John Steinbeck once did something few writers would ever dare. He hid in a migrant camp under a fake name — just to see if America would treat him like one of its own. It didn’t.
It was 1936, the heart of the Great Depression. Steinbeck kept hearing stories — families from Oklahoma and Texas, farmers who had lost everything to dust and drought, were flooding into California in broken trucks. They came chasing a dream, but what they found was hunger, hate, and fields owned by men who saw them as less than human.
Newspapers called them “Okies.” Politicians called them “a problem.”
Steinbeck couldn’t just write about it from a distance. “If you want to understand a man’s pain,” he once said, “you have to walk with him in the mud.” So he borrowed an old car, put on torn clothes, and vanished into the San Joaquin Valley. For weeks, he lived among the migrant workers — sleeping under the stars, eating scraps, and sharing stories by dying campfires.
He watched mothers try to hush their crying babies with songs instead of food. He saw children digging through trash for rotten fruit. “You have no idea how terrifying hunger sounds when it cries,” he later wrote. “It changes the shape of a man’s face.”
Every night, after the others slept, Steinbeck sat by a lantern and scribbled — pieces of dialogue, sketches of faces, small moments of grace in a world built on suffering. Out of those notes came The Grapes of Wrath.
When it was published in 1939, it shook America to its core. Growers burned the book in public. Politicians called him a liar. Churches banned it from shelves. But the people who had lived those lives — the ones with blistered hands and dust in their lungs — they wept. “He told the truth,” one farmer said. “At last, someone saw us.”
The FBI opened a file on him, calling his work “dangerous” and “un-American.” He received death threats. Armed men from the Associated Farmers of California watched his home day and night. A friend once asked if he was scared. Steinbeck just smiled and said, “No. I’m ashamed it took me this long to pay attention.”
He won the Pulitzer, then the Nobel Prize, but he never forgot the camps. “I am not a writer of escape,” he said. “I am a writer of the people who cannot escape.”
John Steinbeck didn’t just write about the American Dream — he lived with the people who were denied it. And in the dust and hunger, he found not just despair, but dignity — the kind that refuses to die, even when everything else is gone.
My Commentary:
I am sure another John Steinbeck will emerge with what is happening in our country today.
Congress has allocated over $145 billion in direct funding to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through two major legislative packages. This comes on top of the agency’s standard annual appropriations.
Life inside ICE detention centers closely mirrors that of a high-security prison, despite being legally classified as “civil” custody. Many individuals are held in remote facilities surrounded by razor wire, fences, and locked doors.
Detainees have reported sleeping on concrete floors or sharing one open-air toilet among dozens of people. Detainees frequently complain about extreme temperature fluctuations, filthy facilities, and continuous artificial lighting that disrupts sleep.
Private prison operators like CoreCivic often pay detained individuals a nominal fee (such as $1 a day) to clean and maintain the facility, which is often the only way they can afford basic hygiene items from the commissary. Solitary confinement is frequently and controversially used. It is often used for minor infractions like eating too slowly or complaining.
Approximately 70.8% of the people currently in ICE detention centers have no criminal convictions on record. An additional 25% of the people in detention centers have only minor offenses, such as traffic violations. ICE detentions have affected over 205,000 children, leaving an estimated 145,000 children who are U.S. citizens, living without at least one parent.
Jesus would remind us that every migrant is first and foremost a human being, created in the image and likeness of God. Before there are questions of borders, laws, or policies, there are mothers, fathers, children, and families whose dignity must never be forgotten.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus consistently stood beside the stranger, the outcast, and the vulnerable. He Himself was once a refugee when Joseph and Mary fled with Him into Egypt. He knows what it means to seek safety far from home.
Christians can hold different views about immigration policy, border security, and how nations should enforce their laws. Those are legitimate matters for thoughtful debate. But there should be no debate about how people are treated once they are in our care.
Jesus would ask us a simple question: “Did you see Me in them?” For He taught, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
Whatever policies a nation adopts, they should always reflect justice tempered by mercy, security balanced with compassion, and law exercised with respect for human dignity.
The measure of a society is not only how it protects its borders, but also how it treats the most vulnerable people within them.
For when we recognize the face of Christ in the stranger, we begin to build not only a safer nation, but a more humane one.
“If you want to understand a man’s pain, you have to walk with him in the mud.”
Have YOU ever walked with someone in the mud when they felt abandoned?
WRAP YOURSELF IN GOD’S LOVE ON A DAILY BASIS AND LET IT BE YOUR GUIDE FOR EVERYTHING YOU DO!
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