𝐂𝐋𝐄𝐑𝐆𝐘 𝐐𝐔𝐈𝐄𝐓𝐋𝐘 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐒𝐓 𝐓𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐎𝐅 𝐈𝐌𝐌𝐈𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐒 𝐖𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐄 𝐀𝐏𝐏𝐄𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐓𝐎 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐂𝐈𝐄𝐍𝐂𝐄

 

They came without banners. To San Diego, California.  No slogans, no fists raised, no defiance broadcast for the news cameras. Only presence. Quiet, deliberate, and clothed in the austere black of the cloth.

The air inside the federal building was sterile, filtered, cold—like a breath drawn from behind a barred window in December. Fluorescent lights glared down with the pitiless scrutiny of bureaucracy. It was not a courtroom, it was an engine. One that hummed with the rhythm of exile.

Among the pews of plastic chairs and pale walls, stood the men and women of the cloth—priests, rabbis, ministers. Not as saviors, not as intercessors in the legal sense, but as witnesses. Their eyes would see what others refused to see. Their ears would strain to hear what had long been whispered only in the shadows.

The Rev. Scott Santarosa, a Jesuit and son of the interior struggle, called it simply a visitation. But that word—so meek on the tongue—carried the weight of ancient trials. In Russia, we had a saying: "God is where there is suffering." And here, in this antiseptic chamber of adjudicated fates, God was.

“More than anything,” he said, “just to provide some sense of presence.”

But presence, when the world demands absence, is already a resistance.

Outside, Bishop Michael Pham, flanked by the interfaith procession, stood not as a protestor but as a remembrance. Of another time. Of another border. He had once crossed too—not a legal threshold, but the chasm between war and peace, silence and voice, despair and hope. A refugee from Vietnam, now adorned with the vestments of the Church and the heavy gaze of memory. He did not shout. He prayed. That, too, was a kind of rebellion.

The Mass that preceded the court visit had been offered not to the crowned heads of earthly power, but to the stateless, the nameless, the quietly hunted. On World Refugee Day, no cannon was fired in their honor—only incense.

“We feel as if we were hunted, as if we were animals,” a woman had told Santarosa in the cloistered simplicity of the sacristy. Her words were not new. Solzhenitsyn had heard them in the wind-swept forests of the Archipelago. The hunted man, the displaced woman, the child peering from behind wire—each generation has their own tribunal.

This time it was San Diego. This time the machine wore a smile, a suit, a flag.

But still the faithful came. Not with the power to stop the machinery, but with the eyes to see it. In a world increasingly organized for forgetfulness, to remember—to witness—was holy work.

And perhaps, just perhaps, even that might trouble the conscience of the system.

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