Yasmine — twenty years in this country, a DACA recipient, the mother of a girl who just turned eleven — told reporters at a press conference this week that her family could not celebrate their daughter’s birthday outside the house. Not because they lacked the money. Not because they lacked the desire. Because they were afraid the government would take her mother away before the cake was finished.
“When I leave to work, I’m afraid to not come home and to never see my daughters again,” she said. She is experiencing delays in renewing her DACA work permits. An eleventh birthday held indoors in silence because the street felt too dangerous.
The UFW Foundation released a survey Thursday of 2,250 farm workers documenting what enforcement looks like from the receiving end. Ninety-two percent said the raids and deportations have affected how they work. Ninety percent fear being separated from their families. Sixty-one percent are shopping less. Twenty-nine percent — nearly one in three — are avoiding medical care because they fear encountering immigration authorities. Seventeen percent say they fear being forced into labor while in detention. Eighty percent of the workers surveyed have lived in the United States for more than a decade. Forty-one percent have lived here more than twenty years.
This is not a population that just arrived. These are people who have spent their working lives feeding this country, who have paid taxes into a system that now hunts them. The numbers are brutal. The numbers are the point.
Let me concede something plainly: a sovereign nation may set immigration law and enforce it. The U.S. bishops who wrote Strangers No Longer with their Mexican counterparts in 2003 affirmed that very thing in their first principle. But the same document says something else that this administration has chosen not to hear: the human rights and human dignity of undocumented migrants must be respected. A policy that produces ninety-percent family-separation terror in a population that has been here for two decades is not enforcement. It is cruelty by design, visited upon people who cannot vote, cannot protest, cannot write op-eds, and cannot afford to miss a day of work while their children eat. The word the Hebrew prophets used for a regime that tramples the poor was not hardship. The word was wickedness.
In Matthew’s gospel, Christ does not ask whether the stranger had papers. He asks whether you welcomed him. “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me” — the words belong to the judgment scene, to the goats, to the people who will ask when they saw Christ hungry or naked or in prison and did not respond. The passage does not leave room for administrative categories. The stranger is Christ or the stranger is refused Christ. There is no third option, and what DHS calls a “cornerstone” of public safety is building a system in which the stranger — the one who has fed you for twenty years — cannot see a doctor or buy groceries without fear.
The administration has spent months building the machinery that produces this terror. Worksite enforcement is now framed as a rescue mission: DHS says it is “rescuing individuals who may be victims of labor trafficking.” But seventeen percent of the workers surveyed said they fear being forced into labor while in immigration detention. The people who pick the food on your table know exactly where the rescuing leads. They have watched the buses. They have seen who does not come back.
This is not only a government operation. It is something we have built together. Our communities and institutions created the conditions — the labor markets, the economic dependence, the decades of looking the other way — that made millions of people essential and undocumented at the same time. We eat the food they harvest. We live in the houses their labor maintains. And we have allowed a system to persist in which that labor can be met with terror whenever the political moment demands it. The cruelty is not a side effect. It is what the system produces when we choose not to fix it.
DHS frames worksite enforcement as protecting “public safety, national security, and economic stability.” The farm workers surveyed say they cannot go to the hospital. They cannot take their children to the park. A mother is afraid to come home from work. The administration’s language and the workers’ experience are not two perspectives on the same policy. They are a declaration and its contradiction — the practice refuting the press release. Francis named this at Lampedusa in 2013, calling it the globalization of indifference: a society that has “fallen into a globalization of indifference,” that has “become used to the suffering of others,” that lives in “soap bubbles” while the cries of the desperate rise unheard. Isaiah pronounced a woe on those who call evil good and good evil. The prophets did not hedge.
Dorothy Day wrote that the gospel takes away our right to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor. She meant that mercy does not come with a means test. This administration has inverted the teaching entirely: it has made the people who do the hardest work in this country — bent over in the sun, hands cut by the harvest, invisible until the raid — into the enemy. And it has done so while a significant portion of the political class that claims the Christian tradition sits in silence or, worse, applauds.
The workers have not given up. Seventy-six percent want protection from deportation and detention. Fifty-three percent want a pathway to legal status and citizenship. Eighty-seven percent said they could finally visit family in their home countries if Congress granted them legal status. The numbers are policy aspirations. The reality underneath them is a daughter who wants to see her mother. A man who wants to visit his father’s grave. They are not asking to leave forever. They are asking to go home and come back, to hold a parent they have not seen in two decades, to show their American children where they came from, and then to return to the fields that feed this country. What they hope for is what the Torah commanded Israel thirty-six times — “You shall not wrong a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” — and what Catholic Social Teaching has said from Rerum Novarum through Fratelli Tutti: that the person who works deserves dignity, security, and the right to live without terror.
The soul selects her own society, Dickinson wrote, and then shuts the door. This child did not choose to shut the door. A government that claims to be protecting you shut it for her. We participate in and benefit from the system that did this.
“You shall not oppress a resident alien,” Leviticus commands, “for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Jesus made it simpler still: whatever you did to the least of these, you did to him. We have locked him in the house. The door could still open. The question the rest of us have to answer is whether we will keep looking away.