I want you to imagine with me for a second you are a seven-year-old girl. Your mother packs you a bag and you leave your country, fleeing persecution and poverty. You have always heard of the promised land of the United States and your mom seeks asylum, which is a legal process. None of this registers with you of course because you are only seven years old. You are just doing what your mother tells you.
Then you grow up in America and you dream. You dream of a future so much brighter because your mom was able to seek asylum in this country. You do good. You get good grades. You become part of the community. You graduate high school and choose Babson College in Massachusetts to study business. You start your freshman year, your future looking brighter and all laid out before you. Your mother is so proud of what you have accomplished so far. You decide to go home for Thanksgiving and surprise your family in Texas. You miss your parents and you miss your siblings.
You go to the airport, thinking about getting a good home cooked meal again, hugging your family members and sharing with them everything about your new adventure at college. At the gate you are told there is a problem with your boarding pass. On your way back to Customer Service, you are approached at the airport by ICE agents. Surrounded by grown men in masks who handcuff you and literally drag you out of the airport. Your family gets a lawyer who immediately goes to court and a federal judge issues an order for you to not be deported. Instead, as a 19-year-old girl, you are shackled at the feet, waist and wrists, as if you were a violent criminal, shoved onto a plane and brought to Honduras, a country you have not been in since you were seven years old.
Sound like a dystopian novel? Well, this just happened in your name. It was not a happy Thanksgiving for Any Lucia Lopez Belloza. Thank God her grandparents still lived in Honduras. She is now separated from her parents and her siblings. I could get into the lies the government seems to be spinning, defending this abject cruelty. The fact that when responding to the criticism, they dehumanized this poor 19-year-old girl by calling her an illegal alien. No human being is illegal.
Christians, this is what the church is now in bed with. This is now what the church supports. Do you have a daughter? Do you have a child? Any Lucia was seven years old when she came here, through no fault of her own. She was not hiding. She was your neighbor. She was your daughter's friend. She was in the pew next to you at church each week. She was you, except her family did not win the "where were you born" lottery. All the fake Christian leaders who blindly support the Republican Party are to blame for this. I am looking at you Jack Hibbs! I am looking at you Mario Murillo! Steven Strang! Dr. Michael Brown! Spare me your pseudo-piety and scriptures out of context. You have led the church to support the terror-icing of our fellow human beings. What bible do you pretend to read? This was a child, just starting college. Did she deserve to be shackled at the feet, waist and wrists and thrown on a plane to fly to a country she had not been in for twelve years? In Jesus name?
I understand politics can be polarizing. I understand you have been fed a steady diet of hate. Hate for the brown people. Hate for the Spanish speaking people. Hate for anyone you are told to hate. None of that should matter. When they tried to deport a four-year-old who needed to be connected to an IV 14 hours per day to live, we said nothing. When they deported a pastor who had been here for thirty years, we said nothing. When they deported a child with cancer, disrupting her treatment, we said nothing. When they deported a pastor's wife, a pillar of her community, we said nothing. Then we go to church on Sundays and raise our hands worshipping God. The hypocrisy dripping off our hands in the spiritual realm.
How much is enough? What line can be crossed where we can finally say not in my name.
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