The whole neighborhood is a sheet of eight inch ice, and the internet is coated with an even harder shell that’s thicker and harder to crack. Everyone knows about what happened in Minnesota, about the gunning down a man who was down, using ten shots and then pretending it was in self defense.
Yesterday, and the day before, my kids and I spent several hours chopping through what Mother Nature dumped on our driveway. We live on a large lot, so we’ve got a third to go today. That the ice is hard enough to stand on, and hard to move, but cannot support us, seems symbolic of our nation’s situation.
But at some point each day, arms got tired, hair got frozen, and we went inside. At the keyboard, I wrote:
The alternative is there will be more stories like Renée Good, Like Alex Pretti.
Since then, I’ve learned of nine more names that didn’t make the local news, people who died because of ICE, either through omission or comission in 2026.
They are Keith Porter, Parady La, Herber Sanchaz Dominguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres and Geraldo Lunas Campos. They were either denied medical attention and medicine which lead to their deaths, or their deaths are under investigation but happened while under the supervision and control of ICE.
So more stories have already happened. We just didn’t know them.
Which begs the question, how much more do we not know. How many more names should be added to this list?
Here’s what we do know. The administration holds zero interest in holding those who use force excessively, responsible. Those acting view authority not as moral responsibility but as an absolute that brooks no questioning, no opposing, no disagreement. We also know the administration lies when it suits them, and smears even the dead to distract, discourage, and dismiss any objections or opposition.
As Martin Luther King Junior said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
When we ignore small injustices, it emboldens larger ones.
Ignoring due process in prior administrations, allows for future and present administrations to justify their ignoring. Every prior injustice or bending of the rules, winking at our bill of rights or a morally ethical application of them, allows for the next break, until there is nothing but breaks.
One poster commented that people would not have been shot if they’d acted like those who march in the annual March for life. I’ve been to those in the past. I do not think his supposition is correct. The president allows for such marches because they are political pacifiers. They provide fig leaf cover for the current administration, convincing many people that he is pro-life. He’s not. Pro-life should not be reduced to a politically expedient loyalty test, but an all embracing ethic that governs not merely how we vote, but how we see and respond to and accompany all we encounter. By their fruits we will know them.
These are the fruits: How this administration is treating the homeless, the immigrant, the person on the street, the person who is in prison, the person who is sick, the weak, the person crying out for justice, even the person following the rules, is not pro-life. How the administration speaks of its victims, of anyone it disagrees with, “Quiet Piggy,” “Are you a stupid person?” and essentially explaining that those who were killed were “domestic terrorists.” These are the fruits.
Being pro-life is treating each person, regardless of status, political affiliation, economic situation, education, physical ability, age, mental ability, and even past and present, as a person God created in His image, whom God loves. That person, yes, that person, is my neighbor.
It’s a radically hard high bar to live by, to see everyone as Christ does on the cross.
The Ice agent, is my neighbor.
The protestor who is drumming to keep everyone awake, is my neighbor.
The old man in his bathrobe being pulled out by masked agents, is my neighbor.
The masked agents pulling him out is my neighbor.
The person who shot, is my neighbor.
The person who laughed, is my neighbor.
The person who disagrees with me, is my neighbor.
The person who hates me because I disagree, is my neighbor.
The person who snarks because I wrote this, is still my neighbor.
There is no one who is not. They are all, like me, before Christ on the cross being given the opportunity even unto the last moment, to accept Christ’s offering from the cross of His salvivic friendship.
The liberal, the conservative, the non-affiliated, the antagonistic towards all faiths, the people of any faith, they are our neighbors, the republican, the democrat, the independent, these are our neighbors. We are a world of nothing but neighbors, even if we do not recognize it. We are all God’s children.
But I’m human. When I ask God, what about the families shredded? I know, their cries are heard by Heaven, but I cry with them, for all children who have been separated from their families because of ICE in the past year. (I could not find an accurate or verifiable number, though I found a range between 1,000 and 3,800. The round number element makes me uncertain). There have been 352,590 arrests, 68, 990 currently in detention, and 352,380 people deported since innauguration. (Data taken from Administration).
There isn’t someone we get to hate. There are people we get to oppose, but there isn’t someone we are given permission to hate.
So I stand and oppose. I stand with those who said, “Let us go.” because I must. Even the guilty deserve due process and dignity, and the haphazard round them up methodology employed by the newly expanded ICE consistently indicates a profound indifference to due process, human rights, and dignity. Even Noem can’t lie fast or clever enough to dispute it.
The people in prison are denied the right to counsel, to phone calls, to religious comfort and counseling, to due process, and those are just the rights we know being denied. The rights enshrined in the constitution are not exclusive to citizens.
I want those who allowed for this, who participated in this, who sanctioned this, who signed off on this, to face justice and that means trials. I want them to see the evidence, to understand what they did, and to live out their lives with that knowledge. So call your senator. Write them post cards. Make Washington know, we want better. We demand better.
Even those denying the rights? Even Noem? Yes, even them.
This keeps getting harder.
Those who support what has happened, who defend it, they need to be called out and resisted.
The Gospel is always a challenge, and anyone who says otherwise, is selling something. Usually all it takes for us to slice of a fraction of the Gospel is our concupisence. Our limited love shows when we seek to actually apply it.
When the Gospel exhonorates us and excoritaes others, it’s our interpretation, not God’s message. We want them to have mercy, even before us, beause that’s what God’s mercy looks like. It is blessings from the cross, a cry of love from the crucified to the ones who cried, “Crucify Him.”Christ tells us to pray for those who persecute us, to bless our enemies.
It’s really hard, even to type the words, because I recognize, I would have to mean it. To bless these people who I see dismantling my country? Who I see saying ugly thing after ugly thing, lie after lie after lie? To bless these people who rip apart families? Who seem to grin in the face of their own violence, and march away with no consequence while the bodies are still warm? Bless them? Really?
And I look back at the crucifx, the inescapable reality of my Lord on the cross. Yes really. And I admit, I don’t want to. It’s not satisfying, the dark joy of excoriating is fun. You get to be clever and cutting and mean…but then, you don’t get to be a disciple.
And I want that.
So bless them. Bless them all. Give them the graces, all the graces. Pour down on them your heavenly blessings Lord, open Heaven and like the snow, coat their souls with the salt of the earth, to melt the ice of their hearts and ours. Bless all of us. We have met the enemy and it is us. God save us from ourselves and all our short sightedness that has lead us to hate each other so deeply and so willingly, and let us go out and be neighbors, good samaritans, to all we encounter.
It will be more difficult and brutal than shoveling eight inches of ice, but the world will be warmer for it and the souls we help may be our own. Be salt, not ice.
I’m going to go shovel some more snow, and pray for our country.
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