How Should Christians Think About ICE and Immigration?

What does it look like to be deeply rooted in Christ in a world of cultural chaos? Welcome to the Equip Podcast. I'm Mark Vance, lead pastor at Cornerstone Church of Ames, and each week we want to look at core biblical truths that will equip you to live a life of faithfulness, to be salt and light wherever Jesus has called you. Welcome to a special episode of the Equip Podcast. My name is Mark Vance, lead pastor here at Cornerstone, and I'm going to take a little bit of time today to speak into the unrest that we're seeing in Minneapolis over clashes between protesters, immigrations, customs, enforcement officials, and really specifically the death of two individuals, Renee Good and Alex Presty. I'm taking time to address this in part because we have a desire for the Equip Podcast to be an open dialogue where if you have questions, I'm trying to take biblical truth and apply them to timely matters. I don't actually have any interest in being like a weekly commentary from a Christian worldview on local news events or on national news events. If you want that, look up Al Moller's briefing. It's brilliant. It's consistent. It's really, really good. That's not the design of the Equip Podcast. The design of the Equip Podcast is to pastor God's people. It's built off really my perspective that if we won't disciple our church with truth and speak honestly and clearly, people out there in the culture at large are more than willing to insert their voice into that empty space that the church leaves absent. So I want to bring truth and biblical theological perspective to issues that people are wrestling with. And certainly, the death of these two individuals, the more aggressive enforcement of immigration policy is one of those questions I'm getting from people and I'm going to speak to today. I want to set this whole thing up by actually telling you a story of a friend that I had lunch with today that I think kind of puts my posture toward immigration at the forefront of this discussion. And then what I'm going to get into is just some theological reflections, trying to use biblical worldview to look at the current event and then a couple of local responses. What is our theology tells to do practically? So here's the framing. I'm doing lunch today with my buddy Jacob Varkees. Jacob is one of my dearest friends and Ames. He's one of our local elders. Our kids go to school together at Ames High School. And Jacob is the son of an immigrant mom and dad. And this weekend, actually, Jacob was telling me he's going to be heading to a very special funeral of a very dear person to his family. It's a gentleman who immigrated from India to America and then went on as a believing Christian to be the sponsor for some 40 individuals who would immigrate from India to America as well. Two of those 40 individuals were Jacob's parents, his mom and his dad. And here's how this worked. What you would have is you would have a sponsor, stateside in America who in your application process would sponsor you. Many of these people would move into his home. He would help them get their initial jobs in America, things like that. But in order to get the visa to come over, you had to enter into a lottery where your name at random would be selected. And if your name was selected, you got on the plane and you headed to America. Two of those people selected in that visa lottery were his parents. This individual helped them immigrate and Jacob said, "If you look through the line of the people, who this person, this one man was able to sponsor, you see doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, pastors, you see people who have contributed to the beauty and vitality of what America was. They recognized that in coming to America, they were coming here to add to what makes America great. A land of people who come and who want to both better themselves but also work for the good of their neighbor and contribute to the greater society. I'm so glad for immigration because I love Jacob Varghese. I love Tony Lee, our salt company director whose parents immigrated from Korea when Tony was two years old. He got his citizenship when he was 15 years old. And so my heart going into anything that deals with immigration is to say inside of what we've decided to be as a country in America, is a country with both laws, borders, but also a heart of compassion to welcome in people who want to come to America and be part of this grand, wonderful experiment called being an American. And I think that's what leaves so many of us with these questions and these tensions because we have questions around what actually is a government supposed to do with immigration. How do we work our way through all of this? It hits close to home when we see questions of immigration because we all know first generation, second generation immigrants who we love. It also hits close to home for us because we're Midwesterners and Minneapolis is not far up the road. We have a church, redemption church, in the twin cities that we love, part of the salt network. I have dear friends who are part of city's church. The church where protesters of ICE basically illegally interrupted their worship service shouting down their children. I have people who I know who are in that room. And so this sort of thing not only dominates our news headlines, but grabs our hearts. So how do we think about that, theologically and practically as Christians? Well, let's first kind of zoom back out and ask some really big kind of national kind of government questions theologically. What is a government for and is it allowable for a government to have national borders and to have laws that they enforce in the areas of immigration? Well, the answer here is that God has designed government from a Christian worldview. We say God's design government is a tool to hold back that which is evil and to lift up that which is good so that people in the image of God in the midst of a fallen world can flourish. People in their design are designed to be led and ruled to be ordered underneath liberties. Jesus when he comes back is portrayed as the righteous king. He's running a government in the kingdom of heaven and government therefore in its existence is not evil but good. We need laws. We need structures to promote flourishing in civil society. Romans 13 is probably the key passage there in the Bible where it talks about how government is God's servant for avenging what is evil and for promoting what is good and when it comes to the question of how human governments work in terms of nation states the idea of nations that have identities and borders is assumed in a biblical perspective. I mean, we need to look no further there from a biblical worldview than to the nation of Israel itself. Israel was a nation that had geographical borders. It had places that God has assigned to them that were in and that were out and even inside the law of God there's careful consideration given to the care and hospitality that is supposed to be shown to resident aliens. But even to have a category there just think of that. A category of the foreigner or of the resident alien means you have a sort of notion of a national identity built into the Old Testament structure. So the application there from a theological perspective is that governments exist and certainly nations exist and the idea that there are borders that are enforced by those governments is logical, good and allowable. In fact, it's probably necessary for human flourishing. So at least one thing we can say to the situation we see right now is even before the violence that has occurred between protestors and immigrations and customs and forceman officials. There has been a cry among some people in probably likely in the more liberal left of our society in America with phrases like shut down ice, like get rid of immigration and customs enforcement. Friends, that statement is as silly as defund the police was. Of course we don't need to shut down customs and immigration. We need national laws, we need national borders. One of my friends who works here on cornerstone staff, his father for years, his job was to work with homeland security and immigrations and customs enforcement and state of Minnesota. And I was asking his friend, what is your dad mainly do? And he said a lot of what my dad did was got into the really messy situations of human trafficking. We want immigrations and customs officials because people sometimes who come into this country illegally are done that happens against their will, their children that are inside of rooms that need to be set free. There's far more that goes into the job of immigration and customs than simply what we're seeing on the streets of Minneapolis and these clashes that are on our news media. And we need to be incredibly slow to ridicule all enforcement of immigration law. Immigration law is helpful for a country to flourish. And good immigration law should be done in such a way that it's clear that for immigrants coming in there is a pathway to citizenship and a place where they can contribute to the flourishing of the country they're entering. When you entered into the nation of Israel, you accepted its laws and its standards. You moved into that society. I think at Tony's parents who came here to work hard to pay taxes to get a job to see if they could become citizens. That process is a good thing for a society and it's an assumed thing in biblical theology. Now, let's ask a follow-up question of that. Is it possible then that a legitimate government aim, like the enforcement of immigration laws, could be done in ways that are illegitimate, inappropriate, or immoral? Can you do a good thing in a bad way? And the answer there is also clearly yes. And that's one of the profound complexities of living in a flawed world. Is when we say that government is good, we can say that statement at the same time that we don't think that everything a government does is always good. A government can be an overarching moral good, but individual actions and individual situations may themselves not be good. So let's look at the complexity of this situation for a second. First off, the complexity of this situation on immigration broadly is that underneath the previous Biden administration from 2021, roughly to 2024 in America, we had an unprecedented historical surge in the amount of illegal immigration that occurred. The general population estimates that are out there say that in three years, our illegal immigrant population in America moved from 10 to 10.5 million to somewhere around 14 million. Three to four million people in fluxed inside of about three years, largely surrounding COVID strains, immigration across that was uncontrolled in many ways. There are laws that govern immigration in this country that due to either COVID crisis or just general government neglect were simply not enforced. So whatever administration was going to be taking over after 2024, they were inheriting a problem that everyone was feeling, namely that we had large, large numbers of people crossing our borders illegally into or now in the country. That was going to cost money and time and resources and someone was going to have to figure out what we did there. There's processes and laws that were simply not being enforced that had to, how are you going to enforce them? What are you going to do? That's the situation. So you have that problem and you have to figure out what you do with that. Keep in mind here as well that people who come into this country through immigration do have rights even if they are illegal aliens. Our Constitution enumerates both rights for citizens and rights for persons in the United States. Persons have rights. Have rights. That's an important theological concern as a Christian because we believe all people no matter your citizenship status, hold image bearer status. That means all people in any situation are inherent because of their nature as image bearers to be given dignity, value, worth, and respect in America what that is enumerating the Constitution under is the provision for due process to be granted to persons. While citizens have more full due process laws enumerating the Constitution, there are certain due process procedures that need to be done even in the case of someone who is immigrated illegally, generally in America. That means you're going to have a day in court, an immigration court. You're going to be able to present your case and that then a decision will be rendered. That means you have to have courts and you have to have lawyers and you have to have judges in the cost being an add up. There is a process to immediately deport people called expedited removal, but that's very rarely used. Then in the current administration, okay, so there's a bit of the complexity of the situation. How do you deal with the problem that there is a rapid rise of illegal immigration that happened? Well, within the Trump administration, there seems to be, if you read the Wall Street Journal on this, you read any major reporting, there were two main perspectives. One was that we should take a much more aggressive public targeting toward getting rid of illegal immigrations, immigration. It would be driven by high numbers of people expelled from the country, almost quotas assigned inside of the immigration system to enforcement agents. You would have to ramp up the number of agents there and you would use very aggressive public symbols of doing this because you wanted to present a strength that would both tell people you took the problem seriously, but also tell people think about coming through the border that that was not going to be something they could do. Another approach was a slower, more moderate approach. The focus on this would be to work through expelling illegal immigrants based on kind of tiers that's top tier to be targeted would be those with existing arrest warrants or who were currently incarcerated. That's, by the way, a pretty big number in America when you consider the number of people who have come in illegal who are currently incarcerated or who have committed crimes inside of America. They said focus on those with criminal history or final deportation orders that are already outstanding, work through that layer first and then steadily work down. Those were the two major approaches. Obviously, the Trump administration decided to take option one, the much more aggressive approach. Tactics were chosen that from any, even as you know, I'm a very conservative person politically, they picked very, very provocative tactics. You dressed agents up in militarized style. You paraded those people into very large cities. You rapidly increased the number of street based ICE agents, even moving people from border patrol on the southern border up to help in urban and intense encounters that are very, very difficult to control. You publicized that and frankly, the administration's rhetoric was both public and aggressive toward not just illegal immigration, but immigration of all sorts and all styles, severely limiting immigration became a very public stance for the Trump administration. Now we have the Minneapolis situation. What happened that sent this situation so out of control and over the edge? Well, first off, Minneapolis is wildly hostile to Donald Trump and to ICE in general. Most consistently rated among the top 10 most liberal cities in the US. It is not coincidental that this is a city where the very large protests around George Floyd occurred and therefore it's a city with resentment and anger and hostility toward strong forms of federal authority. That already existed. State and local officials as ICE came in, it seems very clear looking at the reporting, decided to work to deter, interrupt or even interfere with federal ICE operations. For instance, there are a lot of deportations that happen connected to going to jails to work with state and local jails to find people who would have current arrest warrants or who are currently illegals inside that system. The state of Minnesota largely decided to deny working with federal agents in that process. Or at the very least to work at a very low level with them to make it much harder to operate there. So as such, the normal operations that would have occurred maybe in a more controlled environment of a jailhouse were now outside of that in more public settings. Additionally, we see in Minnesota a lot more public interaction with ICE agents than you would see for instance in a red state like a Texas or a Florida. It's not, frankly guys, even if you look at the numbers, Texas and Florida, there are far more people who are being expelled from those states than from generally blue states. So what's happening there? Well, that in part goes to the response of local political leaders and state, but political leaders who not only severely limited their cooperation with federal enforcement on immigration, but seemed to encourage street level protests and interactions. And what's happening on the ground in Minnesota is not so much a controlled protest in many cases as much as citizens following federal agents, honking horns, blowing whistles, actively alerting people locally, trying to hide people in some communities, some groups going as far as what we saw on the news interrupting local churches in worship. What's happened is aggressive political rhetoric created a plausibility structure where it was said to people, it is okay for you even morally allowable for you to interrupt federal law enforcement. Okay, so let's pause there. From a Christian worldview perspective, we need to be very slow before we advocate for the interruption of a government institution executing its duties. You may not like the tactics, okay, that would be used, but we must be careful not to call that which we find politically objectionable at fascism or Nazism. Labeling something as morally reprehensible creates a plausibility structure where people of good intent somehow now believe I can interrupt a federal law enforcement officer and it's good for me to do that. That's illegal, guys, you can't actually do that. And so what seems to have happened is that then fueled by that, increasingly the public in Minnesota, which is oppositional toward the practices of immigrations and customs enforcement that the Trump administration took, especially the more aggressive tactics on the street, more and more people began to go into the streets to try to alert people, blow whistles, videotape federal law enforcement, even get in the way of people what's happening, and tragically in those instances now two people ran a good in her vehicle, and Alex Presty on a street were shot and killed by ICE agents. In both of those situations, we need to have them fully and completely investigated all the way down. We have people showing up to disrupt and disturb federal law enforcement, encouraged and applauded in doing so by local officials. It's construed and I think there is a legitimate place for civil protest, but this looks so different than what we saw even in so much of the civil rights movement. We spend MLK Day, cornerstone staff watching. We spent it this year watching a reading of MLK's letter from Birmingham jail. I think everyone in this situation right now should read that. The practice of non-violent protests that MLK advocated for looks so different from what you're seeing happen on the streets in Minneapolis. What's happening here is an escalation between the interaction of law enforcement officers and people trying to stop them from doing their duties, and it's putting people into situations that are impossible and unbelievably difficult. Now, here's what I have seen, and this is a Christian perspective. We need to just say this out loud. Alex Presty and Renee Good are people made in the image of God. So whether they should have been there or not, whatever they were doing, seeing people who are image bearers killed is a tragedy. And in this instance, at the very least, the initial response from federal officials seemed to clearly offer as explanation things that were outright lies. I listened to one particular Department of Homeland Security official describe Alex Presty as a domestic terrorist who showed up with an intent to massacre federal law enforcement agents. I've seen absolutely nothing that says that that's true at all, and yet that was put forward inside of a national administration as something that seemed plausible. I think that was a lie that should they have been there in those situations, should they have been interfering with law enforcement agents, absolutely not, absolutely not, but should they have been shot and killed in those situations, we need a full and complete investigation to make clear what happened there, but on the face of it, it's a tragedy. It's horrible. And it does bring to question, it just wasn't wise for the Trump administration, which had a real and legitimate problem of immigration to deal with, to have promoted such an aggressive and hot headed rhetoric-filled approach to the way in which they went about what they did. I think at the very least what we can say is on top of it being a tragedy with image bearers who were killed, this is a tragic example of politicians who should be ashamed. Just ashamed of themselves on both sides of the political aisle. This isn't a time to try to score political points when there's tension on the streets. Shame on governor Tim Walls, on Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey saying things that encourage people to put themselves into interfering interactions with federal law enforcement, plotting protesters harassing agents as if they are doing good. That sort of rhetoric that casts doubt on whether you can trust people in positions of authority is dangerous to people. They bear responsibility in these situations. But also shame on the other side, on members of the Trump administration, Kristi Nome and Gregory Bovino and the others, whose rhetoric is inflammatory antagonizing and at times just outright lying about what's happening on the ground. Shame to everyone. As Christians, what do we believe? We believe that it is godly and inherent on leaders to speak what is true and to pursue that which is peaceful. These statements aren't truthful or peaceful. You're trying to score political points off of people who've died. You're using inflammatory rhetoric to portray immigrants who love the country. It's just, guys, this has got to stop. The whole thing that we keep doing in America where our political opponents, we portray them as Nazis, you need to go back and read World War II history just a little bit here. We're talking about a group of people in the Nazis who tried to exterminate a race. How dare we use that sort of language? What are we doing? It's shameful. So at the very least, what we can say here, let's step back again and state our question. Can a legitimate government aim of immigration enforcement be done in illegitimate and moral inappropriate means absolutely yes? And frankly at present, I think people on every side of the political Iowa aisle should be toning down the rhetoric, looking in the mirror and reflecting just a little bit on whether this is how we want to go about solving this problem. Are there any ways that we could do this, even things that are necessary in ways that would be more healthy? So perhaps there will be, and I hope, even looking at the headlines of Wall Street Journal today, it seems as if the Trump administration is carefully considering whether to take a very different tact, and I hope that they will. On the other side, I don't think it's a good idea for that tact to be, don't enforce immigration law. Because exist, and so if we don't enforce laws that do exist, we promote lawlessness and that's not the job of government. We need a careful and thoughtful approach. So that's some just kind of Christian and theological, hopeful reflection on what we're seeing. Now what does that mean for you locally? I've got three steps for you. Locally, for all of God's people, we should pray in situations like this. Our first response should be prayer. Not if I could, try to pray for people on both sides by putting yourself into their shoes. Think of what it would be like to be an ICE agent, just trying to do your job. Afraid that your identity is going to be exposed, your family is going to be targeted. Think of the gentleman who's part of the pastoral team and who's worked for 10 years as a government bureaucrat with customs and immigration in Minneapolis who just went to church to worship with this family only to have people track him and his family down while they worship. Imagine what that feels like and pray for those agents. Pray that they would have cool heads and calm hearts as they seek to do their jobs. Pray for people made in the image of God who now are grieving loved ones who were shot and killed. It's a tragedy. It's a tragedy. Pray that people in their sorrow would not turn to hate what would find Christ. Pray for legal immigrants who are now in this country who should be our neighbors who know their love who are actually wondering about whether they're welcome. Pray for government leaders. We're told to do that in the scripture. Pray for those who are in positions of power that they would work for good flourishing in peace. So pray. Second admonition I have for you. We need to talk with real people that we disagree with. I'm actually on February 9th going to be at Iowa State doing a lecture on campus titled Why We Need to Disagree and it's about the rise of tribalism in our political rhetoric and why we actually need people like me really conservative Christian people to deeply hold their beliefs and express those even in public spaces like university campuses why because we have to learn how to talk to people who are different than us without labeling them as dangerous. If we can't find a way to stop rolling Nazi rhetoric and civil war headlines out whenever we have firm disagreement we're propelling the situation. We need to learn how to talk to people who we really disagree with. If you cannot from your political persuasion let's say you're saying well I just don't want to have customs and immigration because of this and this or maybe you're on the other side saying I think this immigration thing is a real problem. If you've never faced a face talked with a thoughtful person that you respect who thinks differently than you about that issue. If the only people you ever talk with basically already agree with everything you say then what's going to happen is we're going to have no way to think that the person I disagree with is not dangerous they're just my friend. We have to begin to build relationships with people we disagree with because it's really hard to insult somebody you actually know. We got to think beyond our political tribes and start to actually talk with people. So pray and talk with people, talk with your neighbors, listen when you talk. But if I could give a word as God's people I think one of the things we need right now in this moment is patience. We are almost demanding that elected officials offer final judgment on situations in real time immediately. I think the most important thing that should have been said after these shootings was we will do a thorough and full investigation where all of the truth will be brought to the court, to the court of law and you will know about that as the public because in America we don't hide these things we deal with them openly. We have to at you know what that's called that's called preserving judgment. Being patient, letting all the facts come out allowing yourself to not feel like in a moment you have to have everything figured out. This podcast is not designed to say everything about everything about ice, I can't do that. I can't say everything about everything about these situations. What we can say is on the face of it what's obviously true. It is a tragedy anytime someone made in the image of God dies and it is equally a tragedy. When we see citizens in a country who must work together in moments like this turning against in fighting with each other instead of looking and saying there is something deeply flawed and broken happening here maybe we need to step back and work together on it. We know that and so today my hope is just really simply to give a little bit of biblical theologically informed reflection about a difficult situation and I just want to close by praying because I think perhaps more than anything else prayer would help us both to have the heart of grace for people we differ from but also the heart of patience that we need in situations like this so Father in heaven as we close this podcast I offer a prayer for the families of two people who died and I pray for the family of René Good I pray for the family of Alex Presty that Lord Jesus you would somehow send your people to bring comfort to them to bring the truth to them Father I pray for federal agents on the ground that you would protect them even God I pray for protesters on the ground who are angry right now that you would hold them back from intervening doing that which would be wrong or dangerous God that you would help cooler heads to prevail that people would take a deep breath God I pray for government officials for governor walls in Minnesota for the mayor of Minneapolis for them to act with righteousness and justice and peace in mind for President Trump and for his elected officials who are involved even administration officials involved that is a seek to enforce immigration law they would do it with justice wisdom but also peace in mind and Father we pray for our country right now that instead of looking to score political points we would have a moment to step back and say what have we done in these situations to put ourselves here where our first response is not simply to mourn but to attack to try to score political points off of people's lives Father so Lord we pray that you would bring peace and Lord Jesus in all these things you're the Prince of peace you're the true government that we need we need your kingship and your Lordship and so on these times we say even so come Lord Jesus we pray it in your name Amen.