A defining moment in Archbishop Oscar Romero’s life was his call to El Salvador’s military to put down their arms and stop abusing their authority, to stop oppressing and killing the people. His powerful “call to conscience” underscored the moral and religious limits for police agents of the state, and that one’s conscience requires acting accordingly.
Romero’s courage moved millions of people, who proclaimed him a saint after his assassination. The time has come for America’s clergy to rise to that level of courage and issue a “call to conscience” to ICE agents in their congregations that they consider resigning their jobs because of ICE’s ongoing human rights abuses.
No one disputes the need for a fair immigration system that meets U.S. constitutional standards and international human rights principles and, for Christians, is consistent with the Gospel. Nor can one dispute that ICE operations abuse, and are repugnant to, these norms, for which ICE makes no apologies.
Roving patrols of ICE agents with masked faces have seized thousands of people, young and old, across the country, at home, work, driving, and on sidewalks, and shoved them into unmarked SUVs. They have upended nursing home and home care staff, disrupted crop harvesting, and arrest people near schools and churches. Parents are suddenly ripped from their children, and children yanked from foster homes. Asylum-seekers are imprisoned when they show up for hearings—no due process, just random deportation to countries foreign to them.
Countless videos attest to ICE’s inhumane conduct. The Guardian published a video of ICE using a stun gun on a worker and slamming him to the ground. When his companion, a citizen, says, “Don’t resist” to diffuse the situation, they arrest him for interfering with his friend’s arrest. The agents are laughing. One says, “They’re starting to resist more now,” to which another replies: “We’re going to end up shooting some of them.” The callousness of that flippant remark, unrebuked by ICE, is telling and frightening; it reflects ICE’s culture.
Almost 57,000 people are incarcerated in ICE detention centers nationwide. Human rights reports and the media paint a brutal picture of cruelty. “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades, which officials inaugurated with disgusting mirth, is particularly inhumane. Neither it nor other centers meet the standards for U.S. jails and prisons: unsanitary conditions, denial of access to lawyers, family, and clergy; overcrowding; scarce medical attention. Deaths have occurred.
ICE agents cannot justify their actions as “just following orders.” The Nuremberg trials of Nazis rejected that rationalization. Under international law, “just following orders” never justifies being part of the machinery of human rights abuse; nor is it ever consistent with the Gospel of Jesus.
Some Catholic bishops are speaking out, Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville for one. The presiding U.S. Episcopal bishop, Sean Rowe, has declared, “Once the church of presidents, the Episcopal Church must now be an engine of resistance.” Texas Episcopal Bishop Andy Doyle as pointed in the direction of the Confessing Church, which formed in 1934 Germany to oppose the regime’s human rights violations when other church leaders were subservient to Hitler’s anti-Jewish nationalist agenda.
Verbal remonstrations by bishops are good but inadequate. Some bishops have attended detention hearings in solidarity with immigrants; but, of the country’s 500 Catholic and Episcopal bishops, that number is infinitesimal.
People like the Dorothea Project moms are imploring the bishops to do more. They need to take the Archbishop Romero step and issue a “call to conscience,” suggesting to ICE employees that the time has come for them to resign their positions and find other employment. The more resignations of conscience, the quicker humane immigration reform.
Bishops must bring the moral issue to the fore. Cautiousness in this situation is perilous and harmful. They must pose the tough question of ICE agents who profess Christianity: how do you square this maltreatment of people’s human rights and their dignity with your conscience and the Gospel? How can you work for a police agency that so badly and cruelly treats people who have lived good and honest lives after escaping persecution, terror, or sheer economic necessity? How can you again endanger them and return them to where they had to flee?
As Jesus put it, no person can serve two masters.
Editor's Note: The above guerst column was penned by James C. Harrington, a human rights lawyer, retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project, and an Episcopal priest in Austin, Texas. The column appears in the Rio Grande Guardian with the permission of the author.
