The Pastors ICE Threatened With Their Own Children
When Family Separation Is Government Policy
Government officials are using the cruelty of separating kids from their families to achieve their goals. It’s not the first time.
In June of 2018, when I was working as a politics and opinion editor for The Christian Post, I wrote an opinion article, “Trump’s Family Separation Policy Was Cruel by Design.” I pointed out that three different government officials said in speeches and interviews that they were intentionally using family separation to deter immigration. The cruelty itself became a tool of public policy.
Children should only be separated from their family when the family itself presents an unsafe situation. Otherwise, family separation causes trauma that lasts well into adulthood. Our government was committing child abuse to advance its goals. “Cruelty to children wasn’t an accidental feature of Trump’s policy, it was the intended method of Trump’s policy,” I wrote.
There was much pushback within The Christian Post over that article. Some editors thought my tone was too harsh. I thought my tone matched the story. I fought hard just to get it published. This was one of the escalating events that eventually led to my decision to leave The Christian Post. I tell more of that story here.
We’re continuing to see family separation as government policy today.
Last week, Nepthali Zozaya Saucedo and Cinthia Sarai Cardona Otero, assistant pastors in Edinburg, Texas, were detained by ICE. DHS claims they overstayed their religious worker visas while their church claims their visas are valid. The pastors said they were threatened with separation from their children to get them to sign departure papers.
RNS reports, “while in detention, Zozaya had spoken on the phone to reporters, saying that the couple had been ‘pressured’ with prolonged separation from their children — a seven-year-old and nearly three-year-old twins — to sign voluntary departure papers. On Sunday, Cardona, fighting back tears and speaking in Spanish, described in detail the repeated attempts she alleged immigration agents made to coerce them into signing papers: that they would be deported separately to different third countries, not their home in Mexico; that they could not make calls without signing the papers; and that they would face up to six months of incarceration without their sons.”
“It is categorically false,” a DHS spokesperson claimed when asked if they used the threat of prolonged child separation to pressure these pastors into signing departure papers. This might be believable if it were a one-off incident, but many have told a similar story.
Using children as a pawn for political ends has shown itself in other areas as well. This week we also learned that a program in the Office of Refugee Resettlement designed to protect children is being used to find unauthorized migrants. This creates perverse incentives: reuniting with your children can place you in greater danger or further separation from your children.
Government policy should be to protect children, not put them in harm’s way. In a Dallas Morning News op-ed published on Tuesday, I wrote about the estimated 50,000 children, natural born US citizens, who could be separated from their Haitian parents after TPS expired.
“Imagine being a parent in that situation,” I wrote, “faced with the choice of leaving your children in the U.S., with relative safety and security, or keeping them with you but placing them in a humanitarian crisis into which the U.S. Department of State forbids U.S. citizens to travel. Either leave your children behind or place them in harm’s way. What an impossible choice! What would you do?”
Separating children from their families, as a tool of the government, is not pro-family. As I pointed out in the op-ed, “family values” has been a prominent theme for conservative evangelicals like myself. So why aren’t more family values conservatives speaking out about this? In the case mentioned above, conservative evangelical describes the victims as well. Zozaya Saucedo and Cardona Otero are pastors in the Assemblies of God, a denomination that heavily votes Republican. They were detained when boarding a flight to a retreat at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which is led by Franklin Graham, one of President Trump’s most vocal evangelical supporters.
Conservative evangelicals don’t agree on everything when it comes to politics, of course, but when the government hurts kids to advance policy goals, this should be a moment of moral courage.
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More Good Reads
UC Berkeley: “Your news feed may be making polarization worse”
A new UC Berkeley Economics study finds that online news algorithms can quietly push readers toward more polarized views by reinforcing what they already believe.
The research from Berkeley Economics PhD Student Mingduo Zhao shows that even small differences in opinion can be amplified over time as algorithms learn what users click on and serve them more of the similar content. The result is a feedback loop that can deepen divisions, while also keeping users more engaged.
In his dissertation, paper titled, “News Consumption, Recommender Systems, and Polarization,”(link is external) Zhao examined how recommender systems interact with user behavior. He found that people tend to click on stories that match their views, and platforms respond by recommending similar content, strengthening those beliefs over time.
NYT: “We Hate to Break It to You, but Maybe We’re Not That Polarized”
Many Americans fear that the country is coming apart.
Approximately half of Republicans and four in 10 Democrats said in 2024 that a civil war in their lifetime was at least somewhat likely. That fear arises from an increasing sense that the people on the other side have become something different from us — dangerous and even a threat to the American way of life, whatever you think that is. That framing is now the familiar refrain of political commentary in the United States.
We have been hearing about partisan animosity for so long that it is hard to see our country through any other lens. But before accepting that irreconcilable differences are a fact of our contemporary politics, try a thought experiment. You are an American who voted for Kamala Harris or for Donald Trump in 2024. You randomly meet one other voter for your candidate and one voter for the other side. Which of the two do you have a lot in common with? Well, it turns out you actually have a lot in common with both.
The Dispatch: “A Perfect ICE Storm: New Recruits, Less Training, and Deadly Shootings”
Most significantly, ICE cut the length of its training to get people out into the field more quickly. Reports of reductions in training began surfacing last summer. DHS repeatedly denied that any instruction had been cut and claimed that training was expanded to 12 hours per day, six days a week from the previous eight hours per day, five days a week schedule. In February, Ryan Schwank, a lawyer and legal instructor at the ICE training academy, quit the agency and said that he personally witnessed the gutting of the agency’s training, saying that 240 hours of a 584-hour training program had been cut, including classes on use of force and driving tests.
“Deficient training can and will get people killed,” Schwank testified at a Capitol Hill forum organized by Democrats. “It can and will lead to unlawful arrests, violations of constitutional rights, and a fundamental loss of public trust in law enforcement. ICE is lying to Congress and the American people about the steps it is taking to ensure its 10,000 new officers faithfully uphold the Constitution and can perform their jobs.”
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