Federal prosecutors jailed Jesús Herrera-Salazar twice for obeying their own order.
He is a Mexican national. In 2020 he was indicted on the charge of being “found in” the United States after a prior removal. He pleaded guilty and served his sentence. Then — while on supervised release, a condition the federal government itself imposed, requiring him to remain in this country — he was arrested in Oklahoma, charged with the same crime, convicted of illegal reentry again, and sent to prison for a second term. In 2024 he was deported. He is gone.
That is the whole story, and it should stop us. A man was charged for being here. Then the government told him to stay here. Then it charged him again for being here. Whatever else that is, it is not justice. It is a machine with a man inside it.
His name is Jesús Herrera-Salazar. Say it, because the record gives him almost nothing else: a docket number, a country of origin, two convictions. He is a person, and that is the one fact his prosecution treats as irrelevant. Somewhere there is a family the case file never mentions — someone fed him when he was a child, someone taught him to answer to that name — and the country that made two crimes out of one continuous life returned him like a used part.
The charge that did this to him is not new, and that is the part we should not be allowed to walk away from. The “found-in” provision sits in the same statute that punishes illegal reentry, and administrations of both parties have driven it for decades. The 1996 laws that multiplied deportation grounds and cut back judicial review were signed by a Democrat. The fast-track reentry prosecutions that flooded the border courts were built under a Republican. A Democratic administration later oversaw record removals while calling the system broken and leaving it in place. Christian-right coalitions campaigned for the harsher penalties; centrist Democrats competed to prove they could enforce harder than the other side. We who claim the gospel let both coalitions build this and then went back to our pews and called it the rule of law. The 10th Circuit did not invent the theory that two convictions for one man’s one continuous presence are two different crimes. It inherited it from decades of bipartisan appetite for exactly this.
The Law itself does not leave the question to the prosecutor’s discretion. “You shall not oppress the alien,” says Leviticus, and then, again and again, for thirty times or more, more often than any other commandment: “You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” And the rabbi the prophets lead to said it once more, at the end, in the only place where it becomes a verdict: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Then the other half, which nobody quotes when the charging memo is being drafted: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.”
Pope Francis named the condition this produces the day he reached Lampedusa. “In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference,” he said. “We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!” That is what a second “found-in” indictment is. One man’s suffering becomes nobody’s business — an administrative matter, a checkbox, a fresh charge waiting on a calendar for a man the government has already decided to remove.
Two Supreme Court justices put their names on the same page over this one: Sonia Sotomayor, appointed by Barack Obama, and Neil Gorsuch, appointed by Donald Trump. They agree on very little. They agreed that what was done to Herrera-Salazar was, in their own words, a “constitutional absurdity.” By the appeals court’s reasoning, Sotomayor wrote, the government could have charged him with a new crime for every day he spent in federal prison serving the first sentence — every morning of supervised release a fresh indictment. He had already been deported, so the Court declined to take his case. The two justices wrote anyway, and told the lower courts to “avoid the constitutional absurdity that occurred here and give the Double Jeopardy Clause its full weight and meaning.”
He is not the only one the courts have had to chase after. Judges have ordered deportees brought back after the executive branch shipped them out in the middle of their own cases — a Nicaraguan woman among them — a UN panel has found a detention arbitrary and called for release, and the same Court that now objects to serial charging allowed the administration to turn asylum seekers back at the border. The pattern is not complicated. A person caught between two systems that do not speak to each other, and a Constitution treated as the last thing to consider rather than the first.
The bishops of the United States and of Mexico wrote the answer down in 2003 and it has not changed: people have the right to migrate to support themselves and their families, and the human dignity of undocumented migrants must be respected. Strangers No Longer does not ask whether a man is convenient. It asks whether he is a person. A country that honored its own teaching would charge a man once and mean it, would treat supervised release as the government’s promise rather than its second trap, and would stop slicing one continuous life into an endless series of fresh crimes.
To the prosecutor who signed the second indictment: you charged a man with the crime of remaining where the government ordered him to remain. You know the statute. You know what it does. And you can stop. I do not write this to damn you. I write it because the Church has a name for what happens when the law is turned against the person it exists to serve — pecado social, social sin — and because Óscar Romero, from the altar of his cathedral, did not offer a theory. He offered an order: I beg you, I beseech you, I order you — stop the repression.
Romero preached those words on March 23, 1980, and was shot dead the following evening. He knew what it costs to tell a machine to stop. Herrera-Salazar will never read this column; he is gone, and the system that made two crimes out of one man has already filed his name away. But the next man charged twice for the same continuous presence now walks into a courtroom with two Supreme Court justices on the record calling it absurd, and the lower courts that carry the federal immigration docket have it in writing.
There is a pew somewhere with a name missing from it. The question this country keeps answering wrongly is whether the man who cannot fill it is a person or a violation. The Law says love the stranger. The Gospel says the stranger is Christ. Neither one says: charge him again on Tuesday.