Trump’s ICE uses Latino agents to destroy Latino families.
More than sixty people have died at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or in its custody since the president returned to power. Two were Latino men in the same week: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, shot by agents in Houston, and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, dead in ICE custody in Maine. When the country learned in January that the agents who killed Alex Pretti were Hispanic men — brown skin, Spanish names — it was shocked.
The shock was understandable. It also rested on a lie: that a brown face must mean an open door.
The machine has never needed that to be true. It needs the man at the door who looks like the man inside, so the cruelty reads as something we do to ourselves and the rest of the country does not have to look.
In Houston, the East End rallied in grief and defiance after the killing. The federal account says the agents were seeking other men. That is the machine’s exact cruelty: it does not need to find the man it names. It needs the neighborhood to know the knock. The knock does not check names.
The machine hires our brothers to drag us away, calling it belonging.
More than half the officers who hold the line at the border are Latino. Somewhere between a fifth and a third of the agents who answer to ICE carry Latino names; roughly one in four ICE agents shares that heritage. The machine does not hire our brothers in spite of this. It hires them because of it.
To grow up brown in this country is to learn early that you are not quite inside: the look, the stop, the question. Then a recruiter holds out a uniform and makes the oldest offer in the book.
Prove them wrong. Be one of the good ones. Wear this, and no one will mistake you for the cargo.
The offer has been made to our people for seventy years. The machine reads hunger, and the hunger is real. Employers used undocumented workers to undercut unions, suppress wages, and break strikes. Documented workers had reason to see that threat as structural rather than personal. The labor argument is true.
It is not enough.
It does not explain why a Border Patrol agent with his grandmother’s last name on his uniform kneels on a man’s back in a Houston driveway. It does not explain why cruelty falls with particular force when the hand that delivers it knows the neighborhood.
What explains it is precarity: the condition of occupying an uneasy middle ground in a society that has never decided whether you belong. The promise offered to Latino agents and Latino voters is not policy. It is proximity.
Stand with us and you will not be the one we come for.
The promise is temporary. It is conditional. It is a lie. The badge does not buy the welcome. It can only make a man the machine’s hand. The hand stays brown.
The system needs the target more than it needs the agent. When the sorting is finished, the agent’s skin will not save him.
The history is longer than this administration, and it is our history too. In the 1950s, prominent Latino leaders and organizations supported Operation Wetback, a deportation campaign that removed hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants and citizen family members. In the 1960s and 1970s, farmworker organizers whose names we honor treated undocumented workers as scabs and threats to organizing. The United Farm Workers harassed them, reported them to immigration authorities, organized border patrols, and sometimes watched those patrols end in violence against immigrants.
In California in 1994, Proposition 187 sought to cut undocumented immigrants and their families off from social services. Nearly half of Latino voters could imagine supporting it in the months and weeks before the vote, though only about a quarter ultimately did. In 2016, a banner rose that read Latinos for Trump. When the president returned in 2024, Latino voters did not merely hold their place in his column. They widened it, especially among men and in border communities where the line and the living are the same street.
None of this makes our people uniquely reactionary. It makes us hungry and afraid like any people. The machine has always been willing to sell us the cure.
The cure is a lie.
The recruitment runs beyond the badge. It reaches from Border Patrol to the far right, from Enrique Tarrio, the Afro-Cuban January 6 insurrectionist pardoned by Trump, to Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist influencer whose father is Mexican American. The system does not merely tolerate enforcers from targeted communities. It offers them a place inside the machinery on terms that require them to help turn against their own.
This is not a paradox. It is a pattern, and the system built it on purpose.
Exodus says: You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. More than thirty times, the Torah returns to the stranger — more often than to any other commandment — because this is not a rule alone. It is a memory.
You know the heart of the stranger because you were the stranger.
The commandment does not say you shall not oppress the alien unless you have found a way to feel American. It does not say the obligation expires when a government offers you a badge. It does not say the memory of Egypt becomes useless once you sit at the checkpoint.
It says you know the heart.
The knowledge is the moral claim. It is not the exit from the claim.
What this administration has done is turn that knowledge into a targeting instrument. The agent who speaks Spanish reads the fear in a family’s eyes faster. The agent who grew up eating the same food knows which doors to knock on. Proximity, which the tradition names as the ground of compassion, becomes under this architecture the ground of more efficient cruelty.
That is pecado estructural: sin that does not require malice in every individual because the system carries the harm.
Romero named it. When a regime establishes privileges for some and leaves many others in conditions below what human life is owed, he said, there is pecado social and the church has a prophetic duty to denounce it.
And the Gospel gives the final ledger: “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” Not: Were you on the right side of the line? Did you hold the line? Were your papers in order?
Did you welcome me?
The machine does not need our brother’s labor alone. It needs his forgetting — the crossing, the papers, the story at the table, the whole memory of Egypt, bought and buried. That is the wage.
What is a man worth who has traded his memory for a seat at a table that is never set for him?
Let the truth be told from inside, as truth must be told. Our leaders blessed the removals of the fifties. Our organizers hounded the undocumented in the sixties and seventies. Nearly half of California’s Latino voters could see themselves voting to cut the stranger off from services in 1994. I do not exempt my communities from this accounting. I do not exempt a single administration. The deportation machine was built by many hands over a century.
The farmworker who reported undocumented competitors to La Migra was not acting from nowhere. The parishioner who voted for a candidate promising to remove people she prayed with on Sunday morning was not a monster. She was doing what precarity teaches: secure your own footing before the ground gives way.
The system built the trap. Our people walked into it. Both are true.
Confession is not exoneration.
Every community that has ever beaten the stranger to prove it was not itself the stranger is standing in this room with us. The system does not become innocent because our own hands helped build it. We do not become innocent by naming the system.
The bishops of the United States and Mexico wrote the measuring rod in Strangers No Longer in 2003. A person has the right to seek opportunity in her own land. A person has the right to migrate when her own land cannot sustain her family. A nation has the right to control its borders. Refugees and asylum seekers deserve protection. The dignity of every undocumented person must be respected.
Hold every administration to those sentences. The verdict does not move.
That is not balance. It is arithmetic.
The tradition gives us one witness made for this hour. On March 23, 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero stood in the cathedral of San Salvador and spoke to soldiers ordered to kill their own brothers. They were poor men conscripted from the same villages as the people they were commanded to destroy.
“Hermanos,” he told them. They are of our own people. They are killing their own brother peasants. Before an order to kill given by a man, the law of God must prevail, which says: You shall not kill. No soldier is obligated to obey an order against the law of God.
Then Romero begged them. He beseeched them. In the name of God and in the name of the suffering people, he ordered them: cese la represión. Stop the repression.
They shot him the next day at the altar.
Mark what he did not do. He did not call the soldiers monsters. He called them brothers. He did not denounce from a safe distance. He held out open hands to men who would kill him.
The command and the open hand were the same act.
Our brothers are recruited from the same neighborhoods as the people they are ordered to drag away. The law of God does not change with the uniform or the century. No one is obliged to obey an order against the law of God.
Not in San Salvador in 1980.
Not in Houston in 2026.
A humane order is not mysterious. The person fleeing hunger or terror has the right to go where her children can eat and sleep. The country has the right to its borders. The dignity of every person without papers is inviolable.
The machine takes the middle sentence and calls it the whole law because the middle sentence fills the beds, pays the contractors, and wins the seasons of fear.
The pendulum may swing in new polls. A changed preference cannot erase the families already broken by the old bargain. A new vote cannot absolve the old sin.
You can put the badge down, hermano. Or you can keep it and become the other kind of officer — the one who stands in front of the door it was your job to break.
The door is open.
You know the heart.
The memory of Egypt is in your own house. Let it live in you. Romero’s hand is still open. The stranger is standing on the other side of the door, waiting to see what you do with what you know.