Congress is debating compensation for people convicted of beating police officers during the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol while the agency that deports asylum-seekers and separates families waits for restored funding. The Senate deadlock over Department of Homeland Security appropriations has left Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol without money past the June 1 deadline President Trump set, and the fight has stalled over a separate issue: the Department of Justice’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which would use $1.8 billion in taxpayer money to compensate people who say they were prosecuted or investigated under President Biden. Many expected to receive those checks are Jan 6 defendants convicted of assaulting officers. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina called the fund “stupid on stilts.” Other Senate Republicans who fled the Capitol that night have balked at the optics of sending government checks to the people who attacked them. The migrants — the mothers separated from their children, the asylum-seekers returned to the countries they fled, the families torn apart by enforcement operations — are invisible in both calculations.

ICE, when it is funded, does what it has done for two decades. It deports. It separates families. It conducts raids in neighborhoods, workplaces, and — since January 21, 2025, when the Trump administration rescinded the sensitive-locations policy — churches. ICE has deported more than two million people under Democratic administrations and Republican administrations alike. It has separated children from parents at the border, in detention, and in the interior. It has arrested asylum-seekers in church parking lots with the Eucharist still on their tongues. The cruelty is documented. It is the conduct Democrats say they oppose when they block the funding, and it is the conduct Republicans say they support when they vote to restore it. “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” Jesus said. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” The people ICE deports are the strangers. The people ICE separates from their children are the least of these. The agency Democrats are blocking funding for — and the agency Republicans are trying to fund — is the agency that does to the stranger what Matthew 25 says we will be judged for.

The tactic Democrats are using is not reform. It is defunding without changing the law. When ICE is refunded — and it will be refunded, because no Congress has ever permanently defunded an immigration enforcement agency — the same legal authorities will be in place, the same policies will resume, and the same cruelties will continue. The families separated in 2018 under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy were separated under laws that existed before zero-tolerance and that remain on the books today. The defunding tactic allows Democrats to say they opposed ICE while preserving the legal infrastructure ICE uses to do what it does. It is a calculation, not a reform. Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.” The senators arguing over ICE funding are responsible for the people ICE deports whether they vote to fund the agency or not, because the legal system that authorizes the deportations is the system Congress built and Congress maintains.

The evil at the center of the stalemate is this: people convicted of beating police officers during an attack on the Capitol are in line for $1.8 billion in compensation from the federal government, and the migrants deported by ICE — including asylum-seekers with valid claims, parents separated from U.S.-citizen children, people with decades of residence and no criminal record — receive nothing. The Department of Justice fund is for people the government says it wronged by prosecuting them. The migrants ICE deports are people the government says have no right to be here, and the legal system gives them no compensation, no repair, and in many cases no hearing. Republicans are balking at the Jan 6 fund because of the political optics. Democrats are blocking ICE funding because of the political pressure. Both calculations are about politics. Neither is about persons. “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt,” the Torah commands in Exodus 22:21, and the commandment appears more often in the Five Books than any other. The ger — the resident alien, the stranger in the land — is the migrant. The people arguing over whether to fund the agency that deports the ger or compensate the people who beat police officers have erased the ger from the argument.

Those of us who accepted the bipartisan deportation consensus across thirty years — who voted for border security appropriations under both parties, who accepted the framing that immigration was a policy question and abortion was the moral question, who remained silent while ICE deported more than two million people under Obama and kept Title 42 in place under Biden — helped build the machine both sides are now fighting over. The present stalemate does not erase that complicity, and the complicity does not soften what Congress is doing now. The sin was bipartisan. The machine was bipartisan. The erasure of migrants from the conversation about their own deportation is bipartisan. Pope Francis stood on the island of Lampedusa in July 2013 and named what the world had become: a globalization of indifference in which we have grown used to the suffering of migrants because their deaths no longer move us. Seven years later Fratelli Tutti commanded Catholics to welcome, protect, promote, and integrate the stranger, and the encyclical is binding on every Catholic holding public office.

An immigration system that honored human dignity would not treat migrants as leverage in a funding fight. It would open a pathway to citizenship for the people who have been here for decades, built lives here, raised children here. It would reform the asylum process so that people fleeing violence can make their claims without being detained, deported, or turned back at the border. It would end family separation as policy and as practice. It would recognize that the stranger is a person, that the deportation of a person is a moral act, and that Congress is responsible for every deportation the law authorizes whether or not Congress funds the agency that carries it out. The present system treats migrants as targets when it funds ICE and as invisible when it defunds ICE. Neither position is reform. Neither position is justice.

Senator Tillis, Senator Schumer, members of Congress: you can stop arguing over checks for Jan 6 defendants and funding for ICE. You can pass immigration reform that treats migrants as persons. You can open pathways to citizenship, reform the asylum process, end family separation, and dismantle the legal infrastructure that makes deportation the default. The migrants are still here. The families ICE separated are still separated. The asylum-seekers ICE deported are still in the countries they fled, and some of them are dead. You have made them invisible in your debate, but they are visible to those who choose to see them. The door of return is open. The Christ you claim is the Christ who said the stranger is his own body. The migrants you have erased from the conversation are the ones Christ said we will be judged for. You can see them. You can act. Stop funding the deportations while you debate checks for rioters. Stop.