Love UndocumentedSample

The American church community—our church family—includes generational U.S. citizens, undocumented immigrants, naturalized U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, mixed-status couples, and U.S. citizen children with undocumented parents. Many of the immigrant families in our midst find support and encouragement in their faith, especially during crisis.

It doesn’t matter whether we understand or support every family’s situation or whether we agree on how reform should be legislated. We are first and foremost a family. Our call as Christians to care for our brothers and sisters does not hold conditions, nor does it change with the political climate. 

When we acknowledge the struggles in our extended family, we share the burden and carry the stress of knowing that others in our own church family are at risk. We have stories in the Bible of families who were in danger of being separated forever because of political leaders’ fears. In Exodus, the Egyptian pharaoh grew nervous about Israelites in his land. He declared their growing numbers were a threat, and announced, “Come, let us deal shrewdly with them” (Exodus 1:10). He then decreed that all Hebrew infant boys be killed.

Jochebed, a Hebrew mother of a young girl named Miriam and a little boy named Aaron, had recently given birth to another son. With this imminent danger hanging over Moses’s infant head, Jochebed did what any mother would do: she hid her baby and tried to get him to safety. No one else in Moses’s family was marked for death. Still, they participated fully in his rescue because they were a family. Moses’s parents hid him from authorities for three months. And it was Moses’s sister, Miriam, who stood by and protected her baby brother from the threat of harm. 

As we hear the stories of our brothers and sisters fleeing to the United States to escape military extremists, gang violence, or famine and starvation, we experience this suffering as a family. Those who have violated immigration laws to save their lives or the lives of their children make us, the church, a mixed-status family. This solidarity, birthed in the kinship of the kingdom, makes it impossible to ignore the crushing edicts that harm our family.