Where Is Our Humanity?

By Joseph Rittenhouse

Where is our humanity?

How did we let this happen?

Across this country, hardworking men and women—many of them here for decades, tax-paying, law-abiding, community-rooted—are being rounded up like criminals. Torn from jobs. Torn from homes. Torn from children. Loaded into vans, locked behind bars, then flown out of the country with little more than a trash bag of belongings and a gaping hole where their lives used to be.

How can we sit still, unshaken, while they are ripped from their homes? While they are dragged away — in silence, or worse, to the sound of cheers — as those who want them gone, laugh with unashamed satisfaction.

We’re witnessing families being separated.
Parents locked in detention centers.
Mothers deported before dawn.
Fathers vanished before breakfast.

And feel nothing.

We watch. Some cheer. Some look away. Few cry. Fewer speak up.

Is this who we’ve become?

Yes. Let’s get the undocumented criminals, killers and rapists out of our country and while we are at it, get the citizens who live here that break the laws and create crime and mayhem, out of here or put in jail as well.

It is one thing to talk about border policy, national sovereignty, or economic strain. But it’s another to justify tearing families apart as if compassion were a luxury we can no longer afford.

Critics argue that undocumented immigrants are draining our system—taking jobs, crowding classrooms, using public benefits meant for citizens. But here’s what often gets left out: Many of these same people pay taxes. They buy groceries. They pay rent. They raise children who are American citizens. They contribute—quietly, invisibly—to the foundation of industries we depend on. Agriculture. Hospitality. Construction. Elder care.

And yet we cage them.

We send fathers away from their children. We deport mothers in the middle of picking their kids up from school. We smile in front of cages, as if suffering were just policy in action.

We’ve crossed a line. And something sacred is slipping away.

We keep saying this is just wrong. But wrong keeps happening.
Where is our humanity?

When did the spark of compassion dim so low we no longer feel the pain of another’s tears?

If we let this go on—if we continue to rationalize the destruction of families with the cold calculus of politics—we risk losing more than people. We risk losing ourselves.

When history asks us where we stood, what will we say?

“They had no papers”?

Is that the price of our empathy?

Let’s remember who we are.
Let’s remember what it means to be human.

This is not the America of our better angels. This is the America that has misplaced its soul.

But it’s not too late.

We can reclaim our humanity.
We can raise our voices for the voiceless.
We can remember what it means to love our neighbor — even if they were born elsewhere, even if they crossed borders to survive.

No one is illegal in the eyes of God.