Parenting & Family Quote by Roger Mahony

Mahony’s “unacceptable” lands like a gavel strike, and he swings it twice to make sure you feel the point: this isn’t a policy dispute, it’s a moral emergency. As a cleric, he’s not trying to out-argue border enforcement; he’s trying to out-shame it. The repetition isn’t rhetorical fluff. It’s a deliberate escalation that refuses to let the listener mentally file one horror (“shackled and detained”) as an unfortunate exception and the other (“died by the dozens”) as an inevitable byproduct. He binds them together as a single indictment of a system.

The subtext is aimed as much at complacent observers as at officials. “Including children” is a strategic moral tripwire, designed to short-circuit the usual justifications about legality and deterrence. You can debate visas; it’s harder to defend handcuffing kids without sounding monstrous. “Deplorable conditions” broadens blame beyond individual bad actors to the infrastructure that makes cruelty routine: detention as a machine, not a mishap.

Then comes the desert, and the quote widens its frame from the visible to the conveniently invisible. Death “in the California desert” implicates geography as policy: the border isn’t only a line, it’s a landscape weaponized by enforcement strategies that push crossings into lethal terrain. Mahony’s intent is pastoral and political at once: to re-humanize migrants in a discourse that prefers numbers, and to tell Catholics and civic leaders that neutrality here is its own form of complicity.