Individuals attend a rally at Pasadena Auto Wash on August 28, 2025 the place six staff have been detained in an immigration raid final weekend.
(Sarah Reingewirtz / Los Angeles Each day Information through Getty Photographs)
Almost two weeks in the past, Donald Trump, that most unspiritual and unreflective of men, started musing about how he hoped he would get into heaven however wasn’t certain that he would. I hate to say it, however he’s in all probability proper to be fearful.
Within the 10 days following Trump’s introspective commentary, his immigration insurance policies have gone from totally terrible to past monstrous, culminating with this vacation weekend’s transfer to deport roughly 600, mainly Indigenous, unaccompanied children back to Guatemala—a rustic from which that they had fled violence, trafficking, household destruction, demise squads, and myriad different causes that lead a younger little one to cross a border with out their dad and mom.
Present Concern
Their attorneys, a free community coordinated by the Acacia Center for Justice, which focuses on immigrants’ rights regulation, report that the youngsters, some as younger as 7, one a 14-year-old woman with a 3-week-old US-citizen child, have been woke up in the course of the night time at detention facilities in Arizona and in Texas and informed to organize to depart their locations of detention—even whereas a choose, roused away from bed as soon as the legal professionals heard what was taking place, had ordered that they not be deported within the subsequent couple of weeks.
Attorneys who rushed to services in Tucson, Arizona and in San Antonio, Harlingen, and El Paso in Texas, reported youngsters having panic assaults and sobbing as they have been woken up and ordered by contract staff with MVM, an Ashburn, Virginia-based firm which has a virtually $1 billion contract with ICE that features facilitating airplane repatriations of deportees, to pack their meager belongings and get onto plane. Even after attorneys, who had been given solely a half hour warning that MVM was about to provoke the deportations, knowledgeable the contractors that there was a court docket order blocking the flights, the youngsters continued to be crammed onto three planes. In Harlingen, a kind of planes started taxiing down the runway earlier than, on the final second, its pilot lastly determined to obey the court docket order and returned to the airport parking space.
Unaccompanied Guatemalan youngsters, in addition to these from different international locations, are dotted across the nation in tons of of services the administration euphemistically calls shelters however that are actually detention hubs for kids. A lot of them have been beforehand dwelling in the neighborhood and attending faculties; some had been positioned with foster dad and mom by the Workplace of Refugee Resettlement. Because of Trump and Stephen Miller’s warfare on immigrants, they’ve been rounded up and lots of have spent months in detention.
Yesterday, the administration invoked a provision of the US code, 6 USC 279B1H, which permits for the Workplace of Refugee Resettlement to offer for the worldwide reunification of youngsters with their dad and mom in applicable circumstances, to attempt to rush by way of a mass deportation of youngsters who by any rational measure are at imminent danger of hurt if returned to Guatemala. These clearly are not applicable circumstances, however workforce Trump merely doesn’t care. The administration claims this was at the instigation of the Guatemalan government, however sources within the Guatemalan authorities have informed immigration attorneys engaged on these circumstances that the impetus has come from the US facet.
These are usually not the hardened criminals whom the administration says they’re rounding up. They’re youngsters, scared and much from dwelling, and they’re being deemed enemies by probably the most highly effective individuals on earth.
Now, I’m not a spiritual scholar, however I’m interested by how, if perchance Trump have been to keel over and die this week, St. Peter would possibly cope with the MAGAman’s efforts to storm the Pearly Gates. I believe he would possibly begin by referencing a number of Biblical passages—perhaps that complete factor concerning the Good Samaritan and serving to strangers-in-need or perhaps the tales about Jesus washing the ft of the poor and the sick or perhaps the message concerning the meek inheriting the earth.
After which, on the idea there’s fairly good quality-control methods in place to forestall absolute turds from securing an everlasting spot in Heaven, I hope he would rain down incredulous commentary on the madness of the Trump ghost considering it even remotely possible that these Pearly Gates may ever open for him.
He wouldn’t have to return into all of Trump’s appalling behaviors over the many years. All he must do is take a look at this one week.
Within the months earlier than World Battle II broke out, a British stockbroker named Nicholas Winton helped break down bureaucratic obstacles within the United Kingdon and secured passage for tons of of Jewish youngsters to depart what remained of the dismembered Czechoslovakia and head to England. 600 and sixty-nine of them got here on the Kindertransport with out their dad and mom, weak younger girls and boys whose moms and dads, in desperation, had agreed to half with them in order at the very least to save lots of their youngsters’s lives, even when they couldn’t save their very own, from the inferno they knew was descending upon them.
Winton is, rightly, thought-about one of many quiet heroes of the twentieth century, a larger-than-life man who did an immense quantity of fine—and did so with out tooting his personal horn. (Solely in outdated age did he discuss what he had finished.)
Trump, against this, is utilizing all of his huge energy and communications platform to demonize the weakest and poorest amongst us, and he’s now unleashing the deportation machine towards unaccompanied youngsters, hoping to take away them in the course of the night time on a vacation weekend when no person is paying consideration, and searching for to take action even within the face of court docket orders. It’s one of many ugliest acts but of an administration wedded to cruelty and terror.
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“That is unprecedented,” mentioned Shaina Aber, the manager director of the Acacia Middle for Justice. “All of us want to carry the federal government accountable for following the regulation. The court docket order prohibits their elimination for the subsequent 14 days. Each considered one of them ought to be capable to go earlier than an immigration choose.” And each outraged reader of this text ought to, I’d add, use these 14 days to telephone their Congressional representatives demanding they step as much as the plate to defend the Guatemalan youngsters from Trump’s grotesque reverse Kindertransport.
Take into account it for the nice of Trump’s soul. In spite of everything, this sadistic, vengeful habits is a big no-no, I’d assume, for anybody genuinely hoping to get in St. Peter’s good graces. St. Peter’s denunciation of Trump wouldn’t should cease there, nevertheless. This similar week, ICE brokers but once more brutalized distributors and day laborers within the Westlake district of Los Angeles. Video from the scene exhibits black vans rushing into the realm at 7 AM, skidding to a cease and disgorging masked, khaki-clad brokers who proceeded to throw tear-gas canisters towards their prey after which chase down particular person migrants as they ran from “La Migra.” One man, witnesses say, was overwhelmed by 5 officers. Inside minutes of the raid starting, eight women and men, together with two with documentation, had been dragged off into the unmarked vans, which then sped away once more with their quarries inside.
Siccing violent secret police onto unarmed migrants is, I believe most any non secular scholar would agree, one other no-no for Heaven’s candidates.
So, too, is holding a younger nurse-in-training, who got here to the USA as a baby, for six months in a detention website tons of of miles from her dwelling, refusing to launch her again into the group regardless of documentation that she is affected by a number of diseases, and preserving her from the college she has been admitted into. This week, Allison Bustillo-Chinchilla, whom I wrote about a couple weeks ago, couldn’t take any extra detention and agreed to self-deport again to Honduras—a rustic she hasn’t seen since she was 8 years outdated. Her lawyer, Helen Parsonage, wrote that, “Six months in detention had finished its job in carrying down this courageous younger girl to the purpose the place she would somewhat return to a rustic she doesn’t keep in mind than endure extra time unjustly locked up. America loses a worthwhile and cherished group member who was on her strategy to changing into a nurse. We desperately want extra Allisons in each sense.”
Lastly, final week, two firefighters busy fighting a huge wildfire in Washington were plucked out by Border Patrol agents despatched particularly to root out undocumented staff on the hearth traces. Now, I could also be misinterpreting the entire Heaven factor, however absolutely one doesn’t bolster one’s case by arresting immigrants whereas they’re risking their lives saving different individuals’s properties and lives.
Immigrant-rights protesters across the nation know simply how rancid these actions are—that’s why, for instance, resort workers round Los Angeles and Orange County will spend their lunch hours right this moment, Labor Day, demonstrating exterior their locations of labor, holding up indicators denouncing the raids and deportations. “We wish an America that not solely fights for staff however fights for the immigrant material of this nation. This nation was constructed by immigrants,” mentioned Lorena Lopez, the director of Unite Right here Native 11, which represents many of those staff. But, Trump and his enablers, removed from recognizing the worth that immigrants deliver to American society, are intent on ratcheting up their campaign towards the nation’s tens of millions of immigrants.
Taken as a complete, simply based mostly on the actions of this one week, I’d say Trump is just not a viable Heaven candidate. “He ought to seek the advice of the clergymen working with individuals in Harlingen about that,” Aber mentioned of Trump’s quest to get into Heaven. “There are clergymen who’ve been witnessing day in and day trip ICE grabbing individuals at their hearings.”So, St. Peter, I hope you don’t discover it presumptuous of me to supply recommendation. Whether or not it’s this week or subsequent, and even 20 years from now, that Trump comes-a-knockin’ at your gates, do please provide him the identical welcome that he supplied these panicked, sobbing Guatemalan youngsters, that Honduran nurse, these day laborers in Los Angeles, these firefighters in Washington. In different phrases, look the shade of this vile man up and down, inform your law-enforcement angels to not go too light on him, after which request that he slither off to Hell the place he so clearly belongs.
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