The Trump administration is detaining children indefinitely and arresting the relatives who come to claim them.

Around 1,900 unaccompanied children were under federal control at the end of August. They had spent an average of 183 days in shelters or long-term foster care. At least 65 of them, kids with cases still moving through immigration court, had been held for over a year. Some were babies. Some were teenagers.

The system works like this. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency whose statutory job is the welfare of these children, shares information about sponsors with immigration enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security — the parent agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. The administration has weakened privacy protections for undocumented sponsors and made that information shareable. So the act of coming forward to claim your child has become, for many families, the act of inviting your own arrest. Parents have been detained at the very appointments designed to bring their children home. The government undid the sponsor’s privacy protection. It didn’t have to. It chose to.

Then it cut the children’s lawyers and accelerated their immigration hearings. The administration defunded these kids’ existing attorneys last month — ending the federally funded representation that had been defending unaccompanied children in their immigration proceedings — and has scheduled accelerated immigration hearings where government lawyers are arguing for their abrupt removal from the US, before they can receive legal protections from other agencies. Now lawyers are racing to reach those same children before government attorneys can remove them from the country.

To reunite children with family members the government has already cleared, more than fifty legal organizations have joined the Children’s Due Process Project — the National Center for Youth Law, the Acacia Center for Justice, The Door, the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. They are filing habeas corpus petitions, one child at a time, in federal court. Habeas corpus is the oldest protection in the English-speaking legal tradition against exactly this kind of thing: a person held without a valid reason may ask a court to demand the reason or set them free. That lawyers must use this emergency tool to reunite children with vetted relatives tells us what the government has become.

Immigration courts belong to the Department of Justice. Federal district courts belong to the independent judiciary. In those district courts, judges are asking the obvious question: what are you doing — this child should be with their family. The lawyers are winning some of these.

A child in an ORR facility cannot simply walk out. The child eats, sleeps, studies, and plays inside the same small world. In some shelters, the walls of the sleeping rooms do not reach the ceiling. Noise fills the building. Trusted adults answer to the agency that controls the child’s future. A clinical professor at Stanford calls the conditions the setup for lasting post-traumatic stress. Two states — Texas and Florida — house children in facilities that aren’t even licensed. One former shelter in Brownsville, Texas, was a repurposed Walmart Supercenter. This is detention, whatever name the government places on the door.

I call this cruelty dressed as child protection.

The administration says it is being careful. It says its standards resemble foster care. It says criminal smuggling organizations play a role in every case involving an unaccompanied child. That true fact does not answer the moral question. Children may travel through dangerous networks because danger already surrounds them. The existence of smugglers does not turn every relative into a threat. It does not make indefinite custody humane. It does not give the government permission to convert a child’s family into an obstacle.

Listen to what is being done and what is being said. The carefulness language is the language of whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside and inside are full of dead men’s bones. The government is not careless. The government is doing this carefully, with paperwork, with statutory citations, with the muted language of bureaucratic restraint. And it is detaining children indefinitely, and it is arresting the relatives who come to claim them, and it is accelerating their removal hearings while defunding their lawyers, and it is engineering the separation of families that will then be defended as the natural consequence of the children’s legal status. The carefulness is real. The cruelty is the carefulness.

This is what the priest and the Levite looked like, walking past the wounded man on the road. Not waving clubs. Speaking carefully. Concerned. Stating the reasons they could not stop. The officials reading these briefings know the children. They have been briefed on the conditions. They have decided that the cost of releasing them to their own families is one they are willing to pay in someone else’s children.

You know what is in the Torah. The commandment to welcome the stranger appears more than thirty times by the rabbis’ count. You shall not oppress a resident alien. You know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. The stranger is named, again and again, because the memory of being the stranger is the moral mechanism that keeps a society from becoming the kind of place that does to children what we are doing. Jesus said the same thing differently: I was a stranger and you did not welcome me. The command is not sentimental. It is a test of memory. A people that remembers its own vulnerability must not turn another person’s vulnerability into an administrative advantage.

The children in the Brownsville Walmart, the children in the Florida unlicensed facility, the children sleeping in cubicles where the walls do not reach the ceiling — they are strangers. That is the operative fact. They are the people the gospel names. The system’s answer to them is: more careful. The gospel’s answer to them is: I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.

I want to say what I have to say about my own side, because I will not write a column that pretends my communities have not been part of this. Catholic Charities — in Miami, in other dioceses — has run shelters on federal contracts inside this apparatus for years. The Miami contract alone was eleven million dollars before the administration declined to renew it this spring. The arrangement has been defended as the lesser evil — better that Catholic sisters staff the shelter than not. That defense is a real defense, and it is also the defense of every institution that has ever taken money to be the kind face on the policy. The people in the pews did not get to vote on it. The work has been done in our name. We who claim the gospel and live in this country have not yet made our practice worthy of our texts. And the work is older than this administration. Every administration for the past two decades has run a version of this machine. Some did it quietly. This one does it loudly, and has built new restrictions, undone privacy protections, defunded the children’s lawyers, moved to deport more than five hundred migrant children, and accelerated their removal hearings. The escalation is the indictment, but the machine predates the escalation. Mexican-American families I know in El Paso have been living with the early-morning raids since long before this president took office. The current scale is not the beginning of the cruelty. It is the cruelty showing its hand.

And you, officials who approve these policies, are not beyond the reach of that command. You are not machines. You are not only the office you hold or the signature you place on a form. You are people with the power to stop holding children apart from their families. You can restore privacy protections. You can fund counsel. You can place children with safe relatives while their cases proceed. You can stop treating a child’s legal uncertainty as a reason to prolong the child’s confinement. You can stop converting a parent’s love into their arrest.

A humane immigration policy protects the border without abandoning the person at the border. It provides counsel, prompt family reunification, meaningful hearings, safe reception, and a real chance to seek asylum. It refuses to make children carry the punishment for the circumstances of their arrival.

Óscar Romero once begged, ordered, and pleaded: cese la represión — let the repression cease. He spoke to people who still had a choice. So do you.

The door is open. Open it for the children first.