To say I grew up Catholic is an understatement. By age five, I was told my great grandmother desired with all her heart that I become a priest. By age seven, I was playing Jesus in the Stations of the Cross during Easter. With a crown of thorns, bloody robe, and all. (Photographs of which have all been consequently locked away by me). By age 12 I was an altar boy and I knew by heart and prayed the entirety of the rosary with my two older sisters and mother on the anniversary of the deaths of my grandfather and great grandparents.
As I grew up, I had to come out of two closets, one as a gay man and the other as an undocumented immigrant. Shortly after coming out, I began to work in the immigrant rights movement where I would spend over a decade fighting for the Dream Act, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and immigration reform.
After witnessing and experiencing how religion was weaponized to persecute human beings based on their sexuality and immigration status, I left the church. The more I lived in my dual identity and in those fights, the more I began to see Christian Nationalism as the sole reason there was and continues to be a war to strip both immigrants and LGBTQ+ individuals of their rights and humanity. (Attacks on transgender folk and LGBTQ+ people in general is a central part of Project 2025, the 900-page playbook for dismantling the federal government to advance a Christian Nationalist agenda).
In my world most LGBTQ+ folks expect discrimination and persecution from the church, or, at least, aren’t surprised by it. The same is not true for immigrants. Even though I myself had spent most of my activist journey fighting for immigration reform since 2010, I was blindsided by how Christian Nationalists co-opted the religious community and weaponized their beliefs to create an all-out war against immigrants, undocumented or not.
In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and then-Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders both cited the Bible to justify the child-separation policy at the border. Additionally, some have voiced support for establishing “ideological screenings” of immigrants and even the expulsion and eventual deportation of immigrants based solely on their political beliefs.
Over the last 15 years, powerful anti-immigrant groups and politicians have joined forces to propel anti-immigrant policy and propaganda onto the national stage. One such example was Alabama’s extreme anti-immigrant law HB56, which was drafted by renowned anti-immigrant architect Kris Kobach. The bill became the model for their “attrition through enforcement strategy,” which aimed to make the lives of undocumented immigrants so difficult that they would, in essence, “self-deport.” Strategies like this one were conceived and pushed by immigration restrictionist organizations like Center for Immigration Studies and Federation for American Immigration Reform, the latter of which Kobach is openly known to have close ties to.
It is then no surprise that Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is one of the organizations that is publicly supporting Project 2025, a roster that also includes a slew of Christian Nationalist groups from the Shadow Network that rejects church-state separation. In Project 2025, anti-immigrant groups have finally found a centralized platform with enough money, power, and influence to make their nationalist and eugenic dreams come true. Project 2025 calls for:
I would hope that Project 2025 and anti-immigrant policies like these would serve as a wake-up call for people of faith, but polls have shown that white Christians are the most likely Americans to say migration at the southern border is a “crisis” and the least likely to believe immigrants strengthen America.
Religion is important to so many people. But it’s for that reason that it can also be so easily co-opted, manipulated and used to harm and persecute others. And that’s why religious beliefs should not be enshrined in our laws and our institutions.
Some Christians constantly speak of the second coming of Christ. However, if Jesus, Mary and Joseph were at our southern border seeking asylum, they would have already been detained, caged and deported by now. Instead of crafting government policies to literally feed our hungry, welcome the immigrant, to enshrine protections for our LGBTQ+ neighbors, or help heal the sick, Christian Nationalists continue to use their beliefs to persecute people who look and speak like me. That is why, when I fight for the separation of church and state, I am fighting for immigrant rights, and I will work hard to ensure that the wall which separates church and state is at least one layer of brick higher than when I found it.
