LOOK LEFT, LOOK RIGHT, STEP FORWARD by The Gent

 The name alone will one day symbolize the darkest depths of American inhumanity. Nestled in the heart of the Florida Everglades, this grotesquely named tent city is no less than a modern day concentration camp erected not to protect a nation, but to warehouse human beings with neither dignity nor mercy. Under the direction of President Donald Trump, it has become a grim emblem of his administration’s escalating cruelty, where migrant, fleeing violence and persecution are crammed into sweltering enclosures, denied due process, and shuffled like cargo to distant detention centers or deported without warning.

Despite the mounting outrage, nothing is done!  In the Catholic world, the silence is deafening. Only a few have dared to challenge the moral void, while hate filled rhetoric and militarized enforcement go largely unopposed from the pulpits. Where once the Church stood with the vulnerable, today it risks becoming complicit through its inaction.

Pope Leo XIV once called migrants “signs of hope,” a reflection of our shared humanity. Yet at Alligator Alcatraz, hope is crushed, transformed into despair, exile, and invisibility. This is a test of conscience. If we remain silent in the face of this indiscriminate cruelty, history will ask where was the Church? JG