Holding pictures of migrant children who have died in U.S. custody and forming a cross with their bodies on the floor of the Russell Senate Office Building, 70 Catholics were arrested in July for obstructing a public place, which is considered a misdemeanor.
The protesters hoped that images of 90-year-old nuns and priests in clerical collars being led away in handcuffs would draw attention to their moral horror at the United States’ treatment of undocumented immigrant families.
American Catholics, like any religious group, do not fit neatly into left-right political categories.
American Christianity is more often associated with right-wing politics.
Conservative Christian groups advocating for public policies that reflect their religious beliefs have conducted extremely visible campaigns to outlaw abortion, keep gay marriage illegal and encourage study of the Bible in schools. Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, an Apostolic Christian, was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses after the U.S. legalized same-sex marriage in 2015.
But there’s always been progressive Christian activism in the United States.
So it’s not quite right to herald the “rise” of a religious left, as several think pieces have done since Christians began openly resisting Trump’s immigration enforcement and other policies. That erases the historic resistance of religious communities of color.
Why immigration
Still, Trump’s hardline immigration policies seem to have spurred a broader population of Christians into action. And their civil disobedience crosses racial, ethnic and even party lines in new ways.
Catholics protesting the treatment of undocumented migrants in US custody at the Senate, on the Catholic Day of Action for Immigrant Children, July 18, 2019. Eli McCarthy, Author provided
One reason for this is simple: Migration has become increasingly visible in recent years, especially under Trump.
Donald Trump began his presidential campaign the next year with a speech maligning migrants. During his administration, his rhetoric has slowly become policy.
In the Biblical text Matthew 25, the “Son of Man” – a figure understood to be Jesus – blesses people who gave food to the hungry, cared for the sick and welcomed strangers. And in Leviticus 19:34, God commands: “The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you.”
These texts help explain why support for immigrants crosses traditional left-right religious boundaries.
After all, they point out, God’s command in Leviticus was to the nation of Israel – not just individual Israelites. And Jesus often told religious and political officials how to act and criticized the oppression of foreigners, widows and orphans by those in authority.
Jewish and Muslim organizations have both provided humanitarian aid to Central American asylum seekers and protested a federal ban on travel from Muslim countries.
And 40 Jewish leaders were arrested in New York City on Aug. 12 for protesting the Trump administration’s detention policies.
Connecting to politicians and interfaith cooperation
The 2020 election season has brought Christian faith-based activism into the political fore. Several Democratic presidential candidates have spoken openly about the faith-based roots of their progressivism.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has referenced the biblical text of Matthew 25 as a touchstone for her critique of wealth inequality and insistence on universal health care.
Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker speaks about gun violence and white supremacy at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church, where nine black Bible study participants were slain in a 2015 mass shooting, Aug. 7, 2019. AP Photo/Mic Smith
In pushing for criminal justice reform, Sen. Cory Booker speaks about the Christian tradition of “grace.” He’s also been known to quote the Prophet Muhammad, Buddha and the Hindu god Shiva.
Mayor Pete Buttigieg is a devout churchgoer who is also gay. He says that his sexual orientation is God-given and that his marriage, in the Episcopal church, to another man, has brought him closer to God.
Talk of an emerging “religious left” is ahistoric. American Christianity has always had its liberal strains, with pastors and parishioners protesting state-sponsored injustices like slavery, segregation, the Vietnam War and mass deportation.
But the high profile, religiously based moral outrage at Trump’s immigration policies does seem to be spurring some long-overdue rethinking of what it means to be Christian in America.
A prominent Manhattan pastor has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that U.S. officials violated her religious freedom when she was put on a watchlist over her ministry to migrants at the border.
The Rev. Kaji Douša, senior pastor of Park Avenue Christian Church and longtime advocate for immigrants’ rights, was the only clergy member listed in a secret government database created to collect information on the caravan of Central American migrants that traveled through Mexico toward the U.S. border last fall.
Her lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection argues that placing her on the watchlist and surveilling her violated her First Amendment rights and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
“I think that what ICE and CBP and DHS are doing is not legal,” Douša told Religion News Service “There is so much rhetoric about so-called illegal immigration, and I don’t understand why people who say ‘do it legally’ don’t apply those same standards to their own government.”
People protest against U.S. immigration policies on the American side, right, of the Mexico-America border near Tijuana on Dec. 10, 2018. RNS photo by Jair Cabrera Torres
Working with the New Sanctuary Coalition, an immigrant advocacy organization, Douša participated in a 40-day “Sanctuary Caravan” of faith leaders in Tijuana, Mexico, late last year to provide pastoral services to hundreds of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. When she returned to the U.S. in January, federal immigration officials detained her for several hours and interrogated her about her work ministering to migrants at the border and in New York City.
“They interrogated her about her motives,” the complaint states. “They interrogated her about her associations. They revealed to Pastor Douša that they had collected detailed information about her and her pastoral work. And they revoked the access she had previously been granted to expedited border crossing.”
Under a program dubbed Operation Secure Line and revealed through leaked DHS documents obtained by San Diego’s NBC affiliate in March, the federal government targeted more than 50 journalists, lawyers and immigration advocates and subjected them to repeated questioning by border authorities.
The documents included Douša’s name and photo with a yellow “X” across her face, reportedly denoting that her Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection, or SENTRI, pass to expedite border crossings had been revoked, apparently due to her connection with the migrants.
ICE declined to comment on the allegations due to the pending litigation.
Douša, a United Church of Christ pastor, has spent years ministering to migrants, both at her Park Avenue church and previously as a pastor at the United Church of Christ of La Mesa, near the border in California.
More than 230 clergy members, including UCC’s top leadership and prominent faith leaders such as the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber and Rabbi Joshua Stanton, have signed a letter supporting Douša.
“In this country, the government cannot decide to whom we may preach or with whom we may pray,” the letter reads. “We believe we should take a stand and say so together … Because, mark our words: If we let them come for some of us now, they will come for all of us in time. That we cannot abide.”
Douša argued that the agencies “significantly burdened” her free exercise of religion, which includes serving the “least of these,” per an excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew that introduces Douša’s complaint.
The lawsuit also alleges that the government has diminished her ministry by compromising her “covenant of confidentiality” with worshippers, who she said include immigrants as well as prominent and powerful Manhattanites.
“It’s very, very difficult for people to be able to have a conversation where they unburden their conscience and seek the path to redemption when they’re worried about whether or not there’s a microphone in the confessional,” Douša said. “I don’t know the extent of the government surveillance. I don’t want to make anybody more vulnerable.”
Rev. Kaji Douša. Photo courtesy of UCC
One of the women she had officiated a wedding for in Tijuana was questioned specifically about her connection with Douša when she presented herself for asylum, the lawsuit alleges.
“The U.S. government cannot retaliate against a member of the clergy because it disfavors the people she leads in prayer,” Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, the law firm representing Douša along with Protect Democracy, said in a statement. “While this sort of authoritarian tactic might fly in other nations we revile as unjust, our Constitution and laws forbid it.”
“I’m not a criminal,” Douša said. “Nothing I’ve done is illegal. I don’t encourage anyone to do anything illegal. And I don’t think they could ever really allege that because there would be no evidence to support it.”
Instead, she said, the government “seems to want to make it as difficult as possible to know the truth about what’s happened at the border. And I see and witness what is happening at our border, and there’s very clear evidence that government does not like that.”
In a related case, federal prosecutors announced last week that they will pursue a retrial against border activist Scott Warren, a volunteer with the faith-based migrant advocacy group No More Deaths, who is facing felony charges and possible prison time for providing humanitarian aid to migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The tragedy of a father and daughter from El Salvador drowning while he tried to save her from being swept away by the strong river current reminded the nation of the horror of the unfolding humanitarian crisis at the border.
We must see them.
Martínez was leading his family from El Salvador to legally seek asylum in the United States.
But he was not able to get through the long wait at the border crossing, so he sought to swim the Rio Grande, stand on American soil, turn himself and his family in to Border Patrol and ask for asylum there.
All of that is legal.
But the river took them before they had a chance.
The bodies of Salvadoran migrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter, Valeria, lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, on June 24, 2019, after they drowned trying to cross the river to Brownsville, Texas. Martínez’s wife, Tania, told Mexican authorities she watched her husband and child disappear in the strong current. (AP Photo/Julia Le Duc)
Martínez and his daughter were not the only migrants to die this week. A 20-year-old migrant woman and three small children were found dead in the desert near McAllen, Texas, having succumbed to the searing heat.
In addition to these deaths, the news from last weekend of migrant children held in detention in Border Patrol stations in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, without access to soap, toothbrushes, diapers or proper care, rightly caused an outcry from the public. Instead of the border security debate dominating the immigration headlines, Americans are now more fully seeing the human suffering of desperate migrants fleeing from home to a country that they hope will be a place of refuge.
The numbers of migrants coming are staggering.
People protest against U.S. immigration policies on the American side, right, of the Mexico-America border near Tijuana on Dec. 10, 2018. RNS photo by Jair Cabrera Torres
The month of May saw almost 133,000 apprehensions at the U.S. southern border, with 96,000 consisting either of family units or unaccompanied children. The large numbers of migrants now turning themselves in to Border Patrol and asking for asylum has overwhelmed our system.
Our laws require that we hear and process asylum claims and that anyone who sets foot on U.S. soil can claim asylum, but with the government’s primary focus being on zero tolerance, deterrence, security, detention, deportation and keeping migrants away from the border, the number of families and children presenting themselves for asylum is too much to properly administer.
The Border Patrol is overwhelmed and chaos has ensued.
Hearing these stories this week reminded me of what I’ve seen in my own trips to the border in the past year, most recently to El Paso less than two months ago.
There, I connected with a network of churches receiving from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hundreds of asylum-seeking migrants a day. The churches gave the migrants food and drink and provided a temporary place to rest before they continued their journey to join family in other parts of America.
I’ll never forget seeing the hollow eyes on the faces of exhausted migrants huddled on cots in a church sanctuary that had been haphazardly turned into a migrant shelter in El Paso.
When I arrived, I was told that these migrants had been released by ICE that day to the church. It was midafternoon, but what struck me was that they were so very tired. They sat in the quiet church worship hall in silence. Some slept. Some just sat and stared. Babies didn’t even cry. Mothers held their children close and just looked ahead. No one said a word. No laughter, no conversation. No crying of the children. Just silence. They were all so tired.
I was told by the pastors of the church that many of the migrants who came to them day after day suffered from violence, rape, extortion and threats of being forced into drug gangs. Many of them saw loved ones murdered and they lived under threats of death at the hands of cartels and drug gangs.
Corrupt police and government officials could not protect the poor who were being used and extorted in these countries that are descending into lawlessness.
Yet, prayers from the pastors, shelter, food, love, hospitality, concern, and being received and embraced as fully human encouraged them greatly.
The work of Catholic, mainline Protestant and evangelical churches along the border over the past several months has been immense. I’ve seen with my own eyes, and through my research with the Evangelical Immigration Table, churches engaging in this hard but needed work of receiving migrants in San Diego-Tijuana; Nogales, Ariz.; El Paso, Texas; and elsewhere. These churches truly are being the hands and feet of Jesus.
But the other side of the work of the church is that it is often fellow Christians who come to the border from the south and make their way across.
I’ve heard from multiple sources that the majority of the migrants coming from Central America are evangelical Christians. I was told by a church shelter manager in Las Cruces, New Mexico, that as many as 75 percent of the migrants they served were evangelicals. Others in El Paso said the proportion of evangelical migrants was well over 50 percent. In significant ways, the ministry of receiving migrants by churches at the border is the ministry of the church embracing Christ himself.
Not long ago, a Nazarene pastor friend of mine was invited to meet with a group of asylum-seekers at the border. Among them was a man named Oscar and his little girl. He had fled to the U.S. to keep her safe. They shared a meal and then Oscar, who said he was part of an evangelical church, told my friend something profound.
“Somos familia,” he said. “Somos hermanos.”
We are family. We are brothers.
Was this the same Oscar? What matters is what the asylum-seeker my friend met said.
“Somos familia. Somos hermanos.”
John Garland, pastor of San Antonio Mennonite Fellowship, has also recently written that approximately 80 percent of the migrants that his church receives are evangelical Christians.
I write this not because I think that evangelical Christians have more value than people of other religions or no religion at all, but because I think it is important for American Christians to know that the migrants coming to us are also our brothers and sisters in Christ.
They are family.
How we treat them and see them is how we treat Jesus (Matthew 25:40).
I believe that Jesus sees these desperate people. I believe they matter to him.
Jesus saw Óscar and Valeria. Jesus saw the woman and the three little children who died in the desert. He sees all of the crowds of migrants, harassed and helpless and fleeing from a home where they are no longer safe to journey to a place they have never been.
He wants us to see them too.
Can we, like Jesus, be moved with compassion for the crowds of migrants coming to us? Can we pray for them and weep for migrants like Óscar and Valeria?
