Mexico 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 our neighbors are dead in our system, and the system that killed them has not punished itself. So Mexico is doing the punishing.
The U.S. bishops said it plain, with the Mexican bishops, in 2003: Strangers No Longer. The stranger is not a problem to be managed; the stranger is a person to be welcomed. The Hebrew prophets said it plainer, and older. You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. The stranger appears in Torah more than any other commandment — more than the Sabbath, more than the festivals. The reason God gave the rule, in the text, is memory: for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You remember being the stranger. From that memory comes the welcome.
The seventeen ICE custody deaths happened between June 2025 and this month, the Mexican government says — fourteen of them inside the private and government-run detention centers run by contractors paid to hold human beings in their country’s name. Two facilities are named in the press: Adelanto in California, Florence Correctional Complex in Arizona. The first of the seventeen that the Mexican president highlighted by name is the case of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, shot dead in Houston by federal ICE agents who mistook him for a Guatemalan citizen during an operation. The agents were not targeting him; he was killed in the confusion of an operation aimed at someone else. The family says it was murder and a cover-up. The Mexican government has decided the family deserves a courtroom, not just a press conference.
I am a man who lives in a small Western town and has for years done pastoral work among my undocumented neighbors, including the abandoned veterans the country has agreed not to see. I have held the hands of men as they described what detention did to them. I have heard what the facilities do to a body and a soul. I have watched ICE vehicles parked outside the parish where I pray. I will say what I have seen and what the bishops said: the detention of human beings for the administrative infraction of crossing a line on a map is itself the cruelty, regardless of the conditions in which it happens. The conditions make it worse. They do not make it less cruel.
The Mexican government’s escalation from diplomatic notes to criminal complaints and civil suits is what a sovereign does when the country that holds its citizens answers nothing. Eleven diplomatic notes have gone to the State Department. They have produced no thorough investigations. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has been asked for precautionary measures. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights is to be asked formally. Mexico is climbing the ladder of international recourse because the domestic ladder produces no rungs.
I think Mexico is right to climb it, and I will tell you why in the words of the tradition I come from. Francis, on Lampedusa in 2013, named the condition: the globalization of indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others; it doesn’t affect us; it doesn’t interest us; it’s none of my business. We are a society which has forgotten how to weep. That is what seventeen bodies in detention amounts to, in the language of the present: a society which has stopped weeping for the people inside its own cages, and a sister republic which has not.
The Good Samaritan, in Fratelli Tutti, is the parable Francis keeps handing back to us. The priest passes. The Levite passes. The despised foreigner stops. The point is not that the foreigner is good. The point is that the priest and the Levite are not. The point is what passes for piety in the country that produced the wounded man. The catechism a nation teaches by its operations is the one its operations perform.
Let me name what is being taught. A country that detains the stranger and loses seventeen of them in a year and investigates none of them — that country is teaching that the stranger’s life is the price of its border. A country that lets private contractors profit from the holding and then lets the private contractors escape the lawsuit when the holding kills — that country is teaching that the stranger’s death is somebody else’s line item. A country whose enforcement operation killed a man who was not its target and then treats the wrong identity as a defense — that country is teaching that the stranger’s body is interchangeable with any other body the operation might have taken. You did not even know whose blood you were spilling. That is the catechism.
Mexico’s response is the catechism the Gospel teaches back. You file the criminal complaint because the system that killed them will not file it against itself. You file the civil suit against the contractors because the contractors profited and the contractors must answer. You publish the names because the names were treated as numbers. You announce it from the National Palace because the families deserve a press conference more than a closed file. You do this not to damage the bilateral relationship but because the bilateral relationship cannot survive the alternative, which is seventeen deaths the powerful pretend did not happen and the powerless pretend to forget.
I will confess what my tradition has to confess before I finish naming what another’s tradition has to answer for. The Catholic Church in the United States has not done enough on this. Some bishops have spoken. Some have not. The bishops’ conference has the Strangers No Longer teaching and a long subsequent record and the institutional capacity to name seventeen deaths as the moral event they are, and the leadership has not always used that capacity at the volume the moment requires. I include my own formation in the failure. The pastoral worker who tends the wounded is also the man who did not always raise his voice at the volume the wounded deserved. The column is the work of saying so now.
And the deportation officer who reads this column is a person, and I owe him the truth and not contempt. The detention center guard who reads it is a person. The contractor’s middle manager who reads it is a person. The ICE leadership who reads it is a person. The probability that any of them is a person who went into the work to hurt anyone is small; the probability that they are people inside a system that will hurt anyone it is handed is large. The system is the cruel thing, and the system is made of human decisions, and the human decisions can be made differently. That is the door of return.
What does returning look like? It looks like the United States Department of Justice actually investigating the seventeen deaths Mexico is naming — not performing an investigation, investigating. It looks like the contractors named in any future civil suit being held to discovery rather than shielded by procurement clauses. It looks like the family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo receiving every piece of evidence local authorities and federal authorities have, and not having to ask. It looks like the bilateral relationship with Mexico surviving the moment of accountability rather than being used as an excuse to avoid it.
The prophet Amos said it about a country he loved and watched harden: Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy. The country he was speaking to was his own. The country I am speaking to is mine. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil. The Catechism I was raised in names what seventeen preventable deaths inside a country’s detention system is. The tradition I read at dawn this morning names it. The Mexican government has now named it in the only language the system understands: a court filing.
En la lucha. Tomorrow is the work. The Galilean Jesus, the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt, the ger of Torah, the cese la represión of Romero, the globalization of indifference of Francis, the Good Samaritan on the road — the canonical company is large and old. Seventeen of my country’s neighbors were held in its name and died. Mexico has decided they were people, not line items. The lawsuit is the right instrument. The door of return is open. Mañana we will see whether anyone walks through it.