Donald Trump’s administration is tearing children from their parents again. The Associated Press investigation published this week documents dozens of children, already separated once under a previous policy and legally protected by a federal settlement, taken from their families a second time. Immigration officials deported families after discovering they were legally off limits for removal. Ederson Galicia Alva, who was three years old when agents first pulled him from his mother’s arms in 2018, was ripped from her again last summer. They deported them to Guatemala, despite the protections that were supposed to keep them together, despite the law. A federal judge ruled that the government had acted illegally. The AP obtained emails showing that officials, in some cases, deported people after learning they were off limits. The government knew they were protected, and they deported them anyway. This is the administration that has also been accused of abusing a toddler in federal immigration custody, and that flew a ten-year-old back from Cuba in the middle of a custody dispute. The pattern is not a mistake. It is a machine.
You do not need to read theological texts to know this is evil. The plain record is enough. You are not enforcing the law; you are breaking it. The settlement you signed is law. The court orders are law. And the moral law that every human being knows before any government writes a statute — the law that says you do not take a child from its mother’s arms — you are breaking that law, too. You are not the law. You are the thing the law was written to stop.
You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. The whole moral architecture of the Hebrew scriptures sits on the memory of what it is to be a stranger, and yet we have erected an apparatus that makes strangers of children. When you separate a child from his mother, you are separating Christ from his mother. You are doing to the body of Christ what the empire did to the body of Christ. You are the empire.
We who claim the gospel and live in this country helped build the climate that makes this cruelty politically profitable. Our own communities — the Catholic parishes, the Mexican-American neighborhoods, the veterans’ groups — have been too quiet. We have let the machinery grind on because the children were not our own. We have treated the settlement as a piece of paper, not as a promise made to human beings. We have been the priest and the Levite in the parable, walking by on the other side of the road. The blood on the roadside is real. The child crying in the detention center is real. Our silence is real complicity. I am not exempt from this. I have walked by, too.
The bishops of the United States and Mexico wrote that the migrant is “the mysterious presence of the crucified and risen Lord.” This is not a metaphor. The child in the government facility is Christ crucified. The mother deported to Guatemala is Christ crucified. The families who have been re-separated after a court told the government to stop are Christ crucified, and the government is driving the nails.
Pope Francis wept over the globalization of indifference when migrants drowned off the coast of Lampedusa, and the same indifference is now a policy. It has a budget. It has an enforcement apparatus. It has your name on it. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that a nation which embraces exclusion and cruelty is approaching spiritual death. That death is arriving by degrees, and it is arriving now.
They will point to the strain unmanaged migration places on local schools and clinics — and that pressure is real. But that shared strain was never a license to re-separate a three-year-old, nor to dress a human rights violation as border strategy. The toddler locked in a facility allegedly abused in federal custody, the mother dragged away, the federal judge who has to intervene eight years after a settlement said “stop” — this is not policy. It is a wound we are reopening, even as the administration flies children back from custody disputes across the hemisphere.
A just system would process claims with speed, house families together in humane conditions, and treat every migrant as a person whose dignity cannot be negotiated away by political theater. We could fund the immigration courts so they actually function, and we could extend legal pathways so families do not have to flee in the dark. You can lay down the policy that treats children as leverage. You can obey the law you swore to uphold. You can choose the path that does not require tearing the world apart to protect your standing.
Óscar Romero ordered the soldiers of his day to obey their conscience over a wicked command, and the same burden falls on the officials executing these emails today. Conscience is not a suggestion; it is the line that keeps the uniform from becoming an instrument of evil. The family is back in Florida, for now — not because the system worked, but because a federal judge had to force open a door the government had sealed. The door is open. The question is whether you will walk through it.
The Lord said: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them.” He did not say “unless they are Guatemalan.” He did not say “unless their parents crossed the border.” He said: let them come. The kingdom of God belongs to such as these. You are hindering them. You are standing in the way of the kingdom. You can move. The door is open. Walk through it.