The 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 figure of $100,000 — that they would receive back only after becoming citizens. Citizenship takes at least five years. The applicants most affected are family members of American citizens: spouses, parents, siblings. The applicants least able to pay are the very ones the bond is designed to exclude — people who come to America not because they have money but because they do not.
The administration calls this self-sufficiency. A State Department spokesperson said the president “has made clear that those who wish to immigrate to the United States must be financially self-sufficient.” But a $100,000 bond does not test self-sufficiency. A self-sufficient person can feed their family and hold a job. What a hundred thousand dollars tests is whether you were born with money. The mother in Lagos whose daughter is a U.S. citizen — she may be the hardest-working person on two continents. She does not have a hundred thousand dollars. Under this proposal, that is enough to keep her from her child.
The proposal is not an isolated measure. It builds on a pilot program requiring tourist-visa applicants from fifty countries — most of them in Africa — to post refundable bonds of up to $15,000. Since January, the administration has paused immigrant-visa processing for seventy-five countries, including Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil, with no sign the pause will lift. Earlier this year, the administration moved to require many green-card applicants to apply from abroad, adding cost and distance to a process already slow. These are not separate policies. They are the same wall, built in layers — and each layer lands on the same people. The spouse in Ciudad Juárez. The parent in Addis Ababa. The sibling in Manila. These are people whose only distinction is that they love someone here and cannot afford to prove it.
But the deepest indictment comes not from advocates or lawyers but from the oldest moral code we carry. The Hebrew Bible speaks to this with a frequency that should stop us cold. “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” That is Exodus 22:21. “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” That is Leviticus 19:33–34. The commandment to love the stranger appears more than thirty times in Torah — more often than any other. And nowhere does God attach a means test. The stranger was to be loved as oneself. Not bonded. Not collateral. Loved.
Pope Francis named this at Lampedusa in 2013. “We have fallen into a globalization of indifference,” he said. “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!” In Fratelli Tutti, he wrote that migrants “are not seen as entitled like others to participate in the life of society, and it is forgotten that they possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person.” He called it unacceptable — “since it sets certain political preferences above deep convictions of our faith.” That was not a suggestion from a man in a white robe. That was a pope naming what a price tag on human dignity actually is.
The machine that produces these exclusions is older than this administration, and our communities have fed it as often as we have resisted it. Mae Ngai documented how immigration restriction “produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility.” The $100,000 bond is the latest mechanism in a machine that has been running for a century — Chinese Exclusion, Johnson-Reed quotas, the Public Charge Rule, and now this. Our own parishes have looked at the stranger and counted the cost before counting the person. The confession does not soften the naming — Romero’s cese la represión and his open hand to the soldier are the same act — but it earns the right to speak.
A humane immigration policy would begin where the Torah begins: with the dignity of the person, not the size of their bank account. It would welcome the stranger and process the application and let families be together, because that is what decent countries do. It would not charge a hundred thousand dollars at the door.
“I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” That is Jesus in Matthew 25, and there is no asterisk, no income requirement, no bond attached to the parable. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” The door of return is open, but the administration’s message is unmistakable: only those with a hundred thousand dollars to spare need knock. Stop building walls of money and calling it mercy. The people on the other side of this bond — the spouses, the parents, the siblings — they are not public charges. They are your family. They are ours. They have always been.