Donald 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 removal order. In Houston the week before, an officer killed a man during an enforcement operation in which, federal authorities have acknowledged, the agents were looking for other people. Lawmakers in both states have confirmed what should stop every American cold: neither man was the intended target.
ICE has now suspended the use of traffic stops to make arrests and is requiring body cameras on at least one officer per operation, though the agency has cameras for only about half its agents. Officials say they plan to re-evaluate training for situations where people try to flee by car. Officers have been instructed to wait and attempt another arrest at a different time — which is to say that until this week, the standing instruction was something other than waiting.
The standing instruction was the quota. Two thousand arrests a day. Officers meticulously staking out homes and workplaces, catching people as they left by car. When you set a number and arm agents to meet it — when you tell them failure is not an option and the clock is running — you build a machine that produces exactly this. The men in Maine and Houston were not aberrations. They were outputs. The machine did what machines built to operate at volume do: it ground up bystanders and the administration called the result enforcement.
This is not the first time. Before Biddeford and Houston, two U.S. citizens — Renee Good and Alex Pretti — were killed in separate shootings in Minnesota in January. Good was also behind the wheel of a car. There was, officials said, a “relative lull” afterward. The lull ended. The machine resumed. The pattern does not need another data point to name what it is.
Torah names the obligation to the stranger thirty-six times — more than any other commandment in the text — and each time it carries the memory that makes the obligation intelligible: for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. A people who forget they were strangers will build machines that grind up strangers and call the grinding by whatever name lets them sleep. “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien,” Exodus commands, “for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” The commandment does not come with an enforcement exception. It does not expire when the quota is two thousand.
Jesus looked at the sheep and the goats and told them what separated the two was not their theology, not their patriotism, not their compliance with the law — it was whether they had seen him in the stranger, the prisoner, the naked, the hungry. “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The sentence is not ambiguous. The Christ the administration claims to serve is present in the 26-year-old man in Maine who was leaving a house and is now dead, and in the man in Houston whose name the Department of Homeland Security has made less of a priority than the statement about officer safety. They were not even the people the agents came for. They were bystanders, and the machine took them.
Francis stood at Lampedusa in 2013 and named what he saw: We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect us, it doesn’t concern us, it’s none of our business! He called it the globalization of indifference. The indifference has metastasized since then — from tolerance for migrant deaths at sea to a system that kills bystanders on American streets and issues statements about officer safety. The statement after the Maine shooting said an officer, “fearing for public safety, discharged his weapon.” The man he killed was the public. We who have inherited both the gospel and the Constitution and have not yet figured out how to hold both carry some of what built the climate the administration exploits: every parish that looked the other way, every Catholic voter who treated immigration enforcement as a lesser evil, every time we chose the comfortable distance over the encounter that costs something. The machine did not assemble itself.
You who carry the badge and the number — you are not the machine. You are a person who was handed a quota and a weapon and told to meet the number by whatever means would not embarrass the agency afterward. The men you killed were people, not line items, and the instruction to wait — issued after they were already dead — tells you what your conscience already said. A humane immigration system would honor the dignity of every person it encounters — the one it seeks and the one it does not — and would not set quotas that convert human beings into inventory to be processed at speed. The door is open. You can insist on the restraint, the cameras, the training, and the patience your own leadership now admits you should have had from the start.
Óscar Romero stood before the soldiers of El Salvador and said what the gospel required him to say: In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuously, I beg you, I implore you, I order you in the name of God — stop the repression. He said it to men with guns who had been told the people they killed were the enemy, and he told them the truth: the enemy was the order itself, and their conscience was the law that superseded it. The men leaving their houses in Maine and Houston were not the enemy. They were not even the target. They were alive, and the machine took them, and the only thing that will stop the machine is what has always begun to stop machines like it — enough people deciding the number is not worth the life.