The aliens.gov page opens with a starfield and the opening-credits music from The X‑Files. “THEY WALK AMONG US,” it flashes. “DECLASSIFIED.” The screen is dark, the letters luminous green. Then the joke lands: the “aliens” are human beings. The site calls them “ILLEGALS,” promises to “Deport them all,” and reassures the visitor that any “Alien abduction” will be handled—“We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.” The text refers to a missing person with the pronoun “it.” The White House has done this. This is not a joke. This is dehumanization made into federal policy.
To take a person and call them “it” is to remove them from the moral universe that governs human conduct. Abraham Heschel wrote that the prophet’s task is to remind the people that few are guilty but all are responsible. All are responsible when a government website teaches a citizen to look at a neighbor and see a monster. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,” Isaiah declared. The website does exactly this. It uses the language of science fiction to prepare a country for violence.
It is a license to act violently, an official permission slip that tells citizens the people being hunted are not human and therefore deserve whatever happens next. The scholars who have dissected it note the wordplay fuses hidden knowledge with anti-immigrant sentiment to instill fear. The site warns of an “invasion” and tells the citizen that only one man can fix it. This is the logic of the strongman, not the law. The catechism of the Catholic tradition teaches that the stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you. The law written in the Torah is plain: you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. The website teaches the opposite.
The page brandishes three million “encounters” under an elastic definition—one that swallows interactions where agents merely considered enforcement—to inflate the crisis into an invasion. The source code still carries the chatty notes an AI assistant left behind, as if the people who ordered it couldn’t be bothered to clean up. The data on arrests is padded; the cruelty is exact. Three million encounters means three million human faces. Three million encounters means parents and children forced into the machinery of deportation while a government agency plays a television theme song.
The cruelty is the point. Heschel said that the opposite of good is not evil; the opposite of good is indifference. This website refuses indifference in the most calculated way: it invites the viewer to sneer at the people being deported, to see their removal not as a tragedy but as a punchline. It is an instrument of contempt, and contempt is never the first step toward justice. The administration has turned the machinery of state into a content farm. A White House spokesperson, unnamed, said the site “pulls data directly from DHS arrest reports to communicate just how many illegal aliens are present in our country”—as if the only question were data accuracy, as if the site weren’t shoveling the data onto a bonfire of mockery. The administration uses humor as a shield for cruelty.
Those of us who have ever shared a joke at the expense of a group we considered distant or foreign know the small soul‑ache that follows. We know how easy it is to laugh because the laughter distances us from the pain. That recognition is not a license; it is a confession. The word alien has been in American law since the 1700s, used to arrest, imprison, and detain. The state has always preferred a language that strips the dignity of the person before the state takes their life. We allowed the category to stand while it did the work it was built to do. The administration is only taking the old word and making it literal.
There is a verse in the gospel that names this. The judge will separate the sheep from the goats, and the goats will be those who looked at a stranger and did not welcome them. The gospel does not say the sheep were those who built a well‑funded border patrol. It says the goats are the ones who built the website. The goats are the ones who laughed.
Yet the door of return is open. The same prophets who named your cruelty also called you to repentance. The same Christ who said “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me” also said to the sinner caught in the act, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and sin no more.” Mercy is the tradition you claim; it is time to claim it with your deeds. The administration can take the page down. The White House can restore the language that recognizes the person. The president can stop teaching a country to hate the person crossing the desert.
The column does not end with a resolution, because the story is not over. It ends with an image: a family in a detention center, the youngest child asking why the people on television said her family were “aliens,” and a parent who cannot answer because the question itself is an earthquake. The administration has put that earthquake onto a government site and scored it with a television theme song. The face of God does not look like a monster. The face of God is the person the government is hunting. The door is open.