ICE Refuses to Melt as the World Lays Pope Francis to Eternal Rest
This is life in the Upside Down.
It’s Saturday, April 26, 2025. I’m in London, catching up on this week’s horrors in immigration news while watching the world bid adieu to Pope Francis in a live BBC feed from Vatican City.
On my television screen, speaker after speaker celebrates the late pontiff, each one telling of the man’s rich human warmth, his deep sensitivity to today’s anxieties, his lifelong ambition to reawaken — not just in his Catholic flock, but in the leadership of the world’s richest nations — the Judeo-Christian principles of kindness toward all humankind. One and all recall Pope Francis’s insistence on working on behalf of the poor, in recognizing the real needs of migrants and refugees, and in finding a compassionate response toward their plight, especially while in flight. We are reminded that Francis repeatedly admonished global governments for their indifference in the face of a struggle experienced by ever-increasing numbers of our fellow human beings year upon year upon year. He condemned world leaders (and their sycophantic acolytes) for callously allowing such strivers to suffer and die, under excruciating circumstances, in hidden prisons and black sites, across blistering deserts and dangerous seas, while en route to perceived safety.
They remind us that Pope Francis called for the jubilation of mercy and that he called us to a “culture of encounter” in solidarity with others less fortunate. It was his aspiration that we embrace a worldwide “fraternity.” We all belong to the same human family, Francis taught. The gospel will never be found in the “throw-away” culture represented by the acquisition of things and followers and clicks, he stated, but only in community and in seeing to the common good.
He called attention to our shared responsibility, not only to each other, but to our common home, planet Earth. He warned that the twin spectres of the mass death of people and the mass destruction of homes and hospitals and schools caused by our forever wars lead to a world not more safe, but less, not more healthy, but further weakened by each bomb dropped.
Build bridges, not wars, was Francis’s exhortation. Serve all humanity, not just the privileged, he prayed. His was not a gospel of prosperity adopted across the globe to justify one family’s privilege over another’s poverty. We are all equal in the gospel, as in the eyes of Pope Francis, and therefore, we all deserve to live a dignified life in safety and without hunger.
On my computer screen, a piece by
for reveals the staggering amounts of money MAGA-truebelievers John Thune, Mike Johnson, and Jim Jordan aim to steal from the US taxpayer, with the aid of once-upon-a-time-Republican stalwarts like Lindsey Graham, to accommodate the mass detention and deportation feverdream of a madman. In a Senate vote-a-rama that took place overnight on April 5/6 — following the largest mass mobilization ever to take place in the US, which sparked 1,300 protests across the country and brought millions into the streets to tell the madman and his minders, Hands Off! — the US Senate earmarked between $175 billion and $345 billion to underwrite the largest expansion of deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation immigration enforcement pipeline in history.For context, Department of Homeland Security agencies ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spent $9.6 billion and more than $30 billion in FY 2023/24, respectively — and that was already triple their original 2003 budgets.
It’s an eye-watering sum of money that robs from budgets intended to support the human family — education, healthcare, and other social safety net programs — not to uplift people, but to oppress them. It’s a taxpayer-funded budget appropriation that, once approved, Congress may never be able to roll back. It’s a war chest, really, to be waged against the most vulnerable people among us: to fund cruelty, not kindness, and breed fear, not compassion, throughout the whole of US society. It is money that will be spent to terrorize and incarcerate folks in need of safety and, without due process under the law, render them to off-limits concentration camps inside US military bases or within third-country black sites synonymous with torture. For life.
All to accommodate a manufactured “crisis” 100% made in the USA. All to fill the pockets of US-based multinational corporations, technology Broligarchs, for-profit prison profiteers, weapons manufacturers, and surveillance developers — the inheritors of the Cold War-era military-industrial complex — who are fast becoming the modern equivalents of IBM, which made its riches through strategic business alliances with the Nazis as they murdered 11 million people in the Holocaust. I speak of CoreCivic, GEO Group, Deployed Resources, and Palantir, among many, many other beneficiaries of the Border Industrial Complex.
On my television screen, and in the most coveted front row seat, to boot, is the second-coming of the Führer himself: Trump. Traveling with him and conveniently in the shadows, where snakes reside, is his Joseph Goebbels (although he looks more like Voldemort) — the architect of what I refer to as the US Gestapo and Gulag, but what Manríquez more elegantly calls a “national interior enforcement matrix powered by mass surveillance, mass detention, and mass deportation.” We speak of Stephen Miller.
This is life in the Upside Down. Where the Pope’s most beloved get tarred as “terrorists,” while the true barbarians get to attend his funeral.
Stay strong, friends. The only way through this is… together.
Sarah
PS Don’t forget my workshop tomorrow, April 27, 2:30-4:00 pm ET, with Dora Rodriguez. There’s room for everyone. Click the image to register:
