The Department of Homeland Security deported Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo to Honduras on Monday. She is at least the seventh spouse or parent of an active-duty U.S. service member removed under this administration’s immigration policies — the visible top of a documented iceberg of more than fifty cases in which military families have been pulled into federal immigration custody since protections for them were rolled back.
The tradition I was raised in has a name for what a family is supposed to be. It is a domestic church, a sanctuary. The Hebrew scriptures name the obligation thirty times — love the stranger, because you were strangers in Egypt runs more often than any other commandment. Jesus, in the last-judgment scene of Matthew’s gospel, makes the test of nations the welcome given to the stranger in the doorway: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” What the Department of Homeland Security did to this sergeant’s household on Monday does not pass through that door. It is the opposite of the tradition the same politicians invoke when they call soldiers to duty.
A U.S. Army sergeant at Fort Bliss is now a single parent to a first grader — not by choice, not by divorce, but because the administration he serves under took his wife.
Army Sgt. Hedar Leonel Turcios Juarez has been the only parent in his daughter’s house since July 11, when his wife was detained outside a Walmart near the Texas base where he is stationed. The girl is six. She is in the first grade. Her father drives her to school each morning in the hours when he used to be in military training. He has postponed a planned reassignment to another base because there is no one else to care for his child. This is what the country the sergeant defends has done to his household in return.
The scope here is not anecdotal. Fifty documented cases is a pattern, and patterns have architects. The sergeant at Fort Bliss is one more name written into a category that should not exist in a country that asks its soldiers to deploy on its behalf.
A soldier agrees to be moved, deployed, sent away from home for months or years at a time. The implicit bargain is that the country will not punish the family for being there. The bishops who have spoken against family separation in general have said too little about military-family separation specifically, and the silence has been heard in the pews; Catholic voters — including in this writer’s own family — have given politicians broad margins to set enforcement priorities without asking whose households those priorities would break, and every administration, Democratic and Republican, has wielded immigration law against people the tradition names to be protected. The current administration is the most aggressive. It is not the only one that has done harm. That bargain has been broken — repeatedly, deliberately, and on the specific mornings Sgt. Turcios Juarez is supposed to be in training rather than walking his daughter through a school door.
Some Christian-right voices have welcomed these removals as fidelity to the law of the land, even while invoking the law of the Lord when they speak of the soldier at the altar. They hold up the immigrant as trespasser and the soldier as servant of the republic, and they do not notice the seam they have cut down the middle. Archbishop Romero said it to the Salvadoran soldiers on the eve of his murder: “No soldier is obliged to obey an order that violates the law of God.” The orders that took the sergeant’s wife from his kitchen were legal. They were cruel. The Bible the same voices cite to bless the uniform commands what it commands about the stranger in the door. You cannot pick one and discard the other and call yourself faithful.
A first grader does not understand removal priorities. She understands that her mother is in Honduras and that her father is the only one buckling her backpack. Her body is not a rhetorical device. She is a child, made in an image the country has refused to look at, and her life has been ordered by a docket number signed by people she will never meet. The human ledger will not be measured in removals. It will be measured in the face of a six-year-old at the school door, and in the empty chair at her table.
The country this sergeant serves has a tradition older than its immigration laws. The Hebrew prophets knew what to do with a household broken by the state; the U.S. bishops, in Strangers No Longer with the Mexican bishops in 2003, knew it too. The first thing they did was name it. The second was open the door back up. That door is open for the sergeant’s wife, for the next one, and for the administration too, the moment it decides a sergeant’s wife and child are worth more than a deportation count.