The Department of Justice arrested David Huerta for standing with immigrant workers. On Monday, the prosecutors dropped the charge because they had no case.
The Torah does not permit what this administration is doing. The commandment to love the stranger appears in Scripture more than thirty times — more than any other commandment. You shall not oppress the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall love the alien as yourself. These are not suggestions. They are the moral floor beneath every immigration policy a nation that claims faith can hold.
The Justice Department arrested Huerta — president of SEIU California, a union representing more than 750,000 workers — for protesting the administration’s immigration crackdown outside a detention facility in Los Angeles. They charged him with obstructing federal officers. On Monday, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles filed the motion to dismiss because the case had no legal foundation.
What the government prosecuted was not a crime. It was an act of solidarity. A union president stood where the fight was, with the people who needed him there. His attorneys named it plainly: the prosecution was never designed to win in court. It was designed to make the next person think twice before showing up.
This is the operating principle of a regime that has tried to criminalize the act of protest itself when protest addresses its immigration policy. The DOJ has tested this across the country — the charges against Chicago activists collapsed months ago, Brad Lander was acquitted in New York after being charged at an immigration court. The pattern is the finding. The government keeps discovering that what it calls obstruction is actually the First Amendment.
What they arrested was a man doing what his tradition — the labor tradition, the moral tradition, the tradition of every faith that names the dignity of work — requires him to do. SEIU California’s members are the janitors who clean the offices where policy is written, the security officers who guard the buildings where detention orders are signed, the home-care workers who keep the elderly alive. Many are immigrants themselves. Huerta stood outside that facility standing with them.
The administration holds up a Bible and invokes Christian language to justify what it is doing. The Vice President invoked the ordo amoris — the rightly ordered love of Catholic moral theology — to argue that love of neighbor extends outward in concentric circles, beginning with family and ending with the stranger. The sitting Pope corrected him directly: the true ordo amoris is discovered through the parable of the Good Samaritan, which builds a fraternity open to all, without exception. The department this President built arrested a man for doing what the texts the President claims to follow actually demand. They hold up the Word and use it to license the persecution of those who obey it.
Romero spoke to soldiers ordered to kill and told them no soldier is obligated to obey an order against the law of God. The same words apply to the agents who arrested Huerta, to the prosecutors who filed the charges: an immoral law is no law. Your conscience outranks your orders.
We in the churches and the parishes have not always stood where we should have. Too many of us watched union leaders arrested and said nothing. The climate this administration is exploiting — the sense that enforcement can proceed without moral consequence, that the powerful can punish solidarity and call it law — is a climate our own silence helped to build. But acknowledging the failure is the first step away from it.
But the door of return is open. The enforcement agent reading this column is a person. The prosecutor who filed the motion is a person. What the tradition names as evil is not the person but the act — the use of the law’s machinery to punish those who stand where the law of God places them. You can stop. The door is open. The texts you claim name what you are doing.