The administration is arming violent, unvetted men, and immigrants are dying at traffic stops.
David Brouillette killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on a road in Maine. His ex-wife says he had a history of domestic violence and severe mental health issues. The Department of Homeland Security hired more than 12,000 officers in less than a year to staff this deportation regime, and in the rush to meet production quotas, the vetting was discarded. You have built a machine whose only logic is speed, and now its gears are turning with blood on them.
The state claims the monopoly on legitimate force. But when that force is handed to men fractured by their own violence and given absolute power over a migrant father, it stops being law enforcement. It becomes murder. The prophet Isaiah heard the Lord say of a people who kept the outward forms of religion while practicing cruelty: “Your hands are full of blood.” When the government assigns a man with a documented history of beating his wife to pull over a stranger on the highway, the state’s hands are full of blood.
We who demand order at the border, we who vote for the funding that demands twelve thousand new badges in twelve months, we have built the pressure that guarantees these corners will be cut. The same citizens who cry out for secure borders are now crying out over the bodies in the streets, unwilling to see that the machine we funded and demanded is producing the outcome its haste made inevitable. We do not get to demand the harvest and then feign surprise at the reaping. Just as the mother in Texas seeks accountability sixteen months after an ICE agent killed her son, Joan’s family is left holding the pieces of a life taken by a system that valued a hiring quota over a human soul.
A just society does not measure its strength by the speed at which it can expel the vulnerable. It measures its justice by the care with which it treats every life, including the life of the officer who pulled the trigger. The officer is a person, too—a man whose own wounds should have disqualified him from holding a badge, whose suffering should have been a public health matter, not a police hiring decision. Healing did not happen. The state looked at a broken man and gave him a gun. Pope Francis named this condition at Lampedusa as a globalization of indifference, a world that has forgotten how to weep because the suffering of others has become none of our business.
It is our business. Every time we look away from the humanity of the migrant, we make the migrant’s death possible. And when the stranger stands before us, Jesus told us what the accounting would look like: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” We did more than fail to welcome him. We sent a violent, unvetted man to stop him, and we killed him. You can stop this. You can demand that the machine slows down, that the vetting is honored, that the badges are pulled from men who should never have held them. The door of repentance is open, but the time to walk through it is now, before the blood of another stranger stains your hands.