Congress Endorsed More Of The Same
Legislators found the immoral courage to double down.
Washington, D.C. – Yesterday, June 9, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a $70 billion budget reconciliation bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) by a vote of 214-212.
The legislation, which previously passed the Senate, now heads to President Trump’s desk. This was the second reconciliation bill in less than a year.
In response, Pablo DeJesús, Executive Director, UUSJ, made the following statement:
“Enough is enough, and too much is too much! With the passage of this bill, Congress has given a total of $240 billion to federal immigration enforcement agencies in less than a year, over two reconciliation bills. That is too much! At a time when so many Americans are struggling to pay for food, housing, medicine, and fuel, Congress has found the immoral courage to double down on tearing families apart, detaining children, and terrorizing communities. We’ve had enough!
For many Unitarian Universalists, who center LOVE as a shared religious value, what Congress did constitutes a full-throated endorsement of all the horrors reported, everything our communities have witnessed. In contrast, we choose to side with care, compassion, and welcome in a spirit of solidarity.
As the federal government goes back on its commitment to help ordinary folks, detainees are facing retaliation for hunger strikes, while DACA recipients, Refugees and Asylum seekers fear deportation. It is cruel to ignore those needs for the purpose of adding even more money to the bloated and destructive mass deportation machine.
That machine is hurting our neighbors by breaking up families and detaining children. It is terrorizing our communities with over policing, warrantless arrests, and failure to uphold basic standards of practice utilized by law enforcement officials across the country. That machine threatens our well-being by driving away skilled, needed employees and impeding access to our Houses of Worship and other Sensitive or Protected Locations. It is raising threats and intimating that no one is safe unless you match the leadership regime’s definition of belonging. The federal government is ‘disappearing’ people, taking both citizens and non-citizens—from their homes and from the streets—and creating record numbers of detentions, far in excess of the bad guys and hard criminals in our society.
Pointing out hypocrisy rarely sways hearts and minds, but indifference and complicity cannot be ignored. They must be named clearly; they are the siblings of evil.
With the first reconciliation, Congress may have pleaded surprise and shock at how the funds were used and at the conduct of ICE and CBP agents, but with this second bill, none can claim ignorance. To add insult to injury, this bill does absolutely nothing to address the abuses so well documented by individual Americans, enumerated by civil society actors, and suffered by our neighbors and our communities.
A vote in favor of this morally bankrupt bill was a vote to green-light more of the same by DHS, ICE, and CBP—for the next three years! In Minneapolis and elsewhere, our people have called out and named this conduct as tyranny and a flirtation with fascism.
In reply to this action by Congress, we redouble our commitment to restore our communities to peace, tranquility, wholeness, dignity, and right relations among neighbors. We recommit ourselves to spiritual discipline for the work this moment asks of us.
We say no! We do not agree to these terms of governance. Neither the impact on our loved ones nor the ideology of this regime. We are firm in our conviction, our faith calls us to side with all people, especially those being harmed, scapegoated, and othered, and to defy the torment that current U.S. leaders are imposing.”
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