Donald Trump used armed federal agents to break families apart at a California farm.
On 10 July 2025, hundreds of immigration agents in camouflage descended on two Glass House Farms facilities in Camarillo and Carpinteria, California. They carried guns, chemical munitions and armored vehicles. They blocked roads. They pointed firearms at workers. Across the two raids, the government said it detained 375 people, including 14 minors and 361 adults.
Jaime Alanis, a 56-year-old farm worker, fell 30 feet from a greenhouse roof and died. More than 200 workers were later deported. Families lost fathers, mothers, spouses and wages. A nursing baby was separated from its mother. One family fell into homelessness.
This was not an administrative inconvenience. It was cruelty organized by the state.
Santiago, an undocumented worker from Mexico, had lived in the United States for almost 23 years. He had three American daughters. During the raid, he saw armed agents flood the greenhouse and feared he would never see his children again. He spent nearly six months in detention. When his daughters visited, his one-year-old had lost her baby fat. His five-year-old asked when he would come home from the strange worksite.
Deportation can remove a parent from a child’s daily life with the force of an amputation. It takes away wages, care, school routines and the ordinary presence by which a family knows itself.
George Retes, an Army veteran and security guard, drove toward the Camarillo farm for his shift. Agents shattered his car window, pepper-sprayed him and pinned him to the ground. John Caravello, a university professor protesting outside, was detained and charged with felony assault after throwing a smoking tear-gas canister over the agents’ heads. He faced up to 20 years in prison before a jury found him not guilty.
The record shows federal agents bringing firearms, chemical munitions and armored vehicles into a workplace, detaining workers and using force against people at the perimeter. It shows a citizen veteran thrown to the ground and a professor prosecuted after protesting. It does not require us to call every agent a soldier or every encounter a battle. The conduct is grave enough in its own words.
Then the government called the operation protection.
The government said its officers were “dodging bullets to save children.” That claim must sit beside the chemical munitions, the conflicting orders at the perimeter, the detention of hundreds of workers and the families left without parents, wages or homes. A sentence about saving children cannot make a child’s father disappear. It cannot turn six months in detention into public safety.
Donald Trump chose this policy. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security carried it out. Christian-right politicians, pastors and organizations that have defended family separation, mass detention and coercive enforcement helped give it moral cover. They have invoked children, order and Christian duty while accepting a machinery that makes migrant parents disposable.
That is not an incidental contradiction. It is religious instrumentalization.
The Christian-right actors who bless this enforcement do not merely support a policy. They place Christian language around state violence and ask the public to mistake the wrapping for the gospel. They invoke protection while families are separated. They invoke order while agents use chemical force at a workplace. They invoke the sanctity of life while treating a farm worker’s death as an operational consequence.
Jesus did not say, “I was a stranger, and you detained me for the sake of order.” He said, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” He also said, “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The test is not the religious identity claimed by the official. The test is what happened to the stranger.
The same test applies across administrations. The deportation machine did not begin with Trump, and Democratic administrations have detained, deported and separated families. My own Catholic communities have accepted the language of “illegal” while refusing to see the person beneath it. We have benefited from cheap food and cheap labor while keeping the fear carried by farm workers outside the frame.
That confession does not dilute this indictment. It identifies the soil in which the present cruelty grew. Trump and the Christian-right institutions that defend his campaign have chosen to water it.
A local organizer called the operation a “litmus test for what the federal government could get away with.” The raid established a boundary. Future operations can treat that boundary as permission. This is how cruelty becomes policy: an extraordinary use of force becomes a precedent, and the precedent becomes an ordinary tool.
Catholic Social Teaching does not permit this moral arithmetic. Pacem in Terris recognizes a human right to emigrate when there are just reasons and says that citizenship in one state does not remove a person from the human family. Fratelli Tutti rejects a politics that treats migrants as less human or sets political preferences above the convictions of faith. The Torah says, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”
A humane immigration system would protect the public without making every migrant a permanent suspect. It would provide due process, keep families together, protect workers from exploitation and create lawful paths for people who have built their lives here. It would measure enforcement by the safety and dignity it produces, not by the number of people it frightens, detains or expels.
That is not an open door to lawlessness. It is the minimum moral duty of a country that depends on migrant labor and calls itself governed by law.
The families of Glass House Farms are still carrying the raid. People who gathered for Jaime Alanis’s rosary carried his name to the entrance of the farm. Photographs of people who died in ICE custody or operations moved in the breeze. Retes stood among them and said, “That could have just as easily been me.”
He was right.
A year after the raid, Santiago finally received work authorization. He called it un peso menos—one less burden to carry. It was not justice. It was one less weight on a family still carrying the weight of detention, separation and fear.
The flowers remain at the farm entrance. So do the names. So do the children waiting for a parent to come home.