Will you pray with me for the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement workers: the agents in the streets, the administrators, and the guards? And, for any other federal or state employees who assist ICE workers. Those workers are all individual humans like our brothers and sisters who are immigrants, worthy of no more or less respect and no more or less dignity. They are our brothers and sisters too.
We pray for them especially because they have all been put in terrible untenable moral positions. They have jobs to do, families to feed, and families who need them as models, models for just behavior that contributes to the common good of all. Yet they have compromising immoral orders to follow that make them agents of immoral behavior, behavior that denies the dignity of immigrants, disrespects immigrants as human individual persons, and does damage to well-functioning families and communities that contribute to our common good.
Their immoral orders lead to the round up and detention of people who are not “the worst of the worst,” who are not dangerous criminals. They round up and detain their own human brothers and sisters often only because of the way they look or where they happen to stand or live. Human respect and dignity would obligate ICE and its workers to do legal processing prior to detention, only detaining people whom there was already credible evidence against that they were in fact dangerous criminals, not because of hearsay, appearance, or location, and not because of minor traffic violations or other infractions. They are authorized to do their jobs in this immoral way and even to use unnecessary force in part to frighten and intimidate their victims and any observers of their unjust moral actions. The use of power to frighten and intimidate human persons worthy of dignity and respect is not moral. It is also an immoral abuse of power to detain, let alone deport, people in ways that are disrespectful and do not honor their dignity and human rights even when those persons, our brothers and sisters, are not here legally. It is an immoral abuse of power to damage children and break up loving and well-functioning families and communities that contribute to the common good.
We pray for ICE workers because no one is as yet able to legally and non-violently stop thier bosses from not upholding the law and the requirements of justice and morality, and that fact does not make their bosses’ orders right or just or moral.
We pray for ICE workers because their internal tensions and conflicts arising from their untenable moral positions can lead to their anger and violence against innocents. They do not feel able and empowered to direct their anger toward their bosses’ immoral orders. Their moral conflicts also lead to their being afraid and ashamed. They often hide behind masks and other means of anonymity, like unmarked cars and not using body cams. They often refuse to identify themselves as ICE agents, show their badges or other identification, and give their names. They often aggressively stop others from filming their actions, all so that their behavior cannot be tracked and used legally in the public domain. They must be afraid and ashamed. They also are not treating our brothers and sisters, their own brothers and sisters, with common dignity and respect through face-to-face peaceful encounter and engagement, transparency, and giving their victims time and resources to respond peacefully and legally.
So, we pray for ICE workers who are being placed in these terrible moral situations for which they were, at best, only poorly formed and trained.
We know that empathy works against injustice and toward justice. Let us pray: Love, overcome injustice with just love. Heal the compromised moral strength of our sorely conflicted brothers and sisters who work with ICE. Increase our empathy for them, and their empathy for all our immigrant brothers and sisters.
We are thankful for our freedoms of religion and speech that allow us to practice our values in this way.
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