Three fugitives were arrested, and the ambassador called it a message. In a single day, Ambassador Ronald Johnson posted to X — the way a man posts a weather report, the way a man posts a football score — that federal immigration agents working under his authority had taken into custody a suspected member of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel on a firearms charge from Guanajuato, a fugitive wanted for murder in Zacatecas, and a third wanted for fraud. He called it “bilateral security cooperation” between President Trump and President Claudia Sheinbaum. He called it “a clear message” to criminals: “you will be caught and held accountable.”
Three fugitives. Three labels. Not one name among them.
The framing is the story. Federal immigration agents exist to enforce the immigration laws of the United States — to regulate who enters, who stays, who leaves, and on what terms. They do not exist to do the police work of a foreign government. When the ambassador to Mexico announces their arrests on X as proof of cooperation between two presidents, the work has been re-described. It is no longer immigration enforcement. It is foreign police work wearing an immigration badge.
I take the arrests to be real. The men who took them say so, and I have no reason to disbelieve them. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is a violent organization. The women and girls it disappears in Guanajuato, in Zacatecas, in Jalisco, in Michoacán; the families it extorts; the mayors and journalists and candidates it murders; the fentanyl it moves into the United States, killing tens of thousands of Americans every year — that is a long shadow over a continent, and I do not write to defend it. The cartel’s own leadership is being made to answer in U.S. courtrooms. None of this is in dispute.
But here is what is in dispute, and here is the work the ambassador’s post will not say. When you reduce a human being to a category — narco, fugitive, cartel member — you prepare his body for the punishment he will receive. You have to be able to look at the face in your custody and see a face. You have to be able to look at your wallet, your neighborhood, your school, the face of your own child, and see the face of God. The state’s neatest trick is to tell you that the woman is beyond the reach of mercy, while the man who makes the same argument in a suit is a patriot. And in the very act of making the catch, the state becomes the thing it claims to have caught: a trafficker in human beings, moving them in the dark, announcing them in the dark, all so the light could fall exactly where it was intended on the hand that caught them.
The cartels did not rise from nothing. They rose from the demand for drugs in the United States. They rose from the flow of American guns south across a border we do not police in that direction. They rose from the economic displacement that NAFTA and its successors brought to the Mexican countryside, opening it to subsidized U.S. corn and displacing the smallholders the cartels now recruit from. We helped build the conditions. We have helped build them under every administration for forty years. The least we owe is the honesty.
The work that has been abandoned in this announcement is the work the Torah commanded Israel to remember. “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien,” the Lord says through Moses, “for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus puts it plainly: “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” The commandment appears more than thirty times in the Hebrew scriptures — more than any other. It was not that the alien be hunted down. It was that the alien be loved as the citizen is loved. It was that the system remember who it was built for.
Jesus took the same logic to its end. “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me,” he says in the judgment scene of Matthew 25. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” The scene is not about whether those who failed were nice people. The scene is about whether the system they ran recognized the face of Christ in the person at the door.
And there is another story, one the church I love has carried for two thousand years. A woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses was clear: stone her. The law, the label, the category, the procedure was clear. But Jesus, the one man in the story who had a right to condemn, stayed in the dust, telling them that whoever is without sin should throw the first stone. One by one they went away. And he said, “Neither do I condemn you: go, and sin no more.” The genius of the state is to tell you that he is not like us. That his heart is different. That he is a cartel member, a murderer, a terrorist, beyond the reach of mercy. But the testimony of Scripture is that there is no man who is not the image of God. There is no border wall, no evidence locker, no procedural category deep enough to hold the mystery of a human soul made in the image of God.
The system Ambassador Johnson is running does not recognize that face. It recognizes the X post. It recognizes the bilateral relationship. It recognizes the clear message to criminals. It does not recognize the asylum seeker at the bridge, the long-resident neighbor whose only violation is a missed paperwork deadline, the child whose parents were taken at a home raid last week while the agents were busy helping Mexico build its case. “You shall know the truth,” Jesus says, “and the truth shall set you free.” Not, “you shall know the stats.” Not, “you shall know the arguments.” The truth. The one they would have to tell you to make you anything other than an animal.
The Bible does not say, “fear no evil.” It says, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me.” The cartels know that valley. The answer to a man who treats a human being as a weapon is not to become someone who treats a human being as an animal. The answer is the wall in the soul coming down — not the wall in the desert.
Ambassador Johnson, you have spent four decades in federal service — the Army, the intelligence community, the corridors of power. You know what the work looks like when it is being done well, and you know what it looks like when it is being done for the camera. The door of return is open. The stranger at the door is still there.
I will take the arrests. I will guard the prisoners. I will let them be tried, and they must be tried; even the Son of God stood trial. But the Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever — I don’t think he will be all that impressed with the branding. He’ll want to know some names.