In February, at the main gate of Camp Pendleton, a guard scanned Assim Alkhawaja’s license and asked for another ID. Alkhawaja handed over the work permit the government itself issued, valid until February 2030. The guard left, and returned with two ICE agents. “You’re coming with us,” they said.
“It was as if I assassinated the president,” he said of the chains — wrists, ankles, waist.
Assim Alkhawaja is fifty-three years old. He has a doctorate from the University of San Francisco. He owns Sands Coffee Roasters in Oceanside, California — a coffee cart grown into a brick-and-mortar shop, beans from Brazil and Colombia. On its walls hang a piece of tatreez his mother made for him by hand, a traditional Palestinian embroidery whose center reads, in Arabic: “May Allah protect you.” He has a pending asylum case. He has no criminal convictions. He is the kind of immigrant any country with a functioning merit system would be trying to keep.
The base invites the public through that gate every day. In partnership with ICE, it had made the gate a trap.
Eight days in the Otay Mesa detention center. They took his shoelaces, his hat, his belt, his jacket, his phone, his Costco card. A navy-blue uniform stamped DETAINEE across the back in block letters. A room with eight other men who did not know when they would be released or whether a bus would carry them somewhere worse. No restroom at night, he said. Water that smelled and tasted wrong. Phone calls, snacks, soap — everything cost money. The television played the channel that tells its audience the men in the room are invaders. The company that runs the center says the water is the same water the whole city uses. The man who drank it says it tasted wrong. Their answers do not touch the record that matters: the permit, the case, the clean sheet.
Then the ankle monitor. The kind issued to high-risk parolees, to registered sex offenders. Strapped to his left leg when he came out. He reports almost weekly, at the courthouse or to a home visit, to prove he has not run. Where do you live? Do you work? And now, from the agency that took his shoelaces: how are you feeling?
Camp Pendleton launched a “security initiative” with ICE in 2025 to support “identity verification and access screening operations” — language that means the gate guards at the Marine base are now functioning as a sorting mechanism for immigration enforcement. Between January 2025 and April of this year, ICE has removed more than sixteen thousand people from the San Diego region alone. The louder raids that swept Los Angeles a year ago have died down. The San Diego drumbeat has been quieter and constant: courthouse, Home Depot, military base, schools. His attorney, Sydney Johnson, put it plainly: “The tactics change, but the goal is the same — to make it harder for people to want to fight their case here, and to make them just give up.”
The “give up” part is built in. Alkhawaja was offered three thousand dollars to leave the country immediately after his arrest. He refused. The state calls that payment a bonus. A bonus is a reward for good work. This is payment for a man’s absence, a purchase made in the open of his disappearance.
When the government needed a name for Assim Alkhawaja, it invented one. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson called him “a criminal illegal alien from Saudi Arabia.” The criminality: an arrest in 2002, a night out in San Diego, a conversation with a woman who turned out to be an undercover officer, release at the station, no charge, and no conviction ever. An arrest that produced no charge, his lawyer says plainly, does not bar asylum. The label was not found. It was manufactured — pulled up from twenty-three years ago to make the chains look reasonable. They did not find a crime and then act. They acted, and then went digging for a crime to justify what they had already done. Isaiah named this: woe to those who call good evil and evil good, who put darkness for light.
He thought it would matter that he was a good immigrant. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “That I would be considered a good immigrant.” Here is the sorrow at the bottom of it: the category was never real. The country has always had a use for the immigrant and a fear of the immigrant, both at once, and the policy careens between them. The work permit was the use. The chains were the fear. Both came down from the same desk.
What he fled, his lawyers have asked the press not to repeat, and it will not be repeated here. A man’s safety outranks our telling. What the record shows is enough: he is Palestinian, born and raised in Saudi Arabia; he came through the door the country held open; and the country closed the door on his foot.
I want to say plainly what I believe: this is not a malfunction. The base guard scanned a valid work permit and called ICE anyway. The ankle monitor — a device reserved for dangerous offenders — went on the ankle of a man who was dropping passengers at a military gate. The three thousand dollars offered to leave immediately tells you what the operation actually wants: not adjudication, but surrender. The system is engineered to make the right to apply for asylum feel indistinguishable from the punishment for having applied. The older pattern of “deport felons, not families” has given way to something more honest and more brutal: deport everyone who asks, and make the asking cost as much as possible.
I grew up in El Paso in the years of the pre-dawn raids. Desks emptied, the school day continued, and the silence of that continuation is a thing I have never been able to unhear. That silence is how this is possible. We who watched it and said nothing helped build the climate in which the label could stick; both parties tended the machine, and no administration has ever dismantled it. This year it runs at record pace, and it reaches as readily for the man who has done everything right — the man awaiting his green card in Arkansas was picked up by police and handed over all the same.
The Catholic Church in this country has been ambivalent about immigrants for as long as there have been Catholic immigrants. Our communities have included both the people who fled persecution and the people who wanted the newcomers to go home. My own parish has hosted undocumented families and has also looked away when the knock came at the door. I have sat at tables where the conversation about “those people” was no different from any other room in any country where the settled resent the unsettled. We built this. We are part of it. The administration’s cruelty is operating on a climate our own communities helped to construct. The same compassion I owe the man in the chains, I owe the man who fastens them. He is a person too. He is doing evil. Compassion for the doer does not rename the deed.
The text the country claims is not obscure. The Torah says the word ger — stranger, resident alien — more than thirty times. “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21). “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34). The mechanism of the commandment is memory: every people that built a nation has an Egypt somewhere in its past — a port, a crossing, a name that used to be foreign. Jesus takes it further: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me” (Matthew 25:43). We have traded the memory for a database and the welcome for a watch strapped to the ankle.
In 2013, Pope Francis flew to Lampedusa, the small Italian island where migrants had been drowning in the Mediterranean for years, and named the condition plainly: “the globalization of indifference.” “We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion,” he said. “The globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!” That was twelve years ago. The phrase has not gone out of date. It is the diagnosis of the system Alkhawaja is inside.
On March 23, 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero stood in the cathedral in San Salvador and spoke not about the soldiers of the regime but to them: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I command you: stop the repression.” He was killed the next day. In that homily he told the soldiers that no man is obliged to obey an immoral order.
I say the same to the agent who came to the gate and to the official who offered the cash: you are not required to do this. The conscience is the last free country. It can refuse. The door of return is open. The guard at Camp Pendleton’s gate can call ICE tomorrow, or he can stop. The spokesperson who digs up a twenty-three-year-old arrest to justify shackling an asylum seeker can do that tomorrow, or he can stop. The system requires many hands. Many of those hands are deciding right now.
A humane immigration policy is not a mystery, and it is not a utopian dream. It is a written document, signed by the Mexican bishops and the U.S. bishops together in 2003, called Strangers No Longer. It says five things: people have the right to opportunities in their homeland; they have the right to migrate to support their families when they cannot; sovereign nations have the right to control their borders; refugees and asylum seekers should be afforded protection; and the human rights and human dignity of undocumented migrants should be respected. Five principles. Every administration honors some and violates others. The arithmetic is not partisan. It is moral. The right to secure a border is real. It never required the manufacture of criminals.
What is being done to Assim Alkhawaja is not a policy disagreement. It is cruelty, and it is deliberate. A valid work permit means nothing. An open asylum case means nothing. A doctorate, a business, customers, a mother’s embroidery on the wall — nothing. The category outranks the man, and the state straps the category to his leg and waits for him to break.
In June, after a check-in, he drove to the shipping dock and loaded sacks of coffee beans into his truck, and he was smiling. “We switch,” he said. “We have to survive.” He has not seen his mother in two years. He tells her he will come after the summer. His hearing is in October. He goes to his check-ins the way a soldier goes to a battlefield. “It is as if I’m going to a battlefield,” he said.
Mr. Alkhawaja, you are not a defeated man, and you are not a caricature. You are the man who gave two men a ride. The mothers who drove to your shop with their children, the customers who tell you this is not right — that is the other America. You want here to be home. It can still be. The tatreez on your wall says, “May Allah protect you.” You are a son. You are a business owner. You are a customer of Costco. You are a man whose mother made him an embroidery stitched with a blessing. You are, in the language of every tradition I have read, the face of the one who is asking to be welcomed. What we do next is what we are.
And to the officials who fasten the chains: the door is open. You can stop. No man is bound to carry out an order against the law of God, and no country forfeits its soul in one generation. The stranger is the test. We have not yet failed it.