Advent Welcome: Advocate for Immigrants Today!
Share Stories
Starting today, and throughout this Advent season, you can join a nationwide effort to raise awareness about current immigration policies and what the Bible teaches.
National Latino Evangelical Coalition is leading a campaign called Advent Welcome: Immigration Solidarity Initiative. You can participate by sharing a post, or creating your own, in whatever social media you use. Add one or more of these hashtags: #AdventWelcome #RoomInTheInn #ImageBearerDignity #EvangelicalsMakeRoom
Here’s an image you can use:
It’s also helpful to share stories that show examples of how current policies directed at immigrants affect real people.
Here are three examples you can use:
1) Jasmine Mooney
Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian actress, was offered a job in America launching a health and wellness brand. She went to the immigration office at the San Diego border to apply for a visa that would let her work in the U.S., as she had done many times before. Mooney was then told she would have to apply for the visa in Canada, but rather than let her book a flight back, she was sent to a detention facility, then to a prison, and then to another detention center.
She told her incredible story, including the horrific conditions in these detention facilities, in a column for The Guardian. The story is not just about her but the women she met.
This is not just my story. It is the story of thousands and thousands of people still trapped in a system that profits from their suffering. I am writing in the hope that someone out there – someone with the power to change any of this – can help do something.
2) Katie Paul
After Katie, who is British, married Stephen Paul, a U.S. citizen, she became automatically eligible for a greed card, according to a law passed by Congress in 1986. When she went to her green card interview, along with her husband and 4-month-old baby, federal agents handcuffed her and took her to a detention facility.
The New York Times writes,
“I had to take our baby from my crying wife’s arms,” Mr. Paul, 33, said, recalling the moment that agents said they were arresting his wife, Katie.
Ms. Paul was sent to an immigration detention center with hundreds of other people swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown. Her husband had to take a leave from his job at the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department to care for their child and try to secure her release.
“It’s insane to have them rip our family apart,” Mr. Paul said. “Whoever is directing this has completely lost touch with their mission to the country.”
Read the rest with this gift link.
3) Andry Hernandez Romero
In May of last year, Andry Hernandez Romero fled him home in Venezuela. A make-up artist, Romero’s life was in danger because he was targeted for his political views and for being gay. After making his way to the legal border crossing in San Diego, he applied for asylum. While at the border crossing, he was taken into custody and sent to a prison in El Salvador.
DHS claimed that his two crown tattoos proved he was a member of the Tren de Aragua gang, even though the crowns bore the names “mom” and “dad,” a crown is a popular symbol in his hometown due to an annual Catholic celebration there, and the Tren de Aragua gang doesn’t use tattoos to designate gang membership.
We wrote about the conditions at this prison in a previous newsletter. Watch this 60 Minutes video and you’ll see why it’s often described as a torture prison.
Romero was released in July and sent back to Venezuela. Here him tell his story in this interview.
Doing It the Right Way
Immigration hardliners often complain about “illegals” and say immigrants should “do it the right way.” One theme that connects these three stories is that every case they were doing it the right way. They followed the legal process, and were still punished nonetheless.
Share these stories, or others. There is no shortage of stories about the mistreatment of immigrants in the U.S. today. Providing real world examples can help us break through to the many Americans who are uninformed, and misinformed, about what is taking place.
What Else We’re Reading
The Dispatch: “The Truth, the Whole Truth, Everything but the Truth”
I’ve said many times that perhaps my biggest error in Liberal Fascism lay in believing that American conservatives were more dogmatic than they turned out to be. I thought they considered things like the benefits of a free market and limited government, the sanctity of the Constitution, and the importance of traditional morality and good character. I failed to appreciate the extent to which conservatives could be seduced by the very moral and epistemological relativism they condemned.
I have every confidence that Donald Trump has never read a word of Nietzsche. But I don’t think we have ever seen a more Nietzschean figure in public life. Trump lives by Nietzsche’s dictum that, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” He uses Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment more effectively than anybody on the left. Not to get too deep in the weeds, but this is the idea that you take what society thinks is good and noble and turn it on its head. This was Nietzsche’s great indictment of Pauline Christianity—it made boldness, strength, and other knightly virtues into vices, and it elevated, in his telling, meekness to a virtue. Trump denounced American exceptionalism as a fraud. He said his favorite biblical passage was “an eye for an eye.” He declared at Charlie Kirk’s funeral— after Kirk’s wife bravely and virtuously forgave her husband’s killer—that he did not believe in forgiveness. And yet, I am sure millions of Trump fans still think Trump is a good Christian, simply because they want to believe it.
I could, as you know, go on. But my point isn’t about Trump, it’s about the supposed conservatives who were seduced by this and celebrated it.
Reuters: “Trump’s campaign of retribution: At least 470 targets and counting”
Reuters documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
“FIRE poll: 90% of undergrads believe words can be violence even after killing of Charlie Kirk”
Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and College Pulse.
The survey’s findings are especially startling coming in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — an extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence.
“When people start thinking that words can be violence, violence becomes an acceptable response to words,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “Even after the murder of Charlie Kirk at a speaking event, college students think that someone’s words can be a threat. This is antithetical to a free and open society, where words are the best alternative to political violence.”
The Bulwark: “The Danger of Patriotism Detached From American Ideals: And how Ronald Reagan’s notion of ‘informed patriotism’ offers a path out of our political dysfunction.”
Patriotism in today’s America often bears little resemblance to what Reagan described. While our citizens still express deep patriotic feeling, many cannot explain the ideas that give those feelings meaning. Surveys paint a complicated picture of civic knowledge; the overall trend is one of declining familiarity with constitutional principles and of the workings of our democracy and the ideas underpinning it. As the distance between emotion and understanding has widened, into that void has rushed a version of patriotism that is louder, angrier, performative, and far less anchored to the very values that have guided the republic since its founding.
Reagan viewed patriotism as resting on memory, humility, and shared civic purpose. In this understanding, love of country requires knowledge of country, the nation’s triumphs must be recognized alongside its failures, and democratic citizenship is not inherited but learned. That understanding cannot be transmitted through slogans or symbols alone. It requires deliberate, sustained, and honest teaching and related learning—about the documents, struggles, sacrifices, and aspirations that define the United States.
Yet the practice of teaching and understanding our values, whether civic, professional, or personal, has withered. Even in leadership classrooms, I’ve found that students often struggle to name their own values or the guiding principles of their organizations. When public figures invoke “American values,” the phrase frequently hangs unsupported, used as decoration for whatever argument they want to make. The moral vocabulary remains potent, but the comprehension behind it has grown fragile.
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