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 Day by day Information through Getty Photographs)
Practically 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 positive that he would. I hate to say it, however he’s in all probability proper to be anxious.
Within the 10 days following Trump’s introspective commentary, his immigration insurance policies have gone from solely 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 they’d fled violence, trafficking, household destruction, dying squads, and myriad different causes that lead a younger baby to cross a border with out their mother and father.
Present Difficulty
Their attorneys, a free community coordinated by the Acacia Center for Justice, which makes a speciality of immigrants’ rights legislation, report that the kids, 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 evening at detention facilities in Arizona and in Texas and advised to organize to go away their locations of detention—even whereas a choose, roused away from bed as soon as the legal professionals heard what was occurring, 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 kids having panic assaults and sobbing as they have been woken up and ordered by contract employees with MVM, an Ashburn, Virginia-based firm which has an almost $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 courtroom order blocking the flights, the kids continued to be crammed onto three planes. In Harlingen, a type of planes started taxiing down the runway earlier than, on the final second, its pilot lastly determined to obey the courtroom order and returned to the airport parking space.
Unaccompanied Guatemalan kids, in addition to these from different nations, are dotted across the nation in tons of of services the administration euphemistically calls shelters however that are actually detention hubs for youngsters. Lots of them have been beforehand residing in the neighborhood and attending faculties; some had been positioned with foster mother and father by the Workplace of Refugee Resettlement. Because of Trump and Stephen Miller’s battle 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 supply for the worldwide reunification of youngsters with their mother and father in applicable circumstances, to attempt to rush via 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 staff Trump merely doesn’t care. The administration claims this was at the instigation of the Guatemalan government, however sources within the Guatemalan authorities have advised 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 kids, scared and much from house, and they’re being deemed enemies by essentially the most highly effective folks on earth.
Now, I’m not a non secular scholar, however I’m interested by how, if perchance Trump have been to keel over and die this week, St. Peter would possibly take care of the MAGAman’s efforts to storm the Pearly Gates. I think he would possibly begin by referencing a number of Biblical passages—perhaps that entire factor in regards to the Good Samaritan and serving to strangers-in-need or perhaps the tales about Jesus washing the toes of the poor and the sick or perhaps the message in regards to the meek inheriting the earth.
After which, on the idea there’s fairly good quality-control methods in place to stop absolute turds from securing an everlasting spot in Heaven, I hope he would rain down incredulous commentary on the madness of the Trump ghost pondering it even remotely seemingly that these Pearly Gates may ever open for him.
He wouldn’t have to return into all of Trump’s appalling behaviors over the a long time. All he must do is take a look at this one week.
Within the months earlier than World Struggle 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 kids to go away what remained of the dismembered Czechoslovakia and head to England. 600 and sixty-nine of them got here on the Kindertransport with out their mother and father, weak younger girls and boys whose moms and dads, in desperation, had agreed to half with them in order no less than to avoid wasting their kids’s lives, even when they couldn’t save their very own, from the inferno they knew was descending upon them.
Winton is, rightly, thought of one of many quiet heroes of the twentieth century, a larger-than-life man who did an immense quantity of excellent—and did so with out tooting his personal horn. (Solely in previous age did he speak about what he had executed.)
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 in opposition to unaccompanied kids, hoping to take away them in the course of the evening on a vacation weekend when no person is paying consideration, and searching for to take action even within the face of courtroom 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 chief director of the Acacia Heart for Justice. “All of us want to carry the federal government accountable for following the legislation. The courtroom order prohibits their elimination for the following 14 days. Each one among them ought to be capable of go earlier than an immigration choose.” And each outraged reader of this text ought to, I’d add, use these 14 days to cellphone their Congressional representatives demanding they step as much as the plate to defend the Guatemalan kids from Trump’s grotesque reverse Kindertransport.
Take into account it for the nice of Trump’s soul. In spite of everything, this sadistic, vengeful conduct is a large no-no, I might suppose, for anybody genuinely hoping to get in St. Peter’s good graces. St. Peter’s denunciation of Trump wouldn’t should cease there, nonetheless. 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 dashing into the world 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 crushed 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 think 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 US as a toddler, for six months in a detention web site tons of of miles from her house, refusing to launch her again into the group regardless of documentation that she is affected by a number of sicknesses, and conserving 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 previous. Her lawyer, Helen Parsonage, wrote that, “Six months in detention had executed its job in sporting down this courageous younger lady to the purpose the place she would reasonably return to a rustic she doesn’t bear in mind than endure extra time unjustly locked up. America loses a helpful and cherished group member who was on her solution 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 employees on the fireplace traces. Now, I could also be misinterpreting the entire Heaven factor, however certainly one doesn’t bolster one’s case by arresting immigrants whereas they’re risking their lives saving different folks’s properties and lives.
Immigrant-rights protesters across the nation know simply how rancid these actions are—that’s why, for instance, lodge workers round Los Angeles and Orange County will spend their lunch hours right now, Labor Day, demonstrating exterior their locations of labor, holding up indicators denouncing the raids and deportations. “We would like an America that not solely fights for employees however fights for the immigrant cloth 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 employees. But, Trump and his enablers, removed from recognizing the worth that immigrants carry to American society, are intent on ratcheting up their campaign in opposition to the nation’s hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
Taken as a complete, simply primarily based on the actions of this one week, I’d say Trump is solely not a viable Heaven candidate. “He ought to seek the advice of the monks working with folks in Harlingen about that,” Aber mentioned of Trump’s quest to get into Heaven. “There are monks who’ve been witnessing day in and time out ICE grabbing folks 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 supply him the identical welcome that he supplied these panicked, sobbing Guatemalan kids, 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 mild on him, after which request that he slither off to Hell the place he so clearly belongs.
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