Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Maryland, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, speaks during a news conference at CASA's Multicultural Center in Hyattsville, Md., Friday, April 4, 2025.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Maryland, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, speaks during a news conference at CASA's Multicultural Center in Hyattsville, Md., Friday, April 4, 2025.
West Virginia is a home, not a homeland. I’ve learned to recognize the dog whistles. It comes with the territory of being Affrilachian. Yes, Black Appalachians exist; in spite of the Republican Party’s debased attempts to erase us from public life and history here in West Virginia, we exist.
The people in the southern part of our state don’t have clean water, have had their homes destroyed, and some of our most vulnerable are fearful of cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Our state Legislature is outright dysfunctional and was unable to pass anything of substance to better this state in the ways it needs it most.
We had enough embarrassment at the state level in the past two months to last us a lifetime. I couldn’t have ever imagined that a congressional representative from West Virginia could make it even worse by using the prisoners of Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, in El Salvador, for a pro-fascist photoshoot.
Whatever the arrangement of their charges, Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va., chose to make a spectacle of their bodies. He also chose to do this during Holy Week, the week of our Lord’s Passion and Resurrection. I say “our†because Moore professes a belief in Christ as I do, though there is a chasm of difference in how we each treat our fellow human beings.
The men whom Moore saw in that prison were made in the image of God, as much as the rest of us are. The Lord’s teachings of the works of mercy affords them a further dignity, for among those we are called to serve are the imprisoned. Serve, not dehumanize.
That Moore aligns with such a cause, and furthermore denies the work of mercy of welcoming the stranger that is also present in the Gospels, should give him great pause. And that Moore would do all this and claim to want to protect the people he should be serving while ignoring the real plights present in their lives, indeed enabling and aiding a political party that propagates them, speaks volumes that Moore neither knows West Virginia’s history nor cares anything whatsoever for her people.
