If you are a regular reader, you will have noticed that the interval between the previous column and this one has been two months rather than two weeks, due in part to the inconvenience of a minor surgery. It’s good to be back here.
As I have mentioned now and then over the years, I have a longtime interest in immigration, and even after divesting myself of many books in the last decade or so (passing them on to people working on the subject), I still have plenty of shelves and stacks of books devoted to immigration, not to mention back issues of journals and magazines, photocopies (remember those?), and so on. I am pro-immigration but also convinced of the need for responsible enforcement of the law.
President Trump, following his campaign pledges, has pursued a crackdown on illegal immigration, a necessity after President Biden’s utter failure on this score. Alas, as might be expected, the Trump-directed response, rather than being measured, “prudent,” enforcing the law without gratuitous cruelty, has too often been excessive. No matter how scrupulous the ICE agents had been, of course, they would have been met with furious protests, false accusations, and an utter failure to recognize the need for enforcement. We can only conclude that Trump wanted a degree of excess to daunt potential migrants and to persuade some of those who are already here illegally to return to their homeland.
I have been struck again and again by the extent to which many people I respect simply brush away the consequences of unchecked illegal immigration. This is especially the case with fellow-Christians. One of the most remarkable magazine pieces I’ve seen anywhere on any subject in the last decade appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Christianity Today magazine. “They Led at Saddleback Church. ICE Said They Were Safe,” the title proclaimed. Below that (in what we used to call the “deck”): “A Colombian couple prayed with neighbors and raised their children in one of America’s most influential churches. What did we gain from their deportation?”
Rich in detail, exceptionally long but not padded, Andy Olsen’s piece tells the story of this Colombian couple. I urge you to read it; it will repay your time and attention. Now join me in a thought-experiment. Let’s suppose that while Olsen was at work on his article, another magazine had assigned an equally gifted writer to tell the story of an illegal immigrant who (like the couple profiled in Christianity Today) has been in the U.S. for decades. But unlike that couple, a very sympathetic pair, the protagonist of this piece is a shape-shifting predator, assuming several identities over the course of his time here and comfortably ensconced in a high-paying job as a school-district administrator.
How much would his story tell us about immigration policy? Taken alone, very little; ditto the Christianity Today piece. Of course, that’s not what Christianity Today intends for you to conclude. But that article, alas, represents (in its most persuasive form) the approach to immigration that’s dominant in many Christian circles.
And of course, this problem isn’t at all limited to Christian takes on the subject. Here in Wheaton, Illinois, our newspaper of record is the Chicago Tribune, once a great paper and still a very good one when we moved from Pasadena, California, to Wheaton in the summer of 1994. Now, alas, it’s just a shadow of what it once was, but we still subscribe, and I read it every day.
Since ICE came to Chicago, the Tribune has been running a slew of one-sided articles, heavy on criticism of the crackdown, presenting a simple story of good people going about their lives only to be seized and manhandled and terrorized by Trump’s thugs. Some of the criticism, alas, is justified. But there’s a fundamental disconnect. Story after story offering an idealized portrait of this or that person swept up in one of ICE’s raids must acknowledge that the victim in question is not legally in the United States. “Chicago day care teacher arrested by ICE released: ‘I am so grateful,’” ran the headline in a story this week.
There were the requisite howls of protest and the assertion that the case “has generated widespread backlash.” The Colombian woman who was arrested, who “cares for infants” at a Spanish Immersion Early Learning Center, had “undergone a background check,” the school said. Then there is this, buried at the end of the piece, without comment: “the Department of Homeland Security said . . . she illegally entered the U.S. on June 26, 2023, and ‘was encountered by Border Patrol,’ and that ‘the Biden administration released her into the U.S.’” Oh.
