I worry for those who sojourn among us

As some of my readers might remember, back in 2017, at my previous call, parishioners of the 7^th Day Adventist congregation that shared the building with us and worship there on Saturdays were arrested and deported. That led me to speak out about how we were deporting immigrants, especially those deemed “Non-criminal immigrants” and people who the State Department had made asylees by irregular means. Well, I’m particularly worried about those type of folk again.

I hear all the rhetoric about mass deportation, and the corollaries about how it will be done in a way that focuses on criminals, and it feels like déjà vu. We’ve heard all this before.

In 2016 we were told that “Bad Hombres” would be targeted for deportation. Instead, what actually happened was all of the nuance about who was in our country was washed away. As ICE’s community relations officer explained to me 7 years ago, the Executive Order put in place at the time removed all the footnotes that guided ICE officers about why immigrants were in the USA and the best way to engage with them. Literally some guy pressed the "remove all footnotes" button on a spreadsheet and it scrambled how and who ICE officers apprehended.

That meant an Iraqi translator who risked his life working with US soldiers and a member of the cartel became indistinguishable to ICE agents. That meant a bunch of ethnically Chinese Indonesian Christians who the State Department brought into the country through an atypical path for their safety, who checked in with ICE regularly, who were productive tax paying members of society, who had American spouses and children, had their house raided and were deported as if they were criminals.

If we’re going to deputize the military to do the largest deportation of immigrants in our nation’s history, we have to be clear eyed about what that means. We must acknowledge that we are going to hurt a bunch of good and innocent people in the process. Even if a radical deportation regime is the best option for our country (and I’m not convinced it is) we have to confess that it is going to harm a whole lot of people. We can’t be gleeful and jumping up and down with excited about such a policy; such a choice ought to be mourned.