Dehumanizing the immigrant
Contemplating immigration enforcement actions and the ways we talk about them
Featured articles
Video: Man punched, detained by Border Patrol agents in Santa Ana
Landscaper violently detained by Agents has three Marine Sons
Who is Alejandro Barranco? Immigrant dad of 3 US Marines violently detained in disturbing video
Immigrant father of three Marines is violently detained, injured by federal agents, son says [This article is behind a paywall.]
Now DHS is lying about scary immigrants with weed whackers
Today’s featured articles relate the story that occurred a few days ago, around two-and-a-half miles from my home in Santa Ana, California. Saturday, June 21, 2025, Narciso Barranco (48) was chased, forced to the ground, pepper-sprayed in the head, and forced into the back of an unmarked car by men wearing U.S. Border Patrol Vests. Narciso had been working as a landscaper at an IHOP located close to a Home Depot on Edinger Ave., Santa Ana, California. The videos witnessing the scene are disturbing but there are multiple attestations to the fundamental facts.
Mr. Barranco is seen attempting to “flee,” though his son claims he was running to his truck to retrieve his identification documents. He had a string trimmer and was trimming vegetation near the restaurant when he was targeted for detention by a U.S. border enforcement action.
Mr. Barranco has lived in the United States without documentation since the 1990s. He owns a landscaping business and works for other companies. He has no criminal record. His oldest son served the Marine Corps in Afghanistan. Two other sons are currently active-duty Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton, California. The oldest son has said that “I understand everything going on but what infuriates myself and my brothers are the agents hitting him while he was already down [on the ground].” Barranco was taken to a detention facility in Los Angeles. The son, Alejandro, also said that he believes “my father was racially profiled — they didn’t ask him anything. They just started chasing him, and he ran because he was scared. He didn’t know who was after him.”1
U.S. Representative Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) called the detention “madness” and said current immigration policies are flawed. “You have a family of three kids that took an oath for the country, ready to lay down their lives for this country, and their parents can’t stay here?”
Narciso’s family believes he suffered a dislocated shoulder but do not know if he received medical treatment. Alejandro is also reported to have said, “I’m honestly really hurt because I love this country a lot, and I love my parents a lot. I gave up four years of my life to serve this country and show that I’m a patriot.”2
The Border Patrol confirms their agents made the arrest but have not reported any further details.
Similar incidents have occurred across the United States since Donald Trump became President. He campaigned vigorously on promises to deport violent criminal immigrants that he says entered the country during the Biden administration.
For example, on Thursday, June 19, 2025, Job Garcia (37), a student at Clairmont Graduate University, was capturing an ICE raid on video in Hollywood. A U.S. citizen, Garcia was tackled. Garcia reported, “The pressure of … the knee on my back, and his hand on my neck. I thought … ‘Is this it for me?” No agent asked if he was an American citizen. Nobody asked for identification, he reports. Garcia would later report, “They assumed that I was undocumented.”3
Garcia was taken to a processing area outside Dodger Stadium. While seated on the pavement, handcuffed, he overheard agents celebrating the 31 “bodies” they got that day. The officers colluded in planning what charges they could level against Garcia. “At first it was assault of a federal agent, but only later, the narrative started to change because the video was out,” Garcia said. As one blog I read put it, “To say there was an assault is like saying ‘You assaulted me because my fist was stopped by your face.’” As of Friday, June 20, Garcia has not yet been charged.
“They call them ‘bodies,’ they reduce them to bodies,” Garcia said. “My blood was boiling.”
Another typical story concerns Adrian Martinez (20) a Walmart employee, U.S. citizen, arrested Tuesday, June 17, 2025, at a Pico Rivera shopping center. Martinez was arrested for allegedly punching a border patrol agent. Videos released since the incident do not appear to show Martinez punching anyone, though he was himself roughed up and dragged to the ground by Federal agents. A criminal complaint, now lodged against Martinez says he blocked agents’ vehicles with his car and later with a trash can. This is supported by video evidence. Speaking for the U.S. Attorney’s office, Ciaran McEvoy implied that there was additional, unspecified criminal conduct accusations that will be leveled against Martinez at trial. McEvoy did not specify what these would be.4
Another U.S. citizen, Cary Lopez Alvarado was detained by federal agents on June 8 along with her boyfriend and cousin. The three had been doing maintenance outside a building in Hawthorne, California. Alvarado was nine months pregnant at the time of her arrest. Alvarado and her cousin, Alberto Sandoval are both citizens. Her boyfriend, Brayan Najera, is Salvadoran and is now being held at a facility in Texas.
A Department of Homeland Security representative stated that Lopez was arrested “because she was obstructing agents from accessing a car containing ‘two Guatemalan illegal aliens’ inside.” Instead, only one person was an undocumented immigrant at this incident. Lopez was inside a car blocked by agents and was forcibly removed from it. After she was taken to a processing facility in San Pedro, she was initially thought to be an undocumented Mexican citizen. She was chained and the chain put pressure on her belly. That, combined with the stress from the incident, caused her to begin premature labor contractions. The child was not born for four more days. In the meantime, Lopez has not been charged with any crimes, according to reports posted on June 18.5
Reporters from The Voice of OC approached the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with questions regarding the immigration enforcement actions. The editors were concerned to ask, “Where do residents go when they’re caught up in the federal immigration sweeps?” “Are they criminals, day laborers or people who’ve overstayed their visas?” and “How do families and others find out the fate of those detained?” The DHS responded with partial responses: “The Trump Administration is enforcing immigration laws… Those who violate these laws will be processed, detained, and removed as required.” “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted. We do our due diligence. We know who we are targeting ahead of time.” And, “if and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement officers are trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability.” None of these responses ring true given the reports of those citizens who witnessed and were themselves arrested and against whom exaggerated charges were leveled either in public proclamations or in actual indictments. The authors conclude, “there’s virtually no reliable public information on local immigration enforcement operations in Orange County or data about who is being detained, much less where they are being transferred in real time.”
If journalists get cagey responses from DHS spokespeople, so do Orange County Supervisors, the Orange County Sheriff’s department, and at least two members of Orange County’s congressional delegation. All of them report that their queries to DHS have been met with silence. In one case, a request for information from Representative Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano) has gone unanswered by DHS for weeks. Representative Correa suspects the silence is part of a strategy. “Silence spurs terror.” He sees “needless cruelty in the system… ‘What’s wrong with providing them information?’” Correa asks.6
“Silence spurs terror.” (U.S. Representative Lou Correa)
Faith-based considerations
There are a number of faith-based concerns lurking within these stories: the place of immigrants, access to the justice system, appropriate methods of addressing a “broken immigration” system in the United States, and the value of “aggressive enforcement” by federal agents. Some of these questions are politically challenging issues and invite opposing responses from well-meaning, hard-thinking, principled men and women.
For myself, however, I want to focus on the “smaller” issue that is clearly visible in the videos posted along with the many articles that document these incidents. The federal agents are dehumanizing the men and women who oppose them and who are the subject of their enforcement efforts. Undocumented immigrants are clearly being treated in a physically aggressive manner. Detention facilities are inadequate and inhumane according to many reports. Legal process is being denied to people — even the minimal due process afforded by our laws to non-citizens are being denied to them.
These are all examples of “dehumanization: denying people their basic human rights, stripping them of their identity. Detainees are reportedly denied clothing, medicines and medical care. People are referred to as “bodies,” “illegals,” “aliens,” or a nameless, horrifying “they.” (As the President put it in a nationally televised debate, “They are eating the dogs. They are eating the cats. They are eating the pets.” — Surprisingly, no further evidence of people eating animals in mid-state Ohio has come to light since the election.)
Dehumanization results in mistreatment of men and women. We ignore suffering (overly tight handcuffs, chains across a pregnant woman’s belly). We deny the role of understandable emotions: fear and anger at seeing a member of one’s family taken away roughly, a member of one’s community punched in the head, a person known to be a kind old man who regularly visited a Walmart taken away to “who knows where,” never to be seen again … Lawn mowers left running, abandoned tools at a job-site, these have become silent testimonials to the detentions and deportations.
When I read online comments about the immigrants and how they are being treated by our government, I encounter still more harsh words and inhumane stereotypes. People are reduced to labels. Falsehoods avoid the hard truths and pose as “common sense.” The United States (indeed, the Western world) has created a system of complex documents and procedures governing citizenship and residency. There exists a maze of regulations through which immigrants must pass when they “chose to come here the ‘right way,’ ‘legally.’” Recent deportations have taken the “low hanging fruit,” as a friend of mine puts it. Even people with legitimate asylum claims and green cards, spouses of American citizens, are being detained and deported.
President Trump has said in his tweets, “These aren’t people. These are animals.” Yet, in Orange County, we have yet to learn of any violent criminals returned to their country of origin. The famous deportations of the supposedly “Venezuelan” members of a gang, “Tren de Aragua,” to El Salvadar have been shown to be based on spurious examination of tattoos. There seems to have been no investigation, no basis in facts, but many false allegations which would never pass legal scrutiny. Many of the men sent to the El Salvadoran prison have no criminal record in any country. Even two women were on the deportation plane to El Salvador, despite the fact El Salvador had made clear they were not accepting female prisoners.
Dehumanizing propaganda has been shown to correlate with genocide. Dehumanizing propaganda attempts to alter our perceptions of other people. People who may have wanted to speak out against how people have been treated, instead will hesitate and say nothing. It can start to feel very unsafe to post, speak, or write messages that depart from the “commonly held ‘truth.’” “Dehumanizing propaganda can … [provide] participants [in violence] with cultural narratives that frame violence as the morally right thing to do, and it can help them overcome their initial resistance to killing neighbors as a result.” Dehumanization is a strategy people use when they have participated in violence to justify their otherwise objectionable actions.7
The federal agents who celebrated “collecting 31 bodies” that day were actively redescribing their actions to one another. They were reinforcing this mindset within their working group, a group that has already been motivated to use strong (if not legally excessive) force against perceived immigrants. No matter that a person may be struggling to avoid mistreatment; their actions will be interpreted by agents and reacted to as “they were resisting arrest.”
“Dehumanization is a mental loophole that lets us harm other people.”
The dark psychology of dehumanization, explained
For Christians, we must always stand up for the inherent dignity of every human being. We are “created in the likeness and image of God,” and have a God-given goodness at the core of our being. There are no individuals or groups that can be separated from God’s love, for “there is neither Jew, nor Greek” among us. Our commitment to social justice requires that we treat others in ways that are consistent with how we would ourselves want to be treated.
If we focus on a fundamental ethical argument against dehumanization and dehumanizing treatment, I would focus on rules-based behaviors. If, like the federal agents, I am beating men or women, depriving them of their rights, wrestling them to the ground, subduing them, handcuffing, imprisoning, I must be prepared that if I were in the same circumstances I would be treated the same way. The agents who act out with great force must be prepared to be treated with similar force by others against them.
“You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 10:19)
“You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21)
However, is there not something “cowardly” about men and women in bullet-proof vests, helmets and masked, with machine guns and all of the symbols of authority arrayed on their vehicles and bodies — standing up against men and women with nothing — no weapons, no instruments of death, no means of self-defense? Even people who have been cleared to continue living in the United States are met by I.C.E. or Border Patrol outside the courtrooms where their status is immediately, inexplicably reversed and without announcement they are imprisoned, trafficked across state lines, and deportation proceedings begin.
Such overwhelming use of force is also now on display outside our Federal buildings in Santa Ana where California National Guards are positioned because of arguably illegal orders from the President. (This case is currently in litigation. I am not a lawyer, but I hope the law supports my intuition that the President has exceeded his authority and violated the Posse Comitatus Act.)
Lost amidst the emotions and anger of government agents, immigrant advocates, and the immigrants themselves are the concepts that these are all people. Every man and woman involved in the stories — even the federal agents — have rich and full lives. Immigrants are people and ought to be afforded time to manage their affairs even if we decide as a nation, through fair and legal processes, they may not remain in our country. Even if that person has committed crimes, even the most heinous crimes, our justice system requires they receive from us a full hearing with all the legal protections afforded “due process.” (If anyone is denied due process, none of us can ever expect to receive it.) Even when a criminal immigrant must be imprisoned, they may not be made to endure “cruel and unusual punishments” (as some immigration detainees currently are experiencing).
Every immigrant has a story. Every immigrant should be given an opportunity to tell that story and be heard. Many are married to U.S. citizens. Many have children, parents, or other family members who are citizens. Nearly all of them have been members of our communities for years, sometimes for decades. They work hard. Many pay taxes. Some have served our nation in the military or overseas assisting military operations in countries that are now exceedingly dangerous for them. In the public propaganda against them, these factual claims are too often discounted, dismissed, or denied.
I suggest instead that dehumanization can best be resisted by rehumanization. Rehumanization is accomplished by making visible the people, the names, and the stories of the immigrants in our communities.
Because we are people of faith we must uphold the dignity of every person involved in the enforcement of immigration laws. Of course, federal agents should not be punched, nor should demonstrators be throwing bottles of frozen water at them. By the same token, federal agents can be firm but kind; patient and emotionally reserved. They should not refer to “bodies” as if they were playing a daily contest to meet someone’s idea of a “good quota” for daily detentions of “illegals.” It would be far better if a “good day” meant that no one was rounded up in handcuffs, everyone had a courtroom hearing, and, if for some reason a person was going to be deported, they were given a chance to manage their affairs appropriately before departure.
Considerations for your prayer
Every person is a child of God. Every child of God deserves a home that is secure, safe, and membership in a community that supports their thriving. The dignity of every human being is a fundamental fact and must be defended for every person, even for criminals.
Not all places in the world are secure or safe for the members of their communities. The immigration crisis, as often as not, begins in the home country where corruption, violence, or injustice are rampant.
The police officer or federal agent has human dignity, and we must recognize they are ethically bound to serve a governmental system where they are required to enforce laws — laws that may be too strict, laws that may be too lenient. Law enforcement, however, cannot be so distorted that we lose sight of its ultimate purpose: the safety and security of all people by protecting our fundamental rights. Otherwise, we might end up with the horrifying logic of “total war,” where we end up “destroying the village in order to save it.”
If we applied laws “totally and absolutely,” every single person would be condemned. Justice requires that we impartially evaluate the circumstances and exceptions for every case. If we follow the rabbis, every one of the 613 laws in the Torah admits exceptions and adaptations to circumstances. All of the commandments given by God in the Quran that I am familiar with are accompanied by the idea that God is not commanding the most from us, but only to do those things that we are able to accomplish given our weaknesses. Law does not save us, St. Paul wrote. But love is the fulfillment of the law. (Romans 13:10)
We can strive to bring the actual stories of men and women in our community into our prayers and contemplations. When we see people punched in the head, we can explore how this feels for us and how we feel for them. We can explore what alternatives we would prefer and how our faith leads us to prefer different treatment for that person.
People of faith can accompany immigrants and refugees through the maze of requirements and procedures they must endure to remain in our nation: hearings, interviews, decisions, paperwork. We do not have to be lawyers, but we can be witnesses and offer testimony to the contributions immigrant men and women have made to our lives. Factual statements about people we know can be voiced in social media, in conversation, among our friends and co-workers. A multitude of quiet claims can effectively resist dehumanizing propaganda from other, louder, more powerful voices.
We can examine our conscience. To what extent have we made people “other” and stripped them of their humanity, even if only in our minds or in the way we talk about them?
We can pray for strength to resist the urge to act out violently. We can ask for inspiration to find ways to express appropriate anger when we witness injustice. We can ask our Higher Power to help us persevere, so that we do not ever become comfortable with the mistreatment or abuse of people who live in our nation.
We can pray for the people named in this story: Narciso, Alejandro, Job, Adrian, Cary, Alberto, and Brayan.
Prayer
God our creator, you raised up humankind from among the creatures of this planet.
You drew us into a place of reason and wisdom. You give us the ability to communicate with words, to form communities, and to share our lives with one another. Thus, we received a special dignity, such that each person has worth and merit, deserving security, liberty, and supportive community.
When areas of our world are dangerous, insecure or fail to thrive, open our hearts and the laws of our lands to receive immigrants and refugees so that they may find a home among us, rebuild their lives, and contribute to our common life.
When people fail to live up to the norms of our land, give us wisdom and patience to treat them with justice, kindness, forbearance, and mercy. Should a person be found unable to remain in our country, give us the resolve to treat them firmly and fairly, deporting them humanely, to locations where they can resume their lives in circumstances appropriate to their background and condition.
O God, when we examine our own perspectives and patterns of speech, we find that we may also fall into dehumanizing language, attitudes, or behaviors. Strengthen our conviction to rehumanize the people who have been marginalized. Give us patience and curiosity to listen to their stories and share them with others.
When we witness injustices or feel appropriate anger toward the actions of authorities, give us imagination and inspiration to speak, to witness, and to mediate disputes without violence or rancor.
Amen.