Eloise Lang, Campus Carrier photographer
Last week at the Hyundai battery plant in Ellabelle, Ga., hundreds of primarily South Korean workers were detained, shackled hand and foot and taken to overcrowded, unsanitary detention centers. The scene is disturbingly reminiscent of the same bureaucratic violence that saints like Maximilian Kolbe and Óscar Romero faced. The Trump administration’s barbaric utilization of Immigration and Customs enforcement (ICE) encourages moral disengagement through weaponized euphemisms and the dehumanization of immigrants to justify cruelty. Saints like Romero and Kolbe, who gave their lives in times rife with injustice, call each of us to stand with the oppressed and most vulnerable as commanded to us in the Gospel.
Psychologist Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement explains how individuals detach their moral self from the harmful actions they commit, allowing them to act in good conscience. Eight mechanisms activate this disengagement: moral justification, palliative comparison, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, dehumanization and attribution of blame. All are unmistakably present in the administration’s handling of immigration. Euphemisms like “processing” are used to describe the forced separation of families more palatably. Dehumanizing language is utilized when referring to immigrants as “illegal aliens” or numbers rather than parents, siblings, children, individuals pursuing safety. Moral justification is evident in the claims that ICE agents are simply “following orders” as they actively dismantle and terrorize communities. These calculated choices enable the exact abuse they attempt to hide.
Saints are persisting models of resistance to cruelty, faithful servants who refused to accept injustice. St. Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest martyred during the Second World War at Auschwitz. Known for his tremendous sacrifice, he volunteered to take the place of another man sentenced to death. After two weeks without food or water, he was among the last four survivors and was executed by lethal injection. His act of love and faith was a powerful testament in the face of bureaucratic brutality.
Similarly, St. Óscar Romero, a Salvadoran archbishop, was an outspoken advocate for the oppressed in a time of great political violence. He insisted “the church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being ‘the voice of the voiceless.’” St. Romero was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating Mass, culminating a life of courageous service to the Church and its sons and daughters. Countless others like St. Frances Xavier Cabrini and St. Toribio Romo also exemplify what it means to promote peace and stand with the most vulnerable; the accounts of their lives urge us to not remain passive when confronted with atrocities.
Bishops and religious leaders across the country have signed letters in opposition to increased ICE funding. The late Pope Francis sent letters to American bishops raising concerns over the Trump administration’s immigration policies and their ethicalities. Pope Leo XIV has been a consistent advocate for empathizing with the migrants who share the same hopes and dreams as anyone else. This is not a case of individual belief — this is the very foundation of what Catholic teachings and the Gospel are built upon. Evil flourishes when good people disengage. To be good people — to be good Christians — we must recognize Christ in the stranger and welcome Him as He instructs us in Matthew 25:45: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me.”