There are moments in a republic when the noise of slogans must give way to the quiet insistence of conscience.
This is one of them.
We are told, almost daily, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is pursuing the “worst of the worst.” Instead, the machinery of enforcement has turned its iron attention on those who have committed no crime beyond believing, worshiping, and hoping in the wrong direction.
Consider the case of “Majid,” not his real name, because fear has now become his only shield. He fled Iran after detentions, alleged torture, and, most damning of all in the eyes of his homeland, conversion to Christianity. He came legally. He sought asylum. An immigration judge granted him protection. And yet, one unannounced morning in October, he was shackled at wrists, waist, and ankles and driven through the night to a military airfield in Louisiana.
There, without ceremony or explanation, he was placed on a plane with more than 150 deportees bound for Nicaragua — the only non–Latin American on board — and routed through Venezuela and Turkey toward Iran, the country he fled in terror.
If this sounds disturbingly familiar, it should.
Anne Frank wrote of men who came in the early hours, who offered no explanation, who insisted only that you pack quickly and comply. The machinery was different then. The silence was the same.
Majid managed to disappear into Istanbul, but others were not so fortunate. In September, the United States arranged a chartered flight to Iran — the first in decades — carrying dozens of Iranians reportedly in shackles. Among them, a Christian woman deported back to a regime that treats conversion as apostasy and apostasy as a crime. Her husband, still in the United States, now waits for word on her.
This is not law enforcement. It is state-sponsored recklessness.
The Trump administration insists that all asylum claims were “fully adjudicated.” That phrase is meant to close the argument. It does not. It merely opens another: adjudicated by whom, under what standards, and with what regard for the very human beings whose lives hang in the balance?
Even more chilling are reports that sensitive information — religious conversion, political activity, reasons for seeking asylum — may not have been removed from deportation files. In other words, the very evidence proving why a person must not be returned may have been handed to the other counties authorities most eager to punish asylum seeker for it.
This is not bureaucratic failure. It is moral collapse.
The hypocrisy is almost too neat. At the same time President Trump laments the persecution of Christians abroad — even threatening military action in Nigeria “guns a-blazing” — his own government has been quietly delivering Christian converts back into the hands of regimes that criminalize their faith.
We are a nation that once prided itself on sheltering the persecuted, not cataloging them for their persecutors.
Real strength lies in restraint, in law tempered by mercy, in borders guarded without abandoning the soul of the country behind them.
Some will say these stories are rare which they are not, that they are the price of a tough system. But a republic is not judged by how it treats the wealthy, and the powerful, but by how it treats the poor and downtrodden.
It is not disorder that threatens America. It is indifference and tyranny at the top.
Indifference to the man in chains who has already been told by a judge that he may stay. Indifference to the woman returned to a land where her faith may cost her freedom or her life. Indifference to a child in Los Angeles who has never met her father because he is hiding from the very country he hoped would protect him.
Our gravest sin has never been hatred, but the quiet willingness to look away when our leaders and others do wrong. The lesson remains painfully relevant. We do not have to be shouting to be complicit. Silence and complying will do just fine.
The question before us is not whether a nation may enforce its borders. It may. The question is whether, the way we are doing it forfeits all moral authority that makes enforcement worth having. We are throwing away our morals and freedoms for the appearance of strength and security. We will end up with none of those only tyranny.
A government that can send Christians or anyone back to die or locks them away in detention centers to be abused (that is whole another editorial) in the name of law is a government that has forgotten why laws exist.
Joseph McCain is editor and publisher of the Winston County Journal.
