The Trump administration used a farm raid to test the bounds of cruelty.
It came on a sunny morning last July—July 10, 2025—when hundreds of heavily armed agents in camouflage, face masks, and armored tactical vehicles descended on the Glass House Farms greenhouses in Camarillo, California. They carried guns and chemical munitions. They pointed firearms at workers. They arrested 14 minors and 361 adults. A year later, a farmworker is dead, three lives have been shattered, and the moral arithmetic is as stark as it was the moment the tear-gas canisters flew.
Jaime Alanis, a 56-year-old farmworker, fell thirty feet from a greenhouse roof as the chaos unfolded and died. He left a wife and a daughter. His name, his niece said at his vigil a year later, is “honorable now.” He should still be alive.
Santiago, an undocumented father of three U.S.-citizen daughters, had been working at the farm for three weeks when the agents flooded in. He thought they were soldiers. He felt raw fear for his girls. He spent nearly six months in detention. When he came home, his one-year-old had lost the baby fat she had when he was taken.
George Retes, an Army veteran who served in Iraq, drove to his security-guard shift and reached a line of agents shouting conflicting orders. His car filled with tear gas. Officers shattered his window, pepper-sprayed him, and pinned him to the ground. He missed his daughter’s third birthday because he sat in federal prison.
John Caravello, a university professor and community organizer, saw the tear gas and threw a smoking canister back over the agents’ heads—not at them. Prosecutors charged him with felony assault. A jury acquitted him after video showed the conduct the government had tried to turn into a prison sentence.
You did this, Mr. President. You and the apparatus you command. You sent armed agents into a workplace where human beings were performing the labor that puts food on our tables, and you used them as a measuring stick for how much suffering your deportation machine could produce without breaking. Internal Navy correspondence—pried loose through a record request—shows your agents used a Ventura county naval base as a “staging area” for these raids and held around 275 workers there. One of your own agents, caught on body camera, promised to “fucking gas the shit out of them like we did earlier.” That is not the language of public safety. That is the language of a regime testing the outer edge of what cruelty it can inflict before the public’s conscience recoils.
We have seen this before, and we have seen it since. After the spectacle of the sweeps provoked outrage, enforcement shifted toward pre-dawn arrests at homes, pickups at local jails, ICE appointments, and intimidation of the people organizing against it—including agents ramming community patrollers. The campaign continued in a different form. The scars this city carries—the families still separated, the over two hundred workers deported, the nursing baby separated from his mother, the family fallen into homelessness—are the permanent record of what your test has cost. And the killing last month in Houston, when an agent shot a father driving his work van, showed that the violence is not a bug but a feature. The litmus test continues.
I confess that those of us who live in this country with papers and relative safety have too often looked away. We have let ourselves believe that the deployment of chemical munitions against farmworkers and veterans and professors was an aberration, or that the law would restrain you, or that our silence was a kind of prudence. It is not. We who claim the Gospel have helped build the world in which armed agencies can imprison a father for months and call the result enforcement. We have accepted the distance that lets a detained worker disappear from the parish, the workplace, and the public conscience. Our repentance must become a change in what we permit.
The Gospel gives this violence a name: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The stranger is not an abstraction. The stranger has daughters, savings, a work permit, and a body that grows cold in a detention cell. The stranger has a name, even when the government reduces him to a case number. You cannot invoke law and erase the person standing before you. You cannot call cruelty order and ask the Gospel to bless the arrangement.
Your own spokesperson now claims that agents were “assaulted by rioters” while “dodging bullets to save children.” That is a lie, and you know it is a lie. The cameras show what happened. So would Óscar Romero, who told the soldiers of his own country, “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression.”
Justice, if it is to mean anything, has to enter through the narrow doors the government has left open. Retes filed a civil suit against the government in February. The family of Jaime Alanis sued the government and Glass House Farms over his death. Retes’s lawyers are relying on an untested California law that allows people to sue anyone who interferes with constitutional rights—a long-shot theory in a system that has spent decades narrowing remedies against federal officers. These suits are not proof that accountability works. They are evidence of how hard the country has made accountability to obtain.
You can stop it. That is the terrible, beautiful thing about the pastoral-prophetic word: it names the evil and then it refuses to close the door. You can withdraw the agents, you can end the raids, you can grant the work permits and reunite the families and honor the dead. You can, even now, decide that the litmus test has failed. The Lord you invoked on the campaign trail is still standing at the door of your conscience, knocking, asking you to see His face in the face of Santiago, in the face of Jaime Alanis, in the face of every worker you have made to run in terror. Open it. Open it before another man falls from a roof, before another father is shot in his van, before the test of cruelty becomes the only thing your presidency is remembered for.
The vigil for Jaime Alanis was held at the entrance to the greenhouse exactly one year later. His family placed fresh flowers and a photograph. John Caravello, acquitted by a jury that saw the truth, told the crowd, “The people—my community—saved me.” Santiago stayed home with his daughters, finally reunited, one less burden to carry. George Retes went to the vigil and looked at the photographs of the dead and said, “That could have just as easily been me.” The altar held the dead. The living stood beside it. The door of return remains open, but it opens onto truth, repair, and an end to the campaign—not another speech about mercy while the gas rises.