Heartlessness is now official US policy

The Trump administration is deporting thousands of legal immigrants to countries “they barely know”. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority (ICE) can find any refugee “deportable” if they’ve a crime on their record – even selling marijuana – and that covers about 120,000 immigrants who came here as refugees.

So now deportations to places like Somalia, Cambodia and Eritrea are soaring, as people who’ve spent decades in the US are sent to countries blighted by crime and political repression. In March, a deportee died in a restaurant bombing in Mogadishu. An Eritrean deportee was so distraught he killed himself en route to his native country.

Then there’s the case of Jimmy Aldaoud, a 41-year-old Michigan man recently deported to Iraq. Born in Greece to Iraqi Christian refugees who brought him to the US as a baby, he was severely mentally ill and often homeless. This led to the multiple arrests used as the justification for deporting him. Yet he’d never been to Iraq, “had no language skills, no place to live and no family connections”. He died, probably from poorly-controlled diabetes, a few months later. Unless ICE changes the rules, there will be many more Jimmy Aldaouds.  (Chris Gelardi, Slate (New York), and The Week 31 August 2019).

It is hard to believe that the “base” really supports this cruel treatment towards people who never lived before in the country they are deported to.  This is not a political issue; it is an issue of human kindness and respect for others.

I am an immigrant myself, albeit I did it correctly, to my utter frustration and disbelief (I will not bore you with the bureaucratic hassles).  Thus, although I consider myself a humanitarian, I think the laws should be obeyed and no one should sneak into any country without permission, otherwise I might have sneaked in myself.

But the supporters of this policy of expelling people to countries they have never lived in and whose language they barely, if at all, speak,  is quite the opposite of humane and Christian.  How can one characterize opposing  abortion, but supporting expulsion?