08/01/2026
“If we accept dramatic enforcement as the sole solution to America’s immigration problems, we must also accept the ways it will deform the church and our national consciences,” argued Andy Olsen earlier this year.
“It will dull our sensibilities until we simply accept statements like the one from Rep. Jim Jordan, who, when asked in October about footage of masked federal agents arresting journalists and shooting a pastor with a pepper-spray ball, told a journalist, ‘ICE agents are doing the Lord’s work.’
Law enforcement, like almost all work, can of course be God-honoring and, per Romans 13, God-ordained. But to rest on such blanket statements is to refuse to see the moral mess of humanity that God sees.
Alabama state troopers presumably arrested plenty of dangerous criminals in the weeks before they loosed their billy clubs on peaceful Black marchers in Selma. Was that all the Lord’s work?
The greatest harm of an enforcement-only immigration policy, however, is how it is battering segments of society to which Scripture repeatedly commands Christians to give special deference: the poor, the foreigner among us, the ‘least of these.’
When the legislature doesn’t articulate sensible immigration policies or insist on adherence to them, the poor have little defense against capricious enforcers.
Even immigrants who thought they were following the rules—entering the country lawfully under a special program, staying out of trouble, going to church, paying taxes—are being torn from their families and stuffed into detention centers.
All of this is driving what might be called ‘Beatitude communities’—the ‘blesseds’ of Matthew 5—into deeper levels of isolation and mistrust.
This is the antithesis of a Christian objective. Christ calls people into community and into the light, not into the shadows.”
From the CT archive: https://chrst.today/4pKLT1U
