Donald Trump Is Hunting People Inside Churches

Donald Trump is hunting people inside churches. Kristi Noem signed the order that rescinded the rule that kept Immigration and Customs Enforcement out of houses of worship. Tom Homan stood in front of the cameras and called it good. Stephen Miller drew the architecture. The agents do the hunting. A Korean-American congregation in metropolitan Atlanta watched federal officers come up the aisle during the Sunday liturgy. A Spanish-language parish in Houston watched the same thing happen at the door of the sacristy. In Los Angeles a woman was arrested as she stepped out of the morning Mass and into the parking lot with the host still on her tongue. The plain English word for the hunting of human beings inside the place where they have come to pray is sacrilege, and the country is owed the courage to use the word.

The rule that the Trump administration rescinded had been in place since 2011. It was not a sentimental gesture. It was the standing recognition, under both parties, that there are a few places — the church, the school, the hospital, the funeral — where the state agrees to lay down the hunt because human beings cannot be human in the presence of armed men sent to take them. On the twenty-first of January, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security ended it. Within weeks the Mennonite Church USA, the Religious Society of Friends, the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church filed in federal district court in Maryland that the policy is a Free Exercise violation. The Catholic bishops of the United States issued a public statement the day after the rescission and have not stood down from it. The state agreed for fourteen years to keep its hands off the altar. Donald Trump put them back on it.

“For I was a stranger, and ye took me in,” Jesus said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Matthew 25 is not metaphor and is not parable. It is judgment. The Korean grandmother in Atlanta who came up the aisle for communion and was led out in cuffs before she could receive it is the Christ. The young father in Houston taken at the side door while his children waited in the pew is the Christ. The asylum-seeker in Los Angeles whose first act in the new country was to learn the form of the kneeling and the response is the Christ. The agents who put hands on those bodies put hands on the body of the Christ. The administration that orders the hunting orders the hunting of God.

The Torah on the ger — the resident alien, the foreigner who has come to live among us — does not soften. “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The rabbis count thirty-six iterations across the Five Books, more than the command to honor the Sabbath, more than any other commandment in the corpus. There is no Jewish reading that escapes it. There is no Christian reading that overrides it. There is no Islamic reading that goes around it. Stephen Miller has read the verse or has refused to read it, and either way the verse is what it is. The machine he built and Donald Trump signed and Kristi Noem operationalized and Tom Homan defends at the cameras is a working apparatus for breaking the commandment the three Abrahamic traditions hold in common. The plain English word for the conduct is betrayal.

Pope Francis stood on the island of Lampedusa in July of 2013, with the cemetery of the drowned migrants in view from the altar, and named what was being done. “We have fallen into a globalization of indifference.” Seven years later Fratelli Tutti devoted a chapter of the magisterium to the migrant — welcome, protect, promote, integrate — and is binding on every Catholic holding public office in this country. The senators who tell the camera they go to Mass and then voted the appropriations that pay the agents at the church door are bound by it. The cabinet secretaries who took the oath and then signed onto the rescission are bound by it. And in February of 2016, on the plane from Mexico, Francis said of the man who is now President: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” The Pope said it. The Pope did not retract it. The man the Pope was talking about is the man now sending the agents.

Those of us who came up in the parish life of the Catholic-Right alignment of the 1980s and 1990s helped build the climate Donald Trump is now exploiting; the homiletic asymmetry that named the sanctity of the unborn from the ambo every week and the sanctity of the asylum-seeker once a year was the formation, and the swing-state political-Catholicism that produced the bipartisan deportation pace across thirty years was the vote. The naming of the present cruelty does not exempt the prior years — Obama’s removal pace, the persistence of Title 42 into the Biden administration, the bipartisan border consensus that has hardened across a generation — and the prior years do not soften the present moment by a single ounce. The threshold the present administration crossed is the threshold of the sanctuary itself. The prior administrations of both parties did not cross it. The Catholic bishops, the Episcopal Diocese, the Quaker meeting, the AME Zion church, the rabbinic conferences of the Reform and Conservative movements, and the West Coast Buddhist sanghas have all named it in one direction. There is no other accurate naming available.

On the twenty-third of March, 1980, the Sunday before he was murdered at the altar of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia, Óscar Romero stood in the Cathedral of San Salvador and addressed the soldiers of the junta in the second person. “Hermanos, son de nuestro mismo pueblo… En nombre de Dios, pues, y en nombre de este sufrido pueblo, les suplico, les ruego, les ordeno: ¡cese la represión!” The lineage that writes through this column writes that sentence again, across forty-six years and a continent, to the agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement reading these words tonight at the kitchen table with the boots still by the door. Brother, sister, you are from our same people. The order to enter the sanctuary, to lay hands on the worshipper, to separate the citizen child from the undocumented mother in the parking lot after the Mass — the order is immoral, and no one is bound to fulfill it. Cese la represión. Stop the hunt. The door of return is open to every officer who walks out of the precinct tonight and does not go back in the morning.

To Donald Trump and to Stephen Miller and to Tom Homan and to Kristi Noem, in the second person and in the name of God: stop the hunt. The texts you have on the shelves of the West Wing and the Department say what you are doing. The bishops of your own communion have said it. The Pope said it from the plane. The door of return is open to you also, and the door of every church in the country has not been shut and will not be shut. The Word made stranger is in the front pew where the woman was taken at the rail, and the body of the Christ remains in the place where the agents found Him this morning.

— Hayzeus L. Salvador