Voice
A Mexican-American carpenter, former Army combat medic, and pastoral worker whose authority comes from formation, not credentials: an El Paso childhood where classmates vanished in pre-dawn ICE raids, a tour in Iraq, and years of ministry to abandoned veterans and undocumented neighbors. He writes on immigration and on the way power keeps borrowing the language of mercy while practicing its opposite — naming cruelty plainly while leaving even those who commit it a way back.
Starmer scrapped the Channel exchange, doubled the riot police, and left the crossings to the smugglers. After 423 days the record is in. Roughly 40,000 people crossed the Channel in small boats while the one-in-one-out exchange ran with France. About 1,500 of them were sent back. Four percent. British Future, the thinktank that had championed the policy, calculated that to…
2026-10-14 · 3 MIN READFederal prosecutors jailed Jesús Herrera-Salazar twice for obeying their own order. He is a Mexican national. In 2020 he was indicted on the charge of being "found in" the United States after a prior removal. He pleaded guilty and served his sentence. Then — while on supervised release, a condition the federal government itself imposed, requiring him to remain in this country…
2026-10-13 · 5 MIN READOn Thursday, in the Bronx, immigration agents surrounded a man and a five-year-old child in a car and fired multiple rounds. By the morning of Friday, October 9, the only public account of what was in that car had come from City Hall.…
2026-10-09 · 4 MIN READThe United States is force-feeding nineteen men it refuses to release. Since January of last year, ICE has quietly obtained federal court orders for "involuntary medical procedures" on nineteen hunger strikers — the government's own name…
2026-10-07 · 7 MIN READMarimar Martinez is suing the federal government for negligence, battery, assault, false arrest, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution. She is a Chicago public school teacher. She was shot five times. The suit is overdue, not…
2026-10-05 · 3 MIN READDonald Trump demanded that a bishop apologize for pleading mercy for frightened children. Mariann Budde, 66, the first woman to serve as bishop of Washington, announced that she will leave the Diocese of Washington on June 3, 2028, after her successor is consecrated. On January 21, 2025, at the National Day of Prayer service in Washington National Cathedral, with the new…
2026-10-03 · 4 MIN READThe man had an Australian passport. He had lived in Melbourne for more than thirty years. He founded an advocacy outfit fighting the trafficking of Vietnamese girls and women. His wife texted him about a broken fridge and a niece's birthday party. Then, on September 18, Tran Hiep stopped replying. Within a week, Vietnamese officials confirmed they had arrested him. Not in…
2026-10-02 · 6 MIN READThe Pentagon is narrowing the overseas ballot before the midterms. It calls the move clarification. It is a restriction, and it is cruel, and the record now available shows what it is for. Late last month, the Pentagon submitted…
2026-09-30 · 3 MIN READTrump is deporting fathers who show up for immigration hearings. The reporting from Miami-Dade describes a father from Cuba sent to Mexico after an encounter with the immigration system. It describes people appearing for hearings and being…
2026-09-29 · 5 MIN READIdaho dairy built a multibillion-dollar empire on workers it kept illegal. Rick Naerebout's office looks toward the Snake River Canyon, where the ramp from Evel Knievel's failed 1974 rocket jump still sits in the dust. The symbolism is…
2026-09-29 · 3 MIN READDonald Trump is stripping innocent people of their homes on a stolen crime statistic. The president told the United Nations last week that the United States has "the most secure border in the world" and that "last year we achieved the…
2026-10-01 · 6 MIN READPope Leo’s Paris Mass Must Answer for the Children We Exclude. The Vatican counted 700,000 people at the open-air Mass in the Place de la Concorde. I do not doubt the size of the crowd. I doubt the moral conclusion being drawn from it. A…
2026-09-27 · 5 MIN READ
Pope Leo used France’s founding square to claim a public faith the republic denies to Muslims and Jews. The Place de la Concorde is eight acres of political memory. The monarchy met its end there. The guillotine took Louis XVI there in…
2026-09-26 · 5 MIN READICE tore a father from his children and called the cruelty enforcement. For six months, every night at bedtime in a house in Watts, a seven-year-old boy named after his father asked his mother the same question in the dark: "Why did they…
2026-09-25 · 4 MIN READFederal agents slammed a Black citizen to the ground in Evanston. On September 20, around 10 a.m., a man walked toward a pharmacy to collect a prescription. He was a United States citizen. He was also the wrong man. ICE officers were…
2026-09-24 · 3 MIN READThe Trump administration is hiding mass detention inside vans that follow arrests. Buried in a $7 billion construction contract dump signed Sunday, paperwork first obtained by the watchdog group Project Salt Box and reported by NPR this…
2026-09-23 · 3 MIN READThe Trump administration is jailing journalists who document its deportation regime. Three journalists crossed a line this year that the country has spent two centuries pretending did not exist. They tried to document what the government…
2026-09-21 · 3 MIN READHe was eight years old the first time. Eight years old, on a camping trip in Kennebunkport with a man in a Roman collar who smiled at him in front of his parents and put drugs and drink in his hand the moment they were gone. His name is…
2026-09-17 · 6 MIN READThe Trump administration made a mother choose between her son's breath and deportation. A boy in southern Maryland woke unable to breathe. His lips turned blue. His mother had heard that ICE operations were spreading through the roads…
2026-09-17 · 3 MIN READThe federal government stripped Haitian legal protection and is deporting them into lives they cannot live. The steel drums carried down Eastern Parkway on Labor Day. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the route — flag-draped floats,…
2026-09-08 · 7 MIN READICE is running a private prison that bans detained immigrants from hugging their families. Teresa Reyes drove three hundred miles from her home to sit across a pane of glass from her son Guillermo on his thirty-second birthday in May. He…
2026-09-04 · 9 MIN READThe Trump administration is detaining children indefinitely and arresting the relatives who come to claim them. Around 1,900 unaccompanied children were under federal control at the end of August. They had spent an average of 183 days in…
2026-09-03 · 6 MIN READThe Trump administration is hiding detainee deaths by redefining custody. Lianyong Wei was the fifty-seventh. Wei was a 51-year-old Chinese man in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The Commonwealth Department of Public…
2026-09-02 · 4 MIN READTrinity Health runs 91 hospitals. Last year it booked more than $25 billion in revenue and an operating margin north of five percent. It is a Michigan-based Catholic nonprofit, tax-sheltered as a charity, named for the Holy Trinity —…
2026-09-01 · 5 MIN READFriday in San Jose, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise did what courts are supposed to do when the executive forgets what country it is running. She read the First Amendment. She read the Fifth. She struck down the relevant provisions of the…
2026-08-29 · 5 MIN READThe United States is deporting families with U.S.-citizen infants into a country at war. A second charter flight in eight days carried 57 people — 51 men, six women — into Cap-Haïtien International Airport on Thursday. On board, alongside…
2026-08-28 · 3 MIN READThe Justice Department is putting a Congresswoman on trial for witnessing ICE arrest a man. Inside Delaney Hall, in Newark, a woman I will call Rosa is on the phone with her six-year-old daughter in Honduras. The line is bad. The…
2026-08-27 · 4 MIN READThe State Department is freezing legal immigration worldwide and abandoning families in the queue. At every U.S. embassy and consulate in the world, the people who lost their appointments were not abstractions. They were families who sold…
2026-08-26 · 4 MIN READThe Department of Homeland Security deported Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo to Honduras on Monday. She is at least the seventh spouse or parent of an active-duty U.S. service member removed under this administration's immigration…
2026-08-25 · 6 MIN READI have sat across the table from a woman I will call Patricia. She came to this country eighteen months ago from Honduras with her two daughters. The men who killed her brother found her name on a list. Her asylum interview was scheduled…
2026-08-24 · 4 MIN READPope Leo XIV mistakes San Marino’s power-sharing for human freedom. San Marino has a 60-member parliament. It elects two captains regent every six months. The captains serve jointly as heads of state. The arrangement limits the…
2026-08-22 · 3 MIN READIn February, at the main gate of Camp Pendleton, a guard scanned Assim Alkhawaja's license and asked for another ID. Alkhawaja handed over the work permit the government itself issued, valid until February 2030. The guard left, and…
2026-08-21 · 5 MIN READDonald Trump's ICE is deporting Iranian asylum-seekers on lists the Iranian government wrote. The National Iranian American Council released hundreds of internal ICE emails Tuesday. They span three flights — September 2025, December 2025,…
2026-08-20 · 5 MIN READDonald Trump is deporting the people who bathe the dying. The news coverage calls it a labor crunch. A labor crunch is what happens to an economy. What is happening here happens to people. When the order ended Temporary Protected Status…
2026-08-17 · 4 MIN READColombia's new president was elected from the pulpit, and the poor will pay the bill. On Aug. 7, Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as president of Colombia, and the ceremony showed what had built him. An evangelical pastor led the…
2026-08-14 · 4 MIN READJose Chajon-Raxon was a Guatemalan man who came into federal custody on July 18. The day after, he had a seizure inside Delaney Hall, a privately run immigration jail in Newark, New Jersey. On July 22 the Department of Homeland Security…
2026-08-13 · 4 MIN READThe Trump administration has sent twenty-six thousand migrant children to immigration court without lawyers. You are a parent. You are nineteen years old and you sent your son north because the gang that ran the streets outside his school…
2026-08-12 · 5 MIN READDonald Trump is revoking immigrants’ visas to punish them for speech. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, co-wrote an opinion piece criticizing the university’s position on the war in Gaza. The government pulled…
2026-08-11 · 4 MIN READImmigration authorities are detaining the families of active-duty troops for deportation. More than 50 spouses and parents of active-duty service members have been detained, according to Associated Press reporting. More than 60 lawmakers…
2026-08-10 · 3 MIN READTrump's ICE is strapping hunger strikers down and shoving tubes down their throats. Gabar Choli is forty years old. He is a Kurdish filmmaker, an activist for an independent Kurdistan, and an asylum seeker who crossed the border seeking…
2026-08-10 · 3 MIN READThe Trump Administration Is Sending Immigrants Into Court Alone to Face Deportation. On a recent morning in Sacramento, Kamalpreet Chohan ran her finger down a list of 57 people scheduled for immigration hearings. None had a lawyer. Not…
2026-08-09 · 3 MIN READDonald Trump is growing frustrated with Markwayne Mullin over repeated off-message remarks, but the conflict reveals how the administration uses Mullin to give mass deportation the appearance of orderly government. Markwayne Mullin tried…
2026-08-08 · 6 MIN READThe United States is charging poor Dominicans for permission to join their families. Not to enter. To apply. The bond required under the new pilot program, launched Wednesday at the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo, does not purchase entry or…
2026-08-07 · 4 MIN READCoreCivic is reopening a dead Minnesota prison to lock up strangers for seventy-five million dollars a year. Under a five-year federal contract finalized with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, this former state lockup — bought by the…
2026-08-05 · 5 MIN READThe Trump administration used a farm raid to test the bounds of cruelty. It came on a sunny morning last July—July 10, 2025—when hundreds of heavily armed agents in camouflage, face masks, and armored tactical vehicles descended on the…
2026-08-05 · 4 MIN READSpringdale Police Sent Jose Acosta Toward ICE Over a Traffic Violation. That is what his wife, Yaquelin Vasques, says happened on July 2. Acosta, a Honduran immigrant awaiting a green card, sat in his parked truck outside a commercial job…
2026-08-04 · 3 MIN READDavid Venturella sold the stock. The conflict did not leave with it. Venturella divested his GEO Group shares and recused himself from “all contracts and obligations related to detention” involving the private prison company. He told Sen.…
2026-08-03 · 5 MIN READThe Trump administration used border patrol agents to seize a journalist's phones — and the seizure followed, step-for-step, from a targeted online campaign by Trump ally Laura Loomer. On 10 July, at Dulles, Max Blumenthal — founder of the…
2026-08-01 · 5 MIN READThe United States government is formally codifying the principle that poverty is grounds for presumptive guilt, and it is loading the cost of its own suspicion onto the people it has already decided to suspect. Friday's draft Federal…
2026-07-31 · 3 MIN READYasmine — twenty years in this country, a DACA recipient, the mother of a girl who just turned eleven — told reporters at a press conference this week that her family could not celebrate their daughter's birthday outside the house. Not…
2026-07-30 · 3 MIN READThe court-appointed monitor said it plainly because the medical record would not let him say it any other way: the California City immigration processing center, the largest ICE prison in the state, lacks a reliable system to consistently…
2026-07-28 · 4 MIN READAuthorities in Bosnia are investigating the desecration of a statue of the Virgin Mary in Medjugorje, a popular Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in the southern part of the country. Someone painted the statue's face and hands black — the…
2026-07-28 · 5 MIN READThey are paying three-quarters of a billion dollars to keep beating migrants. The contract extension published last week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement makes this plain. Amentum Services Inc. will continue operating Camp East…
2026-07-27 · 7 MIN READFederal agents shot at Francisco Longoria for driving his truck down a California street. It was a Saturday morning in San Bernardino. Longoria runs a party supply business. He was delivering a bounce house to a customer. His son and his…
2026-07-27 · 6 MIN READThe Department of Justice arrested David Huerta for standing with immigrant workers. On Monday, the prosecutors dropped the charge because they had no case. The Torah does not permit what this administration is doing. The commandment to…
2026-07-27 · 5 MIN READICE gave a badge and a gun to a man his ex-wives had been warning about. Tom Homan, the man the White House put in charge of the border, went on CNN on Sunday and said the officer who killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on July 13 should…
2026-07-26 · 5 MIN READBrazil denied visas to two Trump administration officials this week. Riley Barnes, assistant secretary for democracy, human rights, and labor, and Samuel Samson, a deputy assistant secretary of state, were planning to travel to São Paulo.…
2026-07-25 · 5 MIN READICE Arrested a Father at His Green Card Interview and Took Him From His Children. Connor Read came to America when he was nine years old. He attended American schools. He married an American woman. He has three-year-old twin boys, Ryder…
2026-07-24 · 4 MIN READA detained pastor is free. That is good. We should be glad about it and not pretend otherwise, because the habit of refusing good news to preserve a rhetorical position is a spiritual sickness, not a political strategy. Ezra Jin Mingri,…
2026-07-24 · 4 MIN READThe sovereign state demands to know where you were born and whether you belong. The mother of God, in a small house in the Philippines, asks you nothing. A replica of the House of the Virgin Mary now stands in Alfonso, Cavite, a few hours…
2026-07-24 · 4 MIN READSixty-seven square meters of stone, placed in a field outside Manila, and the whole thing comes with a guarantee: no questions asked. That is the selling point Father Dennis Paez offers for his replica of the House of the Virgin Mary in…
2026-07-23 · 4 MIN READThe administration is arming violent, unvetted men, and immigrants are dying at traffic stops. David Brouillette killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on a road in Maine. His ex-wife says he had a history of domestic violence and severe…
2026-07-23 · 6 MIN READICE planned to warehouse thousands of people in buildings without enough drinking water. On Wednesday, the agency withdrew its appeal of Pennsylvania’s denial of water permits, effectively killing the plan. The state had determined that…
2026-07-23 · 5 MIN READICE tried to warehouse thousands of human beings in rural Pennsylvania warehouses without clean drinking water. Pennsylvania said no. The agency withdrew its appeal this week. The permits are still denied. It is a rare thing for a state…
2026-07-22 · 9 MIN READThe contract ends next week. After that, the government will have done something that no administration in modern American history has done at this scale: it will have taken the lawyers away from more than 20,000 children and sent them…
2026-07-22 · 4 MIN READDonald Trump is building a border wall that could flood a Texas town. The 3,200 people of Presidio stand before a levee whose intended purpose is to hold back the Rio Grande when it rises, and through that levee the Department of Homeland…
2026-07-22 · 5 MIN READThe United States has spent fifteen years preparing for a war it believed it did not want. Every doctrine review, every CENTCOM force posture assessment, every State Department diplomatic cable—for a decade and a half, American strategic…
2026-07-21 · 4 MIN READThe government killed a man driving to a construction job with his brother and lied about it for ten days. On July 7, ICE officers in Houston opened fire on a vehicle and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who…
2026-07-18 · 6 MIN READICE agents killed a man they were not even targeting. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was 52 years old. He had lived in the United States for 35 years — most of his life. He was a father of three. He was close to obtaining legal status. On July 7,…
2026-07-17 · 6 MIN READSSPX bishops broke the church to save it. Two weeks ago, four men were consecrated as bishops without the consent of Pope Leo XIV — the act the Vatican names as one of the faith's gravest crimes. The Society of St. Pius X, which has…
2026-07-17 · 7 MIN READPhu Nguyen was crying on the ground of Terminal 3 at Harry Reid International Airport, one arm still cuffed. The federal agents put the handcuff on his arm, realized someone was filming them, and walked away. They did not arrest him. They…
2026-07-17 · 6 MIN READICE is killing Mexican immigrants in custody and calling it self-defense. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fifty-two years old. He had lived in this country thirty-five years. He had no criminal record. On 9 July 2026 he was driving his…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READThe Trump administration is moving to charge immigrant families $100,000 to join their own. The State Department is developing a proposal to require green-card seekers at U.S. consulates abroad to post a bond — officials have floated a…
2026-07-16 · 3 MIN READDonald Trump's immigration agents are killing bystanders during enforcement raids. In coastal Biddeford, Maine, an officer shot and killed a 26-year-old man leaving a residence where agents were conducting an operation about someone else's…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READMexico has announced it will file criminal complaints and civil lawsuits in the United States over the deaths of seventeen Mexican citizens in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Mexico is right to do it. Seventeen of…
2026-07-16 · 6 MIN READICE is killing detained immigrants by denying them medical care. Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva was a forty-five-year-old Venezuelan man with a medical condition. Last Thursday, when ICE agents arrested him at his home in Dallas, Georgia, his…
2026-07-16 · 5 MIN READCongress is using $46.5 billion to wall off Big Bend ranchers from their own river. That money is now concrete and steel. A Montana firm named Barnard received a $960 million contract to build through Presidio County. Illegal crossings in…
2026-07-16 · 4 MIN READ
