In the spirit of Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
My Dear Fellow Christians,
On too many recent mornings at the ICE field office in Atlanta, I have watched mothers arrive carrying everything they own in suitcases while holding the hands of small children whose fathers have been forcibly taken into detention.
They come “yearning to breathe free,” yet find instead the suffocating air of a promise deferred. What they believed would be refuge too often reveals itself as rejection. What they hoped would be justice becomes an unending exodus.
These are families who entered seeking asylum through lawful channels. They comply at every step. They attend check-ins, submit paperwork, and pay thousands of dollars for legal representation in a system that guarantees no counsel for the poor. Many now wear electronic ankle monitors—profitable to contractors, yet experienced by families as modern-day shackles.
Their father, a lawful asylum seeker, has been detained for six months.
And still, after all their compliance, the husband and primary wage earner is detained.
The family collapses almost immediately.
Rent goes unpaid. Food runs out. There is no social safety net, no extended family to absorb the fall. Children experience displacement long before they can name it. Eventually, mothers gather their children and come to the gates of ICE.
Not because mercy is expected.
But because suffering has closed all other doors.
This week, after witnessing yet another such return—a Venezuelan mother with a preschooler and an infant—an ICE agent said to me in frustration, “Why do these women do this? Don’t they understand we are not a shelter?”
The agent spoke more truth than she intended.
ICE is part of a system through which vulnerable families are rendered unsheltered, stripped of stability by design.
ICE is not a shelter.
But neither is it merely a bureaucratic agency. It is part of a system through which vulnerable families are rendered unsheltered, stripped of stability by design.
We hear much in this country about “family values,” while fathers are taken from homes and placed hundreds of miles away. We are told of the sanctity of marriage, while policies quietly undo it. We are told we are pro-family, while children sleep in cars, churches, and overcrowded rooms because their families have been fractured by detention.
No nation can claim to honor families while funding their destruction.
Cruelty is not a family value.
Terrorizing children is not a family value.
And Christians must reckon with a Gospel that speaks more clearly about welcoming the stranger than blessing systems that commodify and exploit the poorest and most vulnerable.
The question before the Church is not whether these policies are legal. Many grave injustices have been legal.
Slavery was legal.
Segregation was legal.
The separation of Indigenous children from their families was legal.
And now family separation and prolonged detention are defended under the guise of due process.
But legality has never been the measure of righteousness. As Dr. King wrote, “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”
Will we continue to bless systems that divide families and exhaust the poor—or will we recover a prophetic voice that names what is before us?
The question for those of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus is this: will we continue to bless systems that divide families and exhaust the poor—or will we recover a prophetic voice that names what is before us?
When the state is organized around fear rather than dignity, silence is no longer neutrality.
It is complicity.
The time has come to face our fears and stand on the side of love. Justice can rise above cruelty. But such hope requires more than empty words about faith and family.
It requires the courage to say plainly that what is being done to these families is not merely policy.
It is wrong.
And no patriotic language can baptize it into righteousness.
Yours for the cause of Peace and Beloved Community,
Anton Flores-Maisonet
Casa Alterna 