Hope Before Us: From an ICE Raid to Reconciliation

By Sister Mary McCauley

Lessons learned at the Postville, Iowa, Immigration Raid in 2008 stand vividly in my mind as our nation considers comprehensive immigration reform.

Hundreds of memories flood my mind and heart. Recollections of people from Postville and surrounding communities arriving to offer support, food, clothing, blankets, medical care, money and legal advice warm my heart. The vision of children crying as they feared they would never again see their mother or father breaks my heart. It challenges me to again think of women walking with GPS devices on their ankles carrying signs that read:

We are not criminals.

We came to work. We came to feed our families.

We are mothers.

That May 8 afternoon I stood in the unadorned rectory dining room of St. Bridget’s Parish, where I served as the pastoral administrator. It had suddenly became command central. I read a statement from Immigration Customs Enforcement or ICE.

The statement attempted to explain what had taken place at 10 that morning at Agriprocessors. I skimmed the paper hoping to make sense out of what was happening. I read one line after another and then my eyes fell upon these words:

“An immigration raid was conducted at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa in order to uphold the integrity of the law....”

I saw children searching for parents, wives searching for husbands. I saw faces filled with fear. At that moment my heart stirred and I realized that while our government claimed to uphold the integrity of the law it had totally ignored the integrity of the person, the integrity of the family, the integrity of a community, as well as the integrity of the values for which our country stands.

The profound respect and love for every person affected by the Postville raid and a desire to uphold American values demands we find a humane solution to the Postville scene and those like it. The rendering of relationships in ICE raids, the ripping apart the fabric of families, of children from parents and husbands from wives, demands we find ways to bring people together to benefit all.

After viewing what horrors the ICE raids wrought, we now have the opportunity to create humane solution to the broken immigration system and to reach out to government, to employers who unscrupulously take advantage of undocumented workers, to neighbors who fear the stranger, and to legislators who have been slow to rewrite our broken and callous laws.

Now is the time to say: Let us move on, let us respect and honor the dignity of all persons, let us recognize that laws have but one purpose — to ensure the common good. Now is the time to restore the integrity of the law, of the family, of our American values, of our country. Now is the time for comprehensive immigration reform.

Memories may sadden but they will never paralyze us. Our memories, our consciences, our integrity, our respect for the dignity of all persons, as well as our respect and love for our country call us unabashedly to do all that we can to turn the tragedy of Postville into victory for justice.

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Sister Mary McCauley, BVM is a member of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dubuque, Iowa.


 

Star Trek, the Bishops and Drones

"But a 21st Century Catholic bishop said..."

Being a Trekkie (devotee of the Star Trek franchise) is at least vaguely similar to being a Catholic. Both groups display intense devotion to time-honored canons of stories, people, values and entire universes governed by laws and ancient wisdom.

And sometimes both of them raise questions about the morality of drone strikes.

Bp Pates: Drones are not logical for peace.

On May 17, Bishop Richard Pates of Des Moines, Iowa, chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on International Justice and Peace, wrote letters to National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon and leaders in Congress, urging a public discussion on the use of drone strikes by the United States. Shortly thereafter, President Obama announced that his administration was tightening guidelines for drone strikes, with an apparent eye toward scaling back their use. A few days later, the Pakistan Taliban's second in command was reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike. On June 4, Bishop Pates reiterated the moral questions raised by drone attacks in a piece on the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog.

The end result hasn't been so much the public discussion Bishop Pates called for, so much as drones fleetingly returning to our collective attention before being brushed aside as "too complicated to think about" somewhere around the second cup of coffee. Fortunately, Bishop Pates hasn't been alone in raising these questions. The other voices, however, are aboard the Starship Enterprise at a multiplex near you.

(Minor spoilers ahead.)

J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek Into Darkness," released the same day as Bishop Pates' letter, finds Captain James T. Kirk (also from Iowa) and the Enterprise crew sent deep into space, to the edge of the Neutral Zone, to find a terrorist. The terrorist is hiding on the Klingon home world, Kronos, and while the Klingons are hostile to the Federation, they aren't technically at war. Star Fleet's solution: don't invade the Klingon world to catch this man. Simply take him out with these handy new torpedoes we've developed.

(It doesn't exactly take a stroke of foreign policy/storytelling genius to have words like "Pakistan" and "drone strikes" running through one's mind at this point.)

The order doesn't go down well with the crew. Mr. Spock raises the question of how it's moral to essentially assassinate a person without anything resembling a trial. Another crew member resigns over the issue of the Enterprise being used for combat purposes. Both objections resemble concerns raised by Bishop Pates about how drone strikes struggle to apply Just War requirements to actions outside of a war zone.

And while the Enterprise crew fears sparking a war with the Klingons, Bishop Pates talks more generally about how drones are not a recipe for lasting peace. "Targeted killings sow anger and unrest among the countless people whose lives are upended," he writes. "The use of attack drones should be inseparable from the question of whether it promotes peace and security around the world."

In the 2003 documentary "The Fog of War," former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (an architect of the Vietnam War) said "the human race needs to think more about killing." The new Star Trek movie provides a vision of a 23rd Century with people for whom the value of human life -- and the taking of  it -- is still a big deal. They have apparently had the discussion Bishop Pates calls for, given much thought to killing and found it immoral and, yes, illogical.

(CNS Photo/Paramount)