ICE 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 permit office to bring the detention machinery to a halt—the water line, the sewer line, the inadequate plumbing of a building never made for human beings doing the work that no memorandum can do.

The water permit system was the one mechanism that could stop the machine. Pennsylvania used it. Every new building an argument that the earlier facility couldn’t contain our fear, every name an argument that the earlier euphemism was too transparent: they’re not “detention centers,” they’re warehouses. The machinery has operated on the premise that if we can locate enough square footage, we can house our shame. The single inconvenient fact is that the buildings must be fit for human habitation. The Good Samaritan stops to wash wounds and provide what the body needs—the ministry of the neighbor’s hands. The permits do this work: they ask whether a building can hold the people the agency proposes to lock inside. When the engineer looks at the sewer line and refuses the permit, because the water and sewer cannot support thousands of human bodies, that refusal is the neighbor speaking—the neighbor whose ministry is the one Jesus named as a question: who is my neighbor? When the state says “we do not intend to provide water and sewer” to the inhabitants of the building, it is making an argument no Pharisee memorandum can soften: these people were never worth building a building for in the first place. The ancient stranger commandment holds open a door in the same breath it names the cruelty. “I’m a stranger and you did not welcome me,” the Lord says, and Francis,1 in the place where every community has already refused the foundation of the new detention warehouse, said what our own communities too often are not willing to face: the same gospel that calls you to welcome the stranger calls you to name the machine that says it will not provide them water. Martin Luther King Jr. indicted not only the hateful words and actions of those who run the machine, but the appalling silence of those of us who could name it.2 The people we are demanding answer this question about—the people to whom the water would not have been delivered, because the permits said no—would have been locked inside the very buildings we refused to build. This is the confession embedded here: the anti-Pharisee mirror that names the machine without contempt, the millennium of estrangement the immigration community is now being asked to bear. Our own Catholic communities, in the name of the very Catholic Social Teaching we profess, name this for what it is. We who inherit the Constitution and the Sermon on the Mount have not yet figured out how to hold both when the anti-immigrant sentiment and self-deportation logic quiet themselves the moment the federal immigration agent arrives.

The communities in Berks and Schuylkill counties (joined this week by neighbors who faced the same machinery in Detention-Warehouse land) have already torn down the machinery because they can. They used permits and infrastructure to say “no”—the language of governance to name what the Constitution names, what the Gospel names, what Pennsylvania said this week: ICE withdrew its appeal and the door is still open. We who are strangers can hold that door open, answer the old torah question, and carry the law that speaks for itself. The water runs. The stranger enters. The door remains. And the word of Deuteronomy whispers to every one of us: shall you not love them as yourself? The machine said no this week. Pennsylvania said no. ICE withdrew its appeal. And we who are strangers—who were once called to account for every slur, every refusal, every water line left incomplete—are asked: do you know the heart of the stranger?

Footnotes

  1. Francis, Lampedusa Homily, 2013: “In this world of globalization 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!” ↩

  2. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” ↩