This past week I have personally witnessed …

💔Two adolescent young women desperately trying to find their sister who had been taken by ICE during a routine traffic stop. They had not heard from her and she not showing up in the online ICE locator.

♥️I also witnessed volunteers outside Delaney Hall give them comfort, listen to their pain, and give them information on how to navigate this cruel system.

💔I learned of two men from countries in Latin America who were deported to a third country.  But in its cruelty my government sent them on a deportation flight without giving them their papers.

♥️Volunteers in the US stayed in touch with the men and mobilized their networks to find overnight shelter for them in a foreign land and connected them with social services to help them get to their home countries.

💔An asylum seeker in his early 20s was released from detention after 3 years. But ICE was detaining him in a state 3,000 miles away from his family and community of support. He had nowhere to go when they opened the gates.

♥️Volunteers called everyone they knew near the detention center. Someone was able to pick him up and take him to safe temporary shelter while he figured out how to get home.

💔♥️💔♥️💔♥️💔♥️

These are just a few stories that I have been personally connected to via my volunteer ministry at Delaney Hall in the last three days. So many lives and families are being torn apart. We need to tell the stories. We need to act. We cannot stand idly by.

As Cardinal Tobin said at a recent rosary service outside Delaney Hall (and quoted today in the New York Times):  “There’s a growing number of Americans who see the situation as it really is. They cut through the ideology, they cut through the attempts to dehumanize people and they can see suffering human beings.”

Heart breaks and compassion.  A melancholy mix that has my heart heavy and yet filled with hope.

The trauma is real. The evil one is at work. And so are the forces of good. We are better than this.

Be the good. Be kind. Do whatever you can with your agency and influence to spread goodness.

Our very humanity depends on it.