Congress has passed President Trump’s sweeping budget bill, turning its back on our country’s most vulnerable. In these halls of power, where few trace their roots to the lands beneath their feet, descendants of immigrants now plot the deportation, detention and disappearance of the most recent generation of arrivals.
The hypocrisy is as thick as the marble lining the floors of the Capitol. To wield the gavel against those who walked paths once trod by your own ancestors is to spit on the legends told around family tables — the stories of hardship, crossing and hope. It is also, bluntly, a sin.
Make no mistake: This budget does not just “cut costs.” It kills. Speaking plainly, there will be children who go hungry, men and women who die for want of Medicaid. There will be elders whose final days are spent in needless pain, denied the dignity of medicine. There will be immigrants, drawn by the same dream that lured forebears, who vanish into the gears of a detention machine — some forever, as deaths rise in for-profit immigrant prisons.
Members of Congress may rise each morning to the rituals of American civil religion — pledges, anthems, prayers before the flag — but blaspheme the core creed. The covenant was never with billionaires or defense contractors, but with the “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Our representatives have forgotten the swift, hard words of Jesus, who in Matthew 25 warned: “What you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.” Those who ignore the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned he called goats, fit for the fire.
Our lawmakers have lost touch with both conscience and constituents. They write budgets for donors and dynasties, not neighbors. Campaign promises have become jokes whispered at corporate tables, oaths of office discarded as easily as yesterday’s headlines. A crop of elected officials now act as courtiers, not servants; they demand we eat cake and dare call it “shared sacrifice.”
This is not simply politics as usual. This is not even the disruption of ordinary politics. It is a mass betrayal — a sacrifice of the vulnerable on the altar of greed.
But the ledgers of history are not yet closed. Our nation’s destiny is not in the hands of politicians alone. The time for mourning must become a time for action.
We, the people, are demanding more than empty speeches. We are interrupting the rituals of cruelty with sacred refusal by filling the streets with religious leaders and people of faith fighting for our immigrant siblings in Los Angeles and Newark, N.J., at Delaney Hall, overflowing the town halls, surrounding the offices of power with furious compassion as we did with hundreds of religious leaders at a Pentecost action at Capitol Hill. Let love for your neighbor ring louder than the drums of division. Feed the hungry, shelter the stranger, care for the sick — not as charity, but as defiant solidarity. We are ungovernable to injustice.
To every member of Congress: You are not helpless pawns. Your vote is not just a mark on paper — it is a measure of your soul. Remember your own ancestors; remember your conscience; remember the eyes of history and the gaze of the least of these.
If you persist in this way, do not say you were not warned. Let the nation remember: silence is complicity, compassion is revolt.
Bishop Dwayne Royster is the executive director of Faith in Action, the largest U.S. and global faith-based grassroots organizing network. He previously served as the executive director of POWER Interfaith in Pennsylvania, a federation of Faith in Action, and has pastored Black congregations in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
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