The Christian right created a horrific situation, which is impacting their friend and now they want to point the finger instead of looking in the mirror. You are the reason your friend is behind bars, @JoelWBerry. You! You created and promoted a culture of cruelty targeting immigrants. When this was pointed out to you, you callously said people needed to just follow the law. You did not care. You had no compassion. You did not see their humanity. You did not feel for their families. Now, you want to blame others because your chickens have come home and of course, you run to the familiar. The policies of the right-wing government that I support is actually the liberals fault. What!? Is it too much to ask you for remorse? How about repentance? If you can't find some integrity, at least have some shame.

I've been thinking about why the Samuel Sey situation is so infuriating to me, and I realize it's because someone at my parish is going through almost the exact same thing. Except my friend and her husband don't have well-connected, influential right-wing friends to advocate for them. A woman at my parish has a husband who is currently being detained by ICE. He entered this country legally on a visa. He married an American citizen, and through their marriage, they applied for permanent residency through the family reunification process. While his application is pending, he has been granted employment authorization, allowing him to work legally in the United States. Last week, he was at a job site with several other immigrants. I don't know the immigration status of everyone who was there, but I do know his circumstances. ICE picked them all up. He has now been detained for over a week, and his wife is having to spend thousands of dollars trying to secure his release on bond. Now, I've seen people explaining away Samuel Sey's situation by claiming there was a discrepancy with his paperwork. Well, here's what I know about the situation at my parish: There is no paperwork discrepancy. He has his paperwork. His paperwork was completed accurately. He was picked up simply for being present at a job site with other immigrants. As far as I know, there was nothing illegal happening. He was simply there, doing his job while having an accent and suspicious skin color. This is a man who entered the country legally, followed the immigration process, obtained authorization to work, and, to my knowledge, has committed no crime. Yet, he is sitting in detention, separated from his wife, being treated like a criminal for doing nothing more than showing up to work. And this is why the Samuel Sey situation makes me so angry. We are now being lectured about empathy by people who have spent years defending, promoting, and justifying the very system that is inflicting this trauma on families like the one in my parish. Suddenly, when someone they know and care about is caught up in that system, they recognize the cruelty. You would think this was the first good Christian man this has ever happened to. The lady from my parish, like so many others, doesn't have an influential network of conservative Christians demanding compassion on her husband's behalf. And watching people who helped normalize this cruelty chastise everyone else for failing to show empathy when it finally reaches someone in their own circle is absolutely maddening.

Everyone has been telling these tools that ICE is not going after the worst of the worst but hard working families. They didn't care. They said we had toxic empathy. Now, that it happened to one of their friends, they have the nerve to come here talking about, "Can you believe ICE is going after low hanging fruit?" I JUST CANNOT! They saw ICE hanging out at immigration hearings, Home Depot parking lots, schools-- FREAKING SCHOOLS. They noticed nothing. Now, they are shocked because fellow evangelical tool, who dug a pit for his own demise has fallen into the pit that he dug. These people are truly nauseating.