The Via Dolorosa

by

Special to United Methodist Insight | June 16, 2025

Among the many duties of the pastoral vocation, accompaniment is among the most sacred.  Last Tuesday, I joined a faithful member of my Sunday School class as he fulfilled his civic duty to appear before an immigration judge at the federal courthouse on Dolorosa Street in San Antonio, Texas.   

Declared dead by the dictatorship of Venezuela, this elderly man, a pro-democracy dissident and refugee, suffered the arduous journey through the Darien Gap to pursue the “unalienable right” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  A diabetic, he suffered a minor stroke during his journey but arrived alive and applied for asylum.  Tuesday was his opportunity to share his story.

Arriving to the fourth floor of the courthouse, we passed through metal detectors and noticed several overweight men in plain clothes with long beards and tattoos. Equipped with paramilitary ICE vests, face coverings, zip ties and other armaments, the men looked over photographs featuring the very immigrants who were assembling for their hearings.  A female ICE agent joined them wearing casual attire.

Disallowed from joining my parishioner in the courtroom, I visited with others facing uncertain futures: a Cuban refugee about to lose his Bolivian wife and children, a family whose five-year-old nephew would be judged alone as an adult, a domestic violence survivor with two small children (one a U.S. citizen), and a young man whose only request of me was a loving embrace.

After three hours, my parishioner emerged from the courtroom.  Before I could speak to him, he was taken downstairs to the detention bus as the media broadcast images that have since gone viral on social media.  Another immigrant shared that their cases had all been desestimados, dismissed without any hearing.  Instead of freedom and the protection of double jeopardy, the dismissal reset the entire review process and resulted in immediate detention.  

Once in custody, detention turns the presumed guilty immigrant into an asset of the publicly traded for-profit detention industry.  Detention services are a crony capitalist cash cow.  Profits flow through a network of mercenary prisons to shareholders, lobbyists, and the politicians responsible for policies that fill them.  The 13th Amendment prohibits exploiting human souls in bondage for profit.  The taxpayer funded kidnapping, hazing, and extortion of those who have been denied justice should be no exception to this prohibition, but like its predecessor, this new form of the slave trade is as profitable as it is corrupting and addictive.

The following day, I received word from a young mother who was released.  As her children trembled and wept in fear, she was told that her only way out of detention was to sign a false confession: “Failure to Appear.”  Captured at the courthouse and detained for due diligence, she signed the form, was fitted with the grillete ankle monitor (another profit generator), and was given a new date to face the consequences for having respected a court in contempt of her right to due process.

Meanwhile, my parishioner, age 71, remains in detention, determined to seek asylum as his church, his true asylum, prays for his release and health.

For the law-abiding immigrant, Dolorosa Street has become a Via Crucis.  The Passion of Christ begins with the unholy alliance between corrupt religion and sadistic empire.  Sold for profit, Jesus is arrested without resistance and falsely accused.  Pilate washes his hands just as unethical attorneys “rest” immigration cases and judges prematurely dismiss them.  The bitter fruit is the same: the vilification of virtue followed by a public spectacle that fuels the propaganda of terror.

Jesus taught his disciples that what we do to the foreigner, the child, the vulnerable, we do to him.  Aborting justice to create hateful propaganda and mercenary profit does not make America great.  It defiles our nation and crucifies Christ.  

The Rev. John P. Feagins serves as pastor of Manchaca UMC in the Austin, Texas, area (Rio Texas Annual Conference). This post is republished with permission from his blog, Plenaria.