No matter which religion you choose to practice, the way undocumented immigrants are being treated in the United States right now is clearly unethical. As someone who attended Catholic school for my entire life, I was drawn to remember the quote:
"When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God." -Leviticus 19:33-34
Of course, Jesus often preached about loving one another and caring for your neighbor, but this passage from the Old Testament clearly expresses how heartless it is to treat those who come from another country in inhumane ways simply because they are not American.
I hear a lot of people justify the conditions of these detention centers by saying, "Immigrants knew the risk when they decided to come here." I always find this shocking because it accepts and admits the shortcomings of immigrant detention centers and, further, blames immigrants for the conditions they have to suffer. Any person can see how unethical the conditions of these centers are and anyone who tries to justify these conditions denies immigrants their human dignity.
Our country was built on immigrants. Our country was built on the American Dream: a concept that may mean different things to different people, but generally holds that, in the United States, anyone who works hard and is determined can build an honest, happy life and pave the way for their children to do even better. The vast majority of undocumented immigrants aren't here to "not pay taxes and steal from Americans," they are here to pursue that American Dream of building a life and raising their children in an environment that is safe from harm. They aren't here to "steal American jobs," they are hard-working men and women who fill a demand for cheap labor that the majority of Americans don't want to do. They are here to study, to raise their children in a safe environment, to work, and to make a living in a brand new place. Deportation raids that target hard-working, non-criminal individuals only serve to destroy families and ruin people's lives. Those who have entered the country illegally but made honest lives in the United States shouldn't be pressed into concrete rooms and forced to sleep on the ground with only aluminum blankets, they should be offered pathways to citizenship without fear of deportation.
A human can not be illegal, and it is ridiculous to support the concept that immigrants who have done nothing wrong besides entering our country illegally deserve to be treated worse than criminals. At the end of the day, everyone is entitled to their political views. You are allowed to support different political platforms when it comes to education, taxes, healthcare, or any of the issues in our political spectrum today. However, if you deny illegal immigrants their human dignity and believe that people deserve to be forced to drink out of a toilet bowl or denied showers for days on end, we do not have different political views. We have extreme differences in morality.
