but ultimately, probably, his last.

tmorgan@projo.com