Asylum Seekers, Family Separation, and Political Order

Two weeks after Maria’s 9-year-old daughter, Esther, returned home from an errand with her face bruised and clothes torn, she and her daughter sweated profusely under the desert sun 10 miles south of the U.S. border. Esther’s beating had been the tipping point. Maria had tried to hold out. She had grown up in the town; it was her home. But the gang ranks were growing, and with larger ranks came crueler belligerence. Some in her extended family had lost children to gang violence. All had been robbed at some point or other. When Esther returned home bloodied, Maria knew it was time to escape.

Maria had heard rumors that families threatened by violence could seek asylum in the United States. She felt she and Esther had to be ideal candidates. Gangs were everywhere; her daughter had been abused; the whole town was corrupt. As she and Esther approached the border agent and nervously began answering his questions, it quickly became apparent they wouldn’t be admitted as refugees. The agent’s demeanor said it all. They were moved to several different lines until finally arriving in a large holding room. Two days later, authorities approached Maria and Esther to take Esther away. Maria was screaming too loudly for her daughter to hear the agent’s explanation.

The question before American society is whether asylum seekers like Maria should be subject to prosecution and whether prosecution should require family separation. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently defended the Justice Department’s policy of prosecuting asylum seekers and separating children from parents facing prosecution. He appealed to Romans 13, saying people should “obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.” But this policy is morally abhorrent and, far from being justified by Scripture, is condemned by Scripture. Many Christians have objected to Sessions’s misuse of Romans 13 to support the current policy, but some still support the policy itself.

I want to address both the injustice of the separation policy and Sessions’s faulty hermeneutic. Read More

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