God across the border
A Review of Isaac Samuel Villegas' "Migrant God", and the theological case for welcoming immigrants
In one of the early chapters of Isaac Samuel Villegas' new book, Migrant God: A Christian Vision for Immigrant Justice, the author, an ordained minister in the Mennonite Church USA and son of two immigrants, describes going on a trip to the US-Mexican Border to take part in the ritual of setting up makeshift crosses at the place where those attempting to find a new life in America have died in the desert. With a group of others, Villegas journeys deep into the Sonoran wilderness of southern Arizona, and when they come upon the GPS coordinates where the body of one Lucio Sanchez-Zepeda was found, they erect the cross and conduct a short memorial service.
That deep into the desert, and that near the border, is what the US Border Patrol calls "the Constitution-free zone" wherein the rights and privileges of human beings no longer apply. People like Sanchez-Zepeda - and the thousands of other men, women and children who haven't been named and memorialized - are the victims of "a system of violence without perpetrators", where nature has been made "an accessory to crimes against migrants." It is a land where a grand game is being played out, in the form of water access: human rights and immigrant justice groups set up water stations, with jugs of water for the dangerous journey across the blazing desert, and the USBP destroys those jugs of water and lets it seep back into the unforgiving desert. The US government, on our behalf, has decided that those searching for a better life here in our country are not worthy of human rights. In order to enforce this decision, they close off access to things as basic as water to drink, and weaponize the desert against them.
Or, at least, that's how it has been over the past decade or so. This year has seen that "Constitution-free zone" extended across the whole of the United States, and the desire to maintain clean hands by letting the desert swallow people up get overtaken by a primeval lust for cruelty and vengeance against migrants. The methods honed over the years by ICE and USBP have been unleashed: on migrants, on legal residents, on college students, on vacationing Europeans. The new Trump Administration has laid down a marker: the battle for the future of America is going to be over immigration, and who deserves to be present in this country.
Christians should be taking note, and readying ourselves to take a stand. Our faith calls us to a particular stance towards migrants and strangers: a stance of welcome, of compassion, of sanctuary. As Villegas notes,
"The God of the Bible takes sides in human conflicts..in favour of the threatened innocent, the oppressed poor, widows, orphans and aliens. God always takes His stand unconditionally and passionately on this side and on this side alone: against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly; against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those are denied it and deprived of it. God defends the defenseless and liberates the oppressed because that's the nature of God: a divine life in solidarity with people crushed in the gears of our politics."
Villegas knows what the liberation theologians of the 20th century taught us: that God has a preferential option, for the poor and the stranger and the orphan. God is not equally on the side of the rich and the poor. God's love extends to all people, but it shows up in different ways: in compassion and justice for the poor; in condemnation and liberation (from wealth) for the rich and powerful. The church forgets this too often. The situation at our border and in our streets should be serving as a reminder.
Most of all, we are called to be turned towards those who society has deemed worthy of less than life. Our world is built in a way that sustains a few, that enriches the life of some, at the expense of the many. As Villegas notes, "The US economy plunders wealth from the other side of the borders while fencing out people desperate for the livelihood taken from them." Our way of life demands the denuding of others, the stripping away of their lives, and if they come looking for a share in what was taken, we use the violence of the state, of the border, to keep them out.
Yet we forget that God overcame death, and delivered life to those it had been taken away from:
“The Christian faith turns the living toward the dead. The torture and execution of Jesus Christ conditions our imagination, our hope. Communion, a central ritual of the church, habituates our posture toward the death of Jesus - and, through our memorial of his crucifixion, we bow our lives toward the victims of our world's violence. The focus of the eucharistic words of institution, as passed on to us from the apostle Paul, is death: "For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" (1 Corinthians 11:26). The liturgy appeals to his absent body; communicants re-present his life. Redemption, according to this Christian vision, is a stubborn memory. Communion proclaims an eschatology in which the disappeared aren't left behind.”
Welcoming the migrant and the stranger is our Christian duty. It is a moral imperative for anyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus Christ. There is no grey area on this; no amount of theological wrangling or clever sermonizing can spin it any other way. The words of the Bible, and of Christ himself, are clear. And the world is presenting a prime opportunity for Christians to put our beliefs into action, right here and right now. Will we miss this moment?
The story of God's people is grounded in their identity as strangers and immigrants. Abram, the father of the collective faith of Christians and Jews and Muslims, was a wanderer, an immigrant, leaving his Mesopotamian home and searching west for a new place to settle and inherit the promises of his covenant with God. Eventually, his descendants, numerous as they were, ended up in Egypt, slaves to Pharaoh and yearning to leave. The Exodus is the paradigmatic experience of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and it is the story of God's people willingly taking on the status of migrants and strangers. This identity was enshrined in the Law given them by God through Moses: "You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." (Exodus 23:9)
This concern for justice for the alien was expanded upon in the Levitical codes later in Torah:
"When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt." (Leviticus 19:33-34)
Even enemy aliens were to be cared for: "You shall not abhor any of the Egyptians, because you were an alien residing in their land." (Deuteronomy 23:7)
Again and again, God reminds the people: "Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there." (Deuteronomy 24:18)
God requires a remembrance, that God's people maintain the bond of kinship with any who wander in search of a home, a better life, because we have all been that wanderer at one point or another.
Nor do the prophets let them forget it:
"And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place." (Jeremiah 22:3)
"Thus says the Lord of hosts: Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another; do no oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor." (Zechariah 7:9-10)
"I will be swift to bear witness...against those who thrust aside the alien." (Malachi 3:5)
Care and concern for the alien, the stranger, the immigrant, is deep in the bones of the Jewish people, and woven into the roots of our shared faith in a foundational way. The Judeo-Christian tradition is grounded in the experience of a people who wandered and searched for a home. It is animated by repeated reminders from our God to practice mercy and justice and compassion towards the weak, the hurting, the orphan, the widow, and of course, the alien. We cannot cover up or turn away from this heritage. And we cannot live in any way but that which honors that tradition of care.
Two weeks ago, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem traveled to the infamous El Salvadoran prison where the United States is currently housing a variety of people who it claims are dangerous gang members, but who in reality we have little idea about who they are or what crimes they have committed. Using a cage full of human beings as a prop, the Secretary warned "This is one of the consequences you could face" for committing the crime of pursuing a better life for your family, or for fleeing gang violence, or even, apparently, for doing everything right and just having the wrong tattoo according to an ICE agent. The photo op by the Secretary was particularly fascistic, in the instrumentalization and dehumanization of other human beings. Noem seemed unbothered by the optics of her visit, clad in a Homeland Security baseball cap and $60,000 Rolex watch, while prisoners were crammed 80 or more to a cell, clad only in white sweat pants. (Later photos showed that they all had shirts on upon her arrival; apparently, someone in her team made the decision to have them remove their shirts for the video, for effect, I guess.)
In the prison that Noem toured currently resides legal US resident Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 16 to escape imminent gang violence threatening his life in El Salvador. Kilmar married a US citizen, and had a child, who is now 5. In 2019, he received permanent legal resident status from the US government, and he has been gainfully employed since. A few weeks ago, driving his five year old home from school, he was stopped and apprehended by ICE, accused of being a member of MS-13 based on a false accusation from another prisoner and because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey, and illegally deported back to the very place he escaped from in fear of his life.
In response to the legal case brought by his family, the United States government admitted it had made a mistake in deporting Mr. Garcia, saying it had gotten him mixed up with someone else. But, instead of bringing him home and reuniting him with his family, the Administration washed its hands of his fate, claiming it has no ability to bring him home now that he is in El Salvador. This despite the fact that we are paying El Salvador $6 million to house these people on our behalf. If they cannot return them to us on request, what is the point, besides the cruelty?
Of course, none of the people employed in Donald Trump's government could admit any wrong doing, or allow a glimpse of their humanity to be seen in any situation involving an immigrant. Vice President JD Vance tweeted (because that's what our leaders do now, they just tweet) that Mr. Garcia was "a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here" This is an amazing statement; in just 12 words, Vance managed to cram in at least three lies - Mr. Abrego Garcia was convicted of no crime (that would require a court date and hearing to determine), he is not a member of MS-13 (he was wrongfully accused by another prisoner based on a misunderstanding of a tattoo), and he is legally present in the United States since 2019.
This is just one case. There is also Andrys, the gay Venezuelan make-up artist sent to El Salvador. There is Neri Alvarado, the Dallas man, well-known in his community for volunteering his time for special needs kids, deported because some genius ICE agent thought his Autism Awareness tattoo was a gang symbol. There is the professional soccer player, Jerce Reyes Barrio, whose own tattoo crime was a logo for Spanish soccer team and worldwide icon Real Madrid1.
The US government has defended the removal of all these people. It has worked overtime to dehumanize and slander them. It had denied them due process, and subverted the proper functioning of our courts. It has done all this because Donald Trump and his minions decided that the targeting of immigrants was the surest path to power. In pursuit of their own selfish ends, they have used human beings, degraded them, violated them. They do this to undermine our Constitutional protections and to try prime the ground for further limiting of American rights. The choice to detain and deport legal residents who have committed no crime is intentional. It is to signal that the law now serves Trump and his Administration, not the other way around.
But, these cases, they weigh on the souls of all of us. They are a strike against our nation's claim to goodness, to truth. They are attacks on our integrity as a people. They undo the idea pushed by these same leaders that we are in some way a uniquely Christian nation. The immigrants among us, they have a claim on us, on our shared humanity. When we dehumanize them, we dehumanize ourselves. As Villegas reminds us, "When we see immigrants hunted down and expelled from our country, they are not separate from us because our stories belong to each other."
Any time the debate over immigration ramps up in our country, a familiar collection of arguments are trotted out to defend the idea that we must be harder on immigrants, that we must be ruthless in our treatment of those here illegally, and increasingly, those here legally as well. While these arguments often appear common sense and reasonable, they rest on misconceptions, mistruth, and misunderstandings. Most crucially, they almost all fail to take seriously the human aspect of immigration, instead reducing people in dire and difficult situations to caricatures and statistics.
The most recent iteration of the immigration debate in America has prominently included a conversation over the efficacy of national borders. Those arguing against immigration have built a straw man around the idea that pro-immigration forces want to completely eradicate national borders and any form of border enforcement in the United States. Aside from a few fringe actors, this is simply not true. Almost no serious person denies the idea that a nation has a right to its borders, and to enforce rules around who can cross those borders and who can't. This is a straw man tactic, used to deflect from the real conversation, not about whether or not we should have immigration rules, but instead what those rules are, how strict they should be, and the proper level of enforcement and discipline. Anti-immigrant voices want the debate to be shifted towards pro - or anti-border because they want to enact the unpopular policy of completely closing the border and expelling a large majority of immigrants here in our nation, legal and illegal alike. Conversations about the proper level of enforcement and action are, for them, a concession they are unwilling to make. And so, in order to obscure their own radical position, they accuse their opponents of extremism, in order to shift the frame of the debate and obscure the outcome they desire.
Another common objection you hear is about the supposed level of crime and violence visited upon this country by immigrants. Anti-immigrant actors would have you believe that immigrants are uniquely vicious and violent. You saw this in the abhorrent accusations leveled by the Trump Administration during last year's campaign about Haitian migrants in Ohio, and how they were supposedly eating people's pets. It was there in the false claims about Venezuelan immigrants in Colorado, who were alleged to have violently taken over an entire apartment complex and turned it into a lawless drug den. This is all despite the fact that study after study shows that immigrants - and especially illegal immigrants - are actually less likely to commit violent crime that citizens of the United States. These narratives are a tactic to distract from the fact that the most violent demographic group in America is not immigrants, but is in fact white men.
Often, in the debate over immigrant violence, a rhetorical tactic meant to tug at your heart stings is seized upon: the idea that even one violent crime at the hands of an illegal immigrant is so uniquely terrible as to justify the violent repression of immigrants, because it was a crime that could have prevented by tougher borders and more stringent border enforcement. This is the logic behind the reason why Republicans and anti-immigrant groups have rallied around the example of Laken Riley, a young woman killed in an auto accident where the at-fault driver was an illegal immigrant. They have used her name on GOP-led legislation against immigrants, despite pleas from her family to stop politicizing her death and wrongfully using her memory in furtherance of a cause they do not support. While this strategy is certainly emotionally affecting, it is also emotionally manipulative, and another attempt to paint immigrants as somehow more violent or dangerous than "real Americans." Again, the numbers simply don't back this up.
Further, the logic of anti-immigrant and conservative actors here falls apart when one takes into account all the very real violence that happens in our country that MAGA seems much less concerned about - like the pervasive gun violence we face, which they oppose addressing any real way, or the repeated and unnecessary use of deadly force by police officers against innocent citizens, which they also refuse to do anything about, or even the violence visited upon Capitol police by treasonous rioters on January 6th, 2021, all of whom have been pardoned and let back out on our streets despite the violence they practiced and promise to practice again in the future. None of this is to deny the tragedy of the miniscule number of violent events perpetuated by immigrants - all violence is tragic, and should be addressed properly. Instead, my point here is that if the issue is violence on our streets, MAGA supporters have an odd idea about how to bring it down. In fact, when they invoke the specter of violence, and then turn their attention to one of the least violent demographics in our country, the question then necessarily becomes what their real motivation is.
The last point trotted out by anti-immigrant voices in these debates is the most odiferous - that of national identity. Anti-immigrant sentiment is at the heart of the debate over what it really means to be American - whether it is something available to only naturally born Americans, and thus is tied to immutable identity factors, or whether it is something bigger and more amorphous, tied to ideals like tolerance, liberty, democracy, and equality. Since those are all ideals the MAGA movement seems hostile to, it becomes clear what the anti-immigrant push is all about: creating an us, and a them, predicated on where you were born and what culture you were reared in. This is the foundation of all nationalism, and has rightly been tarred with the stain of fascism and genocide. Our world has worked hard since the end of World War II to shift communal consciousness away from nationality and race as the basis of shared identity, and towards a common humanity and mutual concern with well-being, and with good reason. To see fierce nationalism and ethnic insularity returning with such force is frightening and foreboding, and why so many of us are pushing back so hard against the attempt to Otherize immigrants as a way to galvanize political support. It reeks too strongly of our terrible past, and no matter the problems immigration may bring, we must avoid speaking of immigrants as one blanket population all equally unworthy of respect and dignity. That path too easily leads to firing lines and gas chambers.
Jesus, himself a Jewish man traversing uncertain, treacherous and arbitrary borders within the land of Palestine as it was policed by Rome, charged his disciples with carrying on the prophetic Jewish concern for the least and the lost in the way they lived their lives. "I was a stranger, and you welcomed me" (Matthew 25:35), he taught them, envisioning what the kingdom of God really looks like. For Jesus, drawing upon the long tradition he was borne from, being God's people was tied up with welcoming those outside the tribe in, in making one humanity from all the peoples of the earth. National borders and ethnic identity were impediments to the coming of God's kingdom, and the propping of a state was far from his concern.
You see this in his story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), where a despised foreign minority becomes the hero of the story, while the powerful and the pious and the orthodox are shamed by their dehumanizing decisions. You see it in his conversation with the Syrophoenician woman (Matthew 15:21-28), where he welcomes a descendent of the Canaanites - the very people who the Israelites once tried to ethnically cleanse the land of - into his fold. Jesus had no time for borders, either on the land or between people. Ethnic identity did not matter, because God's kingdom transcends all borders and identities and definitions of us and them. Jesus reminded his followers- and all of us - that we an obligation and duty to treat the stranger as if they were our family, as if they were ourself, as if they were God. He lived and preached that which Paul would later write: "There is neither Jew nor Greek." (Galatians 3:28) So, too, we should declare it: there is neither legal or illegal, immigrant or resident, American or foreigner. Just people. Just God's people. Just our siblings.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia's case went before Supreme Court last night. Despite their admission that he was wrongly deported and imprisoned in the El Salvadoran concentration camp, the Trump Administration continued to defend their right to not care about his fate. The lack of humanity exhibited by Mr. Trump, his lawyers, and the entire MAGA movement on this case is shocking. There seems to be no recognition that Kilmar is a human being, one with rights, yes, but also with dreams, and children, and favorite foods, and opinions about the weather, and things that annoy him. To MAGA, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a number. Andrys is a social media post. Rumeysa Ozturk is a photo op. Lucio Sanchez-Zepeda is just a dried out skull in a desert. All these human beings are not really people, not when you can reduce them to political points and Fox News hosts laughing and clicks on X and ways to suck up to the fragile ego of Donald J. Trump.
They become less than people when you make ASMR videos out of their grief, or when you turn real people into cartoons to be mocked and retweeted and laughed at over beers later.2
This is what dehumanization looks like. These are the signposts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, warning us lest we travel too far down that path. Even more, they are signposts of our own sickness, of our own inability to remember what it means to be a person.
We who claim the name of Christians cannot escape from the humanity of every single person on this planet, or from the demands each of those people places on our souls, even if we never encounter them or have to look them in the eye. We Christians have a moral and eternal duty to our fellow humans, to not make their well being worth less than the needs of a state or the ego of a politician or the results of the next election. We are called - we are commanded - to treat each person like they are God in our midst. This means not busting open the water jugs that keeps God alive. This means not sweeping God off a quiet Massachusetts street and illegally holding God in a prison cell in Louisiana. This means not simply reducing God to that potential illegal person on the other side of an invisble line we drew in the desert sand. This means not arresting God based on a tattoo and sending God to a hellhole in Central America and then admitting you screwed but shrugging and saying, "Eh, God was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing we can do about it."
This, and nothing less, is what is required of us, by our shared faith. If we can't do that, then we can't call ourselves Christians. It is as Isaac Samuel Villegas writes near the end of Migrant God:
"Biblical faith is a style of life in which we relearn our relations, we reconfigure our lives to receive the presence of God in our relationships with our neighbors. That's the nature of worship: the rituals of collective life that organize a vision of belonging in which we recognize as idolatry any sociopolitical system that demands the sacrifice of another for the sake of self-preservation. In this liberatory movement of worship, we are following the Hebrews out of ancient Egypt."
We are all strangers and immigrants, in this world, because we are all citizens of God's kingdom. Let us not build walls to keep that kingdom out. Let us not forget our own humanity.
Full disclosure: at the time of writing, I am wearing a Real Madrid hat, but not as some attempt to declare gang allegiance.
Yes, I’m aware the woman caricatured in this image was a criminal selling fentanyl while in this country illegally. No, they still doesn’t make this kind of dehumanization ok. That’s my whole point.