You Are Blocking Our Airports to Punish Sanctuary Cities

Markwayne Mullin is blocking airports to punish sanctuary cities. The Homeland Security secretary has confirmed he is removing U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers from airports in jurisdictions that limit their cooperation with the federal government. It remains unclear which specific airports might face these staffing threats, or how the administration plans to define “sanctuary” — there is no single legal definition for such policies — but the threat is already doing its work. The American airlines and the U.S. Travel Association warn that the staffing cuts would have devastating consequences: the disruption of time‑sensitive international cargo, the irreparable harm to carriers, and the cascading impact on the local economies that depend on the free movement of travelers and commerce. This is not governance. It is extortion dressed in a badge.

You hold a lever that does not belong in your pocket and you pull it to break someone else’s door. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pointed out, correctly, that you will all switch spots at one point — and you are not waiting to switch. You are weaponizing the terminal while you still hold the keys. This is not a new trick. In 2017, a federal court struck down a similar attempt to leverage funding against sanctuary jurisdictions, because our laws do not permit the government to starve a city to force compliance with a political agenda. Yet the strategy you are testing treats human dignity as something that can be rationed at a checkpoint and dispensed only to those who kneel to your political criteria. You build a wall out of a statute, denying the very flow of commerce and people that sustains our borders, and call it the rule of law. But the rule of law does not require you to starve the traveler to prove your devotion to order.

The Torah commands you not to oppress the resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. Exodus 23:9. The law remembers that power is always borrowed, and the person holding the gavel today may be the person waiting in line tomorrow. Jesus named the exact shape of this operation without flinching. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, he said, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. Matthew 23:23. You are obsessed with the theatrical form of federal sovereignty while starving its substance. Making international travel contingent on local compliance with a federal definition of sanctuary that does not even exist is exactly the kind of performance that strangles mercy and chokes the very cargo that sustains your own economy. It looks like strength to the person in the mirror, but the inside is full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that excludes the neighbor standing at your customs line. Pope Leo XIV corrected the record on that doctrine when Vance tried to turn the ordo amoris into a policy of exclusion, reminding you that true Catholic teaching builds fraternity open to all. Francis named it plainly; then‑Cardinal Prevost corrected you on the record. The culture of well‑being you are protecting in your terminals does not make you safe. It makes all of you unnamed, responsible, yet faceless, because the globalization of indifference has taken from you the ability to weep. Pope Francis, Lampedusa homily. You are building a security apparatus that protects everything you own and destroys the very movement that pays for it — the air traffic, the flights, the trade routes — and you are telling us this is mercy.

We who sit through the same political cycles can point to our own complicity in feeding the appetite for spectacle, confusing disruption with strength and hostage‑taking with security. But the climate that makes you comfortable pulling border agents out of terminals was built by decades of people in this country saying yes to the same trade. The moral arithmetic does not change when the administration changes. Óscar Romero looked the soldiers in the eye and told them they must obey their conscience before the order to kill. He did not close his hand to the barracks; he threw it open. Cese la represión. You can drop this threat and walk out of the terminal with your honor intact. The runways are still open. You are still welcome home.