I’ve been thinking about the difference between being ‘legal’ and being ‘human.’ The recent ICE raids in schools aren’t just news—they are a mirror reflecting our own moral atrophy.
Three Moments of Silence
I want you to picture the empty chair in a kindergarten classroom in Minnesota. A five-year-old, detained by ICE. It’s a small, devastating fact that feels too heavy to hold. It forces us to ask: what kind of threat does a child pose to a superpower? The silence of that empty chair is deafening.
Then, I think of the ancient Greek concept of Xenia—guest-friendship. To the ancients, turning away a stranger, let alone harming a child in your care, was to invite the wrath of the gods. It was a recognition that our humanity is tested not by how we treat kings, but how we treat the helpless. We seem to have traded this sacred duty for a sterile obsession with paperwork.
And I am reminded of a scene from literature, from the heavy heart of Dostoevsky. The moment when Ivan Karamazov returns his ‘ticket’ to God, refusing to accept a paradise built on the suffering of a single child. We are building a nation, a fortress, on exactly that foundation. The suffering is not a bug; it is a feature of the architecture.
It is the duty of a patriot to protect his country from its government.
– Thomas Paine
The Atrophy of Conscience
Why does this happen? It happens because we have allowed the law to replace our conscience. We assume that if something is ‘legal,’ it is moral. But history screams the opposite. The greatest crimes in human history were often perfectly legal according to the statutes of their time.
We are suffering from a spiritual blindness. We see ‘aliens,’ ‘illegals,’ ‘cases,’ and ‘numbers.’ We have lost the capacity to see the human face. Hannah Arendt warned us about this—the banality of evil isn’t always a monster; sometimes it’s just a bureaucrat doing their job with terrifying efficiency.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
– Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
Go Deeper
Step beyond the surface. Unlock The Third Citizen’s full library of deep guides and frameworks — now with 10% off the annual plan for new members.
The Courage to See
So, how do we move forward? We must refuse to be blind. We must refuse to let the label ‘undocumented’ erase the reality of ‘child.’ The path forward is one of radical solidarity. It means standing between the machine and the vulnerable. It means telling the truth about what is happening in our name.
This isn’t about politics; it’s about the soul. If we can justify the detention of a five-year-old, we have lost something that no border wall can replace. We have to be the ones to say: ‘This stops with me.’ We have to be the friction.