Texas wants to criminalize, close Catholic outfit that sends asylum seekers through KC | Opinion

Just before Christmas in 2022, a group of Christian, Muslim and Jewish volunteers known as the KC Welcome Alliance welcomed its first busload of asylum seekers to Kansas City, where they were fed, treated by doctors, housed for a night and then sent on to the families in other parts of the country who had agreed to sponsor them.

The Star covered that effort, which had to be kept secret, organizers felt, quite understandably, until after the asylum-seekers had already come and gone. Because, as one of the organizers, Bill Cordaro, said at the time, “Kansas City is a very welcoming city. I’m just concerned about the crazies out there” inflamed by anti-immigrant political speech.

Now some different, and even more dangerous crazies — my characterization, not Cordaro’s — are threatening the work of the KC Welcome Alliance. And what’s more, they’re threatening religious liberty in this country.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general (and Missouri AG Andrew Bailey’s role model) who would have been impeached by members of his own party last fall if his savior Donald Trump had not intervened, is trying to close the Annunciation House in El Paso, alleging that helping migrants amounts to “human smuggling.”

Annunciation House is the outfit that the KC Welcome Alliance works with. It’s also the Catholic shelter network, named at the personal suggestion of Mother Teresa — yes, that Mother Teresa — that has for half a century been caring for migrants at the border.

If Paxton, who in a complete absence of shame has called the place a “stash house,” is successful in suing and closing the place, and in criminalizing its ministry, then, as Cordaro asks, what does religious liberty in this country really amount to?

“Jews, Muslims and Christians all have a strong commandment to care for the marginalized, and specifically for refugees,” he told me over coffee on Wednesday. “Now the government is trying to keep us from doing something that’s at the center of who we are.” No can do, says the First Amendment.

A recent New Yorker piece about Annunciation House and its founder, Ruben Garcia, headlined “El Paso’s Saint of the Border Negotiates a New Reality,“ says that without Garcia’s efforts, “tens of thousands of people would have been on the streets of El Paso without food, without shelter, without comfort,” according to Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso in Congress. She calls Garcia “a saint who still walks the Earth.”

Saints, let’s face it, are rarely popular with those in power.

Trump, Paxton defy Jesus’ teachings on immigrants

But are those who walk the Earth still allowed to do the work Jesus asked of all of his followers in the United States of America?

Or is religious liberty only a constitutionally protected right for those who decline to bake wedding cakes for gay couples?

I disagreed with a lot of my friends on that Masterpiece Cakeshop case, because I thought that was both a free speech and religious liberty issue, and that the baker was within his rights to refuse. “I’d bake a cake for a same-sex wedding,” and then dance at the celebration, I wrote in 2017, “but Jack Phillips shouldn’t have to.”

The Christian imperative — not suggestion, or option, but imperative — to welcome the stranger is all over the Bible, so why is living out that imperative being criminalized by the same Ken Paxton who is so keen to keep women from ending even nonviable pregnancies?

Paxton’s protector Trump has said he wants to “terminate” the U.S. Constitution, so at least there’s no inconsistency in the fact that his acolytes like Paxton are also ignoring the constitutional guarantee that, as Cordaro says, “if someone steps foot on our land, we have an obligation to protect their rights.”

In 2018, Trump said the immigrants his administration was deporting “are not people. These are animals.” He has also said of refugees, “I guarantee you they are bad.”

The other day, that same proud Christian soldier, the former president, told a group of wildly applauding religious broadcasters that “they” — you know, “they” — “want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags. But no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration, I swear to you.”

Would you know the cross of Jesus if all the splinters flew back into place and it fell on you?

What is a social justice flag, anyway?

Jesus, FYI, was the original SJW.

I await your cross-of-Christ inspired turnaround on the immigrants who are, if you’re going to listen even in passing to that guy whose cross you claim to be so ready to defend, actually people.

And as long as this is actually America, we are within our rights to welcome them.