Here in Inglewood, and in many areas of greater Los Angeles, we deal with a perplexing urban phenomenon: coyotes, sometimes in packs, prowl about at night and in the early morning. They’re hunting small animals, often rodents and cats. Nobody knows why the coyotes are on the increase, though there’s speculation. Are they from sprawling parks? Or scorched hillsides? Or even from deserted oil fields? Lately, though, we’ve been dealing with another perplexing, and far more dangerous, urban phenomenon. Some call it la migra. More specifically, it’s ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s mission is to protect us from transnational crime and illegal immigration. National security and public safety are at stake, or so we are told.

Crime is crime, whether national or transnational, and criminals should be stopped. That’s hardly controversial. So let’s cut to the chase. ICE is now hunting undocumented workers. And where? The agency is arresting workers looking for day jobs at commercial warehouses like Home Depot. It’s picking up suspects employed at busy car washes. It’s even stopping folks in Church parking lots. Sometimes ICE agents find their targets outside public schools. There was also a well-filmed incident at Dodger Stadium, where they were denied entry.

As a result, ICE is responsible for a poisonous climate of fear. Latino in-home caregivers, so desperately needed, now worry about whether it’s safe to go to work. Some folks wonder about attending soccer matches. L.A.’s teeming garment center is emptying out. Informal phone trees are springing up to alert people at risk.

The chosen modus operandi of ICE agents is odious. Agents operate without standard uniforms, and they are often masked. They drive unmarked cars with tinted windows. When challenged, agents refuse to identify themselves and sometimes detain those who challenge them. The worst-case scenario, which the Supreme Court has just sanctioned, is that arrested immigrants can be sent, against their will and with little notice, to troubled countries for detention—including South Sudan.

Archbishop José Gomez is forthright in addressing this perplexing and dangerous phenomenon. He writes, “Statements and actions from the new administration in Washington have caused fear in our parishes, schools, and communities. That’s not good for anybody. I pray that our leaders will proceed with restraint and compassion, with respect for the law, and with respect for the rights and dignity of all concerned.” More than politics is at stake. The immigration crisis tests our deeply held religious beliefs. “Jesus Christ,” Gomez reminds us, “commanded us to love God as our Father and to love our brothers and sisters, especially the most vulnerable, and regardless of what country they came from or how they got here.”

Pope Leo XIV, in recent days, has spoken of the primacy of natural law over merely civil law. “Natural law,” he points out, “is universally valid apart from and above other more debatable beliefs,” and it “constitutes the compass by which to take our bearings in legislating and acting, particularly on the delicate and pressing ethical issues that, today more than in the past, regard personal life and privacy.”

Amid today’s raging debates about immigration policymaking, three principles of Catholic Social Teaching need underscored. The first is the principle of the universal destination of goods. Simply put, things are for people. The second is the principle of stewardship. We are none of us the absolute owners of the land or the seas or the air. We are only stewards. The third is a principle of civic membership. Human beings have a right to immigrate, or not to emigrate, in keeping with their deepest needs. No State “owns” anyone.

To be sure, gentle reader, I present these principles bluntly. This is a blog post, not an academic text. I’m pleased, though, to recommend a stellar new book that both rewards study and offers legislators the excellent guidance to which they often seem adverse. The book is Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law: Principles for Human Flourishing (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025) by Melissa Moschella, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life.

A critical policy consideration for legislators, and for President Trump, is how to order immigration regulations that impact the family. Common sense and common decency tell us we should keep families together. Moschella is a friend of both. “The unit of society,” she argues, “is the family.” We are, indeed, political animals. Nonetheless, the State is only an instrumental good. Hence, the State is only the topmost agency of the people. Moschella writes that “the specific point of political community (and its corresponding coercive authority)—consists in the conditions that enable the community’s members to pursue their own flourishing” (emphasis hers). The immediate take-away: in breaking up the families of immigrants, which it regularly does, ICE is an agency not of the people but of a tyranny. In this regard, its operatives in Los Angeles are far more dangerous than a marauding pack of coyotes.