Editor's Newsletter

“On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas!” -Pope Francis on Easter.

It was his final message of caring, of opening hearts to those seeking a better life, of “increasing our mutual solidarity” as human beings with integral value. But those words were likely lost on the migrant-demonizing J.D. Vance who met briefly with the pontiff hours before his death. The vice president, who notoriously lied through his teeth about pet-eating Haitian immigrants working legally in his home state, never stopped lying about the powerless he could exploit.

His bald-faced lies about a wrongly deported Maryland father being a dangerous gang member — despite no evidence presented in court and no due process offered the man —are shameless. Never mind that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had legal permission to remain in the U.S and establish a life with an American wife and children. Never mind that he had never been convicted of any crime in the U.S. or his Salvadoran homeland. 

The man was shackled and flown to a brutal gulag in El Salvador (in direct violation of a court order) where he remains today while the Trump-Vance administration sits in open defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court decree to facilitate his return. Two days before meeting the pope Vance blasted out posts implying the father of three got his just desserts with a “valid deportation” and “shouldn’t be in the United States.” 

But the broken veep is wont to “create stories” to fuel backlash against those “who come from distant lands” — exactly what Francis lamented before his death. Vance even went on the warpath against basic due process arguing that it’s an unnecessary impediment to ridding the country of millions of unwanted immigrants. “How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and the migrants!” wrote the late pope.

But in the land of the free foreigners live in fear. The Trump administration is obsessed with racking up the numbers of deportations it can brag about to its base. It is disappearing people to detention facilities, denying them counsel or their day in court and stealthily shipping them to the war-torn or tyrannical countries they fled or to a notorious prison for life. Whatever it takes to advance the “largest mass deportation in history” of illegal and legal immigrants. 

The Trump cruelty Vance promotes cancelled the temporary protected status of Haitians, Venezuelans, Afghans, Ukrainians, and other nationals from unsafe homelands allowed to live and work in the U.S. Ending that protection with imminent deportations threatened hundreds of thousands of terrified families who sought safe haven from humanitarian and political hellscapes. Fortunately, an array of legal challenges halted many of those efforts. But the ruthless authoritarian mission of the Trump regime — to purify the country of immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” has branched out to visa and green card holders in far-flung sweeps of universities and colleges. 

Under the guise of national-security, a huge dragnet has been cast in nearly every corner of higher education across America and Ohio to surveil and scoop up unsuspecting international students. At least a dozen Ohio universities and colleges and nearly five times as many international students attending those schools are being blindsided daily by menacing emails from the Trump administration.

Without warning or explanation, foreigners legally studying here and throughout the U.S. are being summarily kicked out of the country for no apparent reason except being foreigners. The crackdowns on students from India and China and other parts of the world are coming fast and furious. But these kids aren’t hiding or committing egregious, deportable offenses. They’re just going to school. Pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees or post-graduation training in science and technology — and paying full freight to do so. 

Under the State Department’s newly launched, AI-enabled “Catch and Revoke” initiative, the government is scraping social media posts (including likes, shares and comments) to “find foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terrorist groups” and cancel their visas. The effort is framed as an anti-terrorism measure, but it is being used to terrorize students at Ohio State University, Kent State University, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Cincinnati, Youngstown State University, the University of Toledo, Xavier University, Cleveland State University, the University of Akron, and others.

At least 1,300 student visas have already been cancelled nationwide. The international community at Case Western Reserve has been encouraged to carry immigration papers at all times. Foreign students who uprooted their lives to attain an education no other country affords are living in dread of a knock on the door and being spirited away by masked government agents in plainclothes driving unmarked vans.

On the last day of his life, Pope Francis made a powerful call for mercy and kindness for those “who are different than ourselves.” But he was under no illusions about America’s dark turn or Vance’s complicity in it.

“What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly,” he predicted.

Pray that it will not come to pass.

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This story is provided by Ohio Capital Journal, a part of States Newsroom, a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit. See the original story here.