“States have the right and the duty to protect their borders.” These words came not from President Trump, or any other American politician, but from Pope Leo XIV on Oct. 23. That recognition provides the rationale for nations to protect the basic rights and way of life of their citizens—and also recognizes the enormous stresses on social and physical infrastructure that open borders can produce. But the assertion of that standard was followed by an appeal to human conscience that every American needs to hear. This right of every nation to secure its borders, Pope Leo said, “should be balanced by the moral obligation to provide refuge.”

The pope said that many nations are ignoring this moral obligation: “Ever more inhuman measures are being adopted—even celebrated politically—that treat these ‘undesirables’ as if they were garbage and not human beings.”

It was a clear reference to the migration policies of the developed nations of the world, including the United States, a nation that still displays on its most revered monument words that our ancestors—refugees—saw as a balm and a promise: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The pope’s words came during yet another day of violence and confrontation on the streets of the United States, where the masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency continue a crusade of intimidation, terrorizing residents in cities across the country. On Oct. 8, millions of Americans saw the image of an ICE agent firing a pepper-spray projectile directly into the face of a Christian pastor who was advocating for those bearing the brunt of ICE actions in Chicago, a city recently singled out by Mr. Trump as “a hellhole” in need of federal intervention. And on Oct. 27, ICE agents dragged a 67-year-old Chicago resident—a U.S. citizen—from his car, breaking six of his ribs and causing internal bleeding. The incident occurred during an ICE raid on a children’s Halloween parade.

Those recorded acts of violence have been accompanied over the past few months by many more unseen and completely unnecessary violations of human dignity and American law by agents of ICE and other government agencies against both new migrants and longtime American citizens.

The words of Pope Leo—and the fundamental promise of America inscribed at the feet of the Statue of Liberty—are also under attack in that violence. So, too, are two traditions. First is the centuries-old compact in the United States that people deserve due process, the right to protest and the protection of the rule of law. The second is the internationally recognized right stated in the United Nations Global Compact on Migration (from which the United States withdrew during the first Trump administration) that migrants “are entitled to the same universal human rights and fundamental freedoms, which must be respected, protected and fulfilled at all times.”

They are not “garbage”; they are not vermin to be eradicated; they are not the enemy. They are here in the United States seeking the same rights of  “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” with which we are all endowed by our creator.

Where did we go wrong?

When did the notion that we should protect our borders and regulate immigration devolve into a determination to unleash anonymous masked agents pulling people from cars, and to publicly celebrate the creation of true hellholes like the Alligator Alcatraz detention facility?

The Trump administration would have us believe that migrants are here to steal American jobs, to commit crime, to pollute our unique way of life. These are in some cases the same tropes used by Nazi criminals whom Americans died to overthrow in World War II. They are also an echo of the ugliest instincts of human nature. And they are, at their core, sentiments that are un-American, ones that betray our heritage as they also betray the words of the Gospel.

Americans now hear and see stories on a daily basis about people detained by ICE, both residents and visitors to the United States, who are held without a charge for weeks, and stories of those who have sought to obey American jurisprudence being seized outside the very courtrooms they were summoned to in observance of the law.

The positive contributions of immigrants to the United States are being deliberately denigrated, even as citizens reap the bounty of their work in industries where Americans simply will not toil under current conditions: agriculture, manual labor and in the many other industries that contribute to our national economic output and the necessities of daily life. No one, for example, has offered an alternative to the current economic system that orders our nation’s farm life, from the breadbaskets of California to the processing plants of the Midwest. Far from compensating our agricultural workers (42 percent of whom are undocumented) with a living wage and a chance at upward mobility, our politicians are terrorizing them, telling them they are not welcome while pretending the sweat of their brows is not what keeps our economy and society robust.

People of faith across the country have stood up for these least in the past few months, often with admirable tenacity and courage, but we need to do more. The Gospel mandates it, to say nothing of history and economic reality.

On a practical level, we have also created a situation in many cities where the supposed forces of law and order are creating chaos, a classic example of setting fires to claim credit for putting them out. The public scenes provoked by ICE agents have been used in several cases by Mr. Trump to justify the deployment of National Guard troops to cities to restore order—actions that have been opposed in almost every case by the governors and mayors tasked with local governance.

Many who seek to limit immigration to the United States argue that social cohesion is impossible when any state absorbs too many newcomers at once. The response of terrorizing communities with inhumane immigration enforcement, however, demonstrates the moral blindness of this claim. It is not undocumented immigrants who threaten social cohesion in our cities, but rather the tactic of forcing them to choose between self-deportation or living in fear of arrest and detention.

Immigrants are woven into American life as our neighbors, our fellow worshipers, our friends and family. As the past months have amply demonstrated, it is not possible to target immigrants en masse without also targeting the communities of which they are an integral part. In that sense, the immoral and violent tactics presently being used for immigration enforcement are a true reflection of the goals at which they aim. They are also a compelling argument for why such goals are a betrayal of not only American values but also of the Gospel.

This article appears in December 2025.