When it comes to issues like supporting public funding for private religious schools or opposing transgender rights, Christian Nationalists loudly proclaim that they are defending parental autonomy and preserving the sanctity of family. But we know that’s all smoke and mirrors because when it comes to immigrant families, their concerns for parental rights vanish. Suddenly it is seen as just – even moral – to separate non-white children from their parents at the border, or to call for mass deportations that will break up millions of families.
Back in 2018, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited the Bible to justify a policy of family separation at the border, which led to children as young as five being taken from their parents. Taking his cues from a weekly White House Bible study led by Christian Nationalists – and over the objections of faith leaders across the country – Sessions argued that family separation was a proportional punishment for lawbreakers because “[t]he authorities that exist have been established by God.”
Family separation is not the only way in which Christian Nationalists have succeeded in imposing their supposedly biblical views on the nation’s immigrants. Prior to joining AU, I was an Equal Justice Works Fellow at a refugee rights organization, where I focused on reuniting families impacted by the Muslim Ban. As my colleague Mariko Hirose has written, the Muslim Ban was an outgrowth of Christian Nationalist rhetoric and fear-mongering.
The Muslim Ban explicitly targeted families from Muslim-majority countries, including children living in difficult and dangerous conditions. In October 2017, the U.S. government shut down a 40-year-old immigration program that allowed refugees who entered the country through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program to have their spouse and children join them in safety.
Religiously affiliated groups, such as Jewish Family Services and the Episcopal Diocese – who had long played a leading role in welcoming refugees and supporting refugee communities in the United States – were among the leaders who successfully challenged this suspension. But even though the government eventually re-opened this program, it did not undo behind-the-scenes policy changes that were designed to keep Muslim families apart. And suspicion and hostility toward Muslim immigrants endured, extending even to Afghans and Iraqis who risked their lives to support American troops and values.
Years after the Zero Tolerance Policy and the Muslim Ban disappeared from the headlines, their impacts continue to reverberate. As of May 2024, over 1,400 families who were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border have not been reunited. And thousands of Muslim refugees remain separated from their families abroad, notwithstanding their statutory right to reunification.
Meanwhile, the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric seeded by Christian Nationalists continue to bear fruit. They echo in renewed calls to ban Muslim immigrants and to engage in mass deportations. And they live on in the struggles that immigrants from Muslim-majority countries face, even absent a formal ban, in coming to the United States.
Like Mariko, I came to Americans United from the immigrants’ rights world because I understand that at its core, the fight for immigrants’ rights and the fight against Christian Nationalism is the same fight. When, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court decrees that, in the name of religious liberty, states must fund schools that teach their students to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion,” they perpetuate an otherization that leads to anti-immigrant – and anti-family – policies. Church-state separation is essential to ensuring that the fringe values of a vocal minority do not dictate our nation’s values and immigration policies.
