Donald Trump is deporting the people who bathe the dying.

The news coverage calls it a labor crunch. A labor crunch is what happens to an economy. What is happening here happens to people. When the order ended Temporary Protected Status for roughly three hundred fifty thousand Haitians, it did not rearrange an industry’s staffing problem; it unmade the lives of human beings who have been in this country for ten, twenty, thirty years — people who came lawfully, obtained legal protection, worked, paid taxes, raised children, and then, on a date set in Washington, were rendered deportable again. The framing does what the policy needs: it lets a country watch a mass removal and believe it is reading a business section.

Start where the story actually sits, in a small South Florida agency that serves about four hundred Holocaust survivors. Jewish Community Services of South Florida had to let go of eighteen Haitian home-health aides last month — some of whom had cared for those survivors for more than twenty years. Think about what that sentence holds. The people who survived the great strangering of the last century were being bathed by the hands of the century’s newest strangers. And now the state built on the vow “never again” has become the hand that sends those hands away. The Torah refuses to let anyone in this story forget why: “You shall not oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” It was written for exactly this hour. A people that remembers being the stranger is commanded, on pain of losing its soul, not to become the stranger-maker. And the Gospel sets the test in one act: “I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me.” The bill for that failure is now being collected at a bedside.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, marching at Selma, said the truest sentence he ever spoke: “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.” I think of Heschel because this story rests on an unlikely covenant between two vulnerable communities — Polish Jewish survivors of one genocide, and Haitian women and men whose country has known its own catastrophes. The caregiver who lost her work authorization last month is the same caregiver who helped a ninety-three-year-old Auschwitz survivor wash and dress every morning for two decades. The prophets of Israel understood what we have stopped understanding: that the test of a society is how it treats the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. The prophets called it what Isaiah called it: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” In Matthew twenty-five, Jesus gathers the nations and judges them by what they did — and did not do — for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned. “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me,” he says. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.” The elderly survivor in her apartment. The dying patient in the Catholic nursing home. The Haitian aide who built her life around the consistency of her work. They are not abstractions. They are, in the literal Catholic sense, the Body of Christ. The policy has decided they are disposable.

The coverage does its arithmetic the way the machine wants it: sixteen thousand cooks and servers, eight thousand stockers and packers, four thousand nursing assistants. Numbers are how a deportation stops being a person. But read past the categories and the people are still standing there. In Key West, Bobby Kuchinsky had to terminate six of his employees at Half Shell Raw Bar — including the second person ever to make his conch chowder and fritter batter, a prep cook who had worked in the restaurant for more than a decade. Now Kuchinsky has his servers, bartenders, and oyster shuckers in the kitchen washing dishes, because the prep cooks and bussers who knew how to do that work have been deported. Sabine Dulcio runs an event company and had to dismiss half her crew: “We’re drowning,” she said, “this is the largest turnover we’ve ever had.” Farah Larrieux received protection in 2010, lost her hospitality job last month, and now barely leaves her house. Two home-care agencies in Miami-Dade and Broward counties have already shut down because each lost more than eighty Haitian TPS holders. Moorings Park Communities in Naples lost seven TPS holders, on top of seventeen who left last year. ArchCare — the health arm of the Archdiocese of New York — has twenty positions to fill and has tripled its sign-on bonus to six thousand dollars. The exiles have been telling us exactly what they fear for weeks, and the health-care experts warned this was where the road ended; the warning has now arrived inside a dying woman’s room.

Let me be honest about culpability, because honesty is the ground of the accusation, and pretending the evil came from nowhere serves no one. The man who signed the order did not build the machine that makes a stranger deportable. That machine is older than any administration, and it was assembled by every party — decades of Congresses that left protection endless and unresolved, decades of officials of both coalitions who spoke of “securing the border” while the categories churned, decades of employers who wanted the labor and not the person. We who claim the gospel and live in this country built the climate this order is exploiting; that confession does not soften the charge, it is what gives the charge its weight. I am a Catholic. The Catholic agencies affected include ArchCare, and the Catholic hospitals and home-care programs across Florida now scrambling to replace what the policy has stripped away. We have built an enormous Catholic health system in this country, and we have not built it to be defended by us when the law treats the workers who run it as deportable. We were quiet about Haitian TPS for years, both Democratic and Republican administrations, because Haitians were convenient to be temporary. We should have been the loudest. The same category was used, across both parties, to extract labor and then threaten workers with removal when the moment came. And when the same machine that has fired the sixteen thousand cooks now tells the “American-born” their wages will rise and calls it justice, name that for the oldest trick in the book — setting the stranger against the neighbor so the ones who own both keep both.

To Steven Camarota, who says this loss is one the economy can absorb and that it “creates real opportunities for less-educated, American-born workers”: you are a man, not a monster, and I do not doubt you believe you are describing a market correcting itself. But the tradition I speak from has a plain word for treating a person as a variable in someone else’s wage equation, and it does not soften because it issues from a policy institute. It is the sin the prophets called trampling the needy — present tense, wherever a nation prices the stranger’s body as a removable input. And to the officials who signed the order, and the agents who will one morning stop a woman on her way to work: the thing you are carrying out is a removal of persons, and it is evil; and it is also not the last page. The courts said the administration was permitted to do this. They did not say it was required. A classification is a human artifact — the same hands that made it can unmake it. No soldier is obliged to carry out an order against the law of God; no agent is obliged to be the enforcement arm of a cruelty they can see. Conscience outranks the order, and the door is open.

At Lampedusa in 2013, Pope Francis named our sickness in one phrase: “the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep.” Calling a deportation a labor crunch is the Levite’s walk. But the Samaritan is also on that road, and it is not too late to be him. It is not too late for the administration to reverse the order, not too late for the states that depend on these hands to protect them, not too late for a country that remembers its grandparents were the strangers to choose the dignity that says a woman who has bathed the dying for twenty years has earned the right to stay.

The caregivers will keep showing up. The ones whose papers allow it. They will keep coming in the morning, and they will keep tending, and they will keep building the long relationships that make dying bearable. To a deportation officer who finds this column in your inbox on a Tuesday morning: these are the people you have been ordered to remove. Look at their faces. Ask whether the order fits the name of the country that issued it. The door of return is open. It has always been open.

Tonight, in some South Florida room, a very old woman who survived the camps is being bathed by a stranger once again. The hands that knew her name are on a plane. When we call that a labor crunch, we are not reporting the news — we are burying it. Twenty years of mornings, and the same hands. That is what the policy broke. Nothing requires this but our consent.