You are killing people and praising God for it.
You called the strike that killed Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores “swift and lethal kinetic,” and then you posted the unclassified video of the building exploding. You said the men you killed belong in “the depths of hell where they belong.” You are the president of the United States, and you are using the language of the pulpit to celebrate the work of the bomb.
Two hundred and seven dead. The boat strikes in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean have now killed at least 207 people since last September, most of them unnamed, many of them never charged with a crime, blown apart on the water by an American military that you have ordered to treat the open sea as a free-fire zone. The administration says these are “narco-terrorists.” Perhaps some of them were. But you do not know. You are not holding trials. You are not presenting evidence. You are killing suspects and calling it justice, and you are doing it in the name of a God who commanded, from the mountain, “You shall not kill.”
Say the number slowly. Two hundred and seven. Each one was a person. Each one had a mother. Each one was made in the image of God, as every human being is — the smuggler and the migrant and the soldier who pulled the trigger and the president who gave the order.
Guerrero Flores was charged in a New York federal court in December. The State Department had offered a reward for his arrest. The federal government was pursuing him through the law. Then the law was set aside. A missile was substituted for a trial. And the president declared the matter closed from the golf course.
I do not question the evil of Tren de Aragua. The gang is real. Its violence is real. The suffering it has caused across Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and in communities here at home is real. What I question is the righteousness of a government that responds to that evil by building its own machinery of death and calling the result justice. A missile does not cross-examine. Water does not preserve testimony. And the dead do not get to tell their side.
You, Mr. President, claim the Christian tradition. You have held up the Bible. You have invoked the name of God. And you have told the American people that you sent a man to hell and that this was a good thing.
The Christ you claim said this: “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” He did not say: “As you sent them to hell, you sent me to hell.” He said: as you treated them, you treated me. The migrant. The prisoner. The man you killed from a distance you will never have to look in the eye. Matthew 25 does not provide an exception for gang leaders. He does not include a footnote for narcoterrorists. He said what he said, and the door of return has not closed.
The Hebrew prophets warned against this. The prophet Amos stood before the rulers of Israel and said: “Hear this, you cows of Bashan, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy.” Isaiah looked at men who dressed their violence in righteousness and cried: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” You are calling the extrajudicial killing of human beings good, and you are celebrating it with the language of the sanctuary. These are not gentle words. They were never meant to be. They are the words a tradition reaches for when a nation begins to celebrate its own killing and believes God is on its side.
There is a word for what happens when a human being claims the authority to consign another human being to hell. The Catholic tradition calls it blasphemy. The prophetic tradition calls it idolatry — the worship of one’s own power as if it were divine. Every empire has had its court priests to bless the killing. But you are the president of a country that has, in its better moments, tried to hold itself to a higher standard.
The Christian tradition I carry has a name for the gap between the words you speak and the deeds you do. It is the Pharisee operation. Jesus looked at the religious leaders of his day, the men who prayed loudest in the temple while they devoured widows’ houses, and he said, “You are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones.” Your administration has spoken often of God, of faith, of the need to restore a Christian nation. But the Christ you invoke is the one who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and who refused to let his disciples call down fire from heaven on a village that rejected him. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” he said. You have offered him a sacrifice of blood. He is asking for mercy.
You are not a peacemaker. You are a man who kills people from the air and then tweets the video.
The administration’s own intelligence assessment contradicts the claim that Tren de Aragua operated under Venezuelan President Maduro’s control. You spent months asserting otherwise. The factual foundation for the escalation you have built — the boat strikes, the compound strike, the rhetoric of sending men to hell — rests on a premise your own agencies have disputed. This does not mean the gang is not dangerous. It means the framework within which we are killing people is not honest about its own reasons.
I am not a pacifist. I was a combat medic in Iraq. I have seen what armed men can do to one another, and I have seen what happens when governments decide that some lives are not worth the paperwork of a trial. I know that the line between defending the innocent and becoming the thing you are fighting is thinner than any of us want to admit.
I carry complicity in this. The Catholic Church in the United States has not made extrajudicial killing by our own government a sustained moral crisis. Our bishops have spoken on immigration. They have spoken on the death penalty. But 207 people executed without trial on the open water have not produced the episcopal crisis they should have. The Catholic Church has blessed wars, has blessed inquisitions, has blessed the sword when it suited the prince. The Crusaders marched into Jerusalem chanting “God wills it,” and they slaughtered the city. We are not innocent. I am not innocent. The communities I come from — Catholic, Mexican-American, the borderlands — have sometimes been the loudest voices calling for the very enforcement that produces these deaths when the faces of those killed are not the faces of our own children. We know the stranger’s heart, and still we choose the missile.
But that confession is not a license for you to keep doing what you are doing. It is an invitation to you to stop. To stop calling the killing of suspects “lethal kinetic” and pretending it is something other than killing. To stop wrapping the bomb in the language of the altar. To stop treating the waters of the Pacific as a place where you can execute people without a judge and then call it holy.
The Torah commands: “You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” That commandment appears more than thirty times in the books of Moses. Thirty times. God was not ambiguous about strangers.
Pope Francis stood at Lampedusa in 2013 and named the condition that makes such language possible: “We have fallen into a globalization of indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others; it doesn’t concern us, it doesn’t interest us, it’s none of our business.” When the president describes sending a man to hell and the country scrolls past it, that is the indifference Francis named. It has become the air we breathe.
The machinery works like this. You begin with boat strikes. Then a compound. Then the language of hell. Then the number of the dead is large enough that it no longer produces headlines. The machinery of extrajudicial killing becomes ordinary. It becomes policy. And then it becomes the water in which we all swim, and we cannot remember what it was like to breathe air.
The Galilean Jesus, the one who walked among the poor and the outcast and the stranger, is not your mascot. He is not your chaplain. He is the one who said, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”
The door of return is open. It is always open. That is the promise of the same gospel you have used as a prop. You can stop. You can stop ordering the strikes. You can stop posting the videos. You can stop taking the name of the Lord in vain while you kill people you have never met and never tried. The deportation officer reading this column is a person. The soldier who pulled the trigger is a person. The president who celebrated is a person. The machinery does not require them. It requires only our continued silence and the continued belief that the people it kills are not fully human.
Óscar Romero stood before the soldiers of El Salvador in 1980 and said: “In the name of God, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you: stop the repression.” He spoke to men who had been ordered to kill by a government that believed its targets had forfeited the right to live. He spoke in the name of the same God the government invoked. And the government killed him for it eight days later.
The dead are still in the water. Two hundred and seven of them, and not one name has been read from our pulpits. The machinery is still running. And we who say we follow a God who died on a state executioner’s cross have not yet found the voice to say what every prophet since Amos has known: that a nation which kills without trial and calls it justice has set itself against the God it claims to serve.