My heart retches within me. I grieve for the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Good was murdered while she attempted to drive away from an ICE agent, shot at least twice through her window after the ICE agent stepped away from his supposed danger. Pretti, holding only a cell phone and his voice, stepped between a woman and Border Patrol agents and paid with his life. He was beaten, dragged to the ground, stomped and shot while he laid on the ground.
Spin doctors have come out of the woodwork to claim, “He brandished a gun!” ignoring the fact that Pretti had a concealed carry permit and no video has shown him holding his gun. They shot him repeatedly while he laid on the ground.
Randy Shepley
The violence toward immigrants from CBP and ICE is not merely condoned by our leaders. It is justified and defended through deception and manipulative misrepresentation. Many, including Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, have called Pretti a domestic terrorist, even though his background and history offer no evidence to support this claim. Furthermore, Noem and countless others have lambasted Pretti as a lawbreaker bent on harm for carrying a pistol, even though he had a concealed carry permit and never drew his weapon.
The falsification and distortion present in Noem’s claims pales in comparison to the duplicity present in the secular and Christian right. How many calling Alex Pretti and Renee Good criminals celebrate Kyle Rittenhouse openly carrying an AR-15 and killing two people? How many people champion Rittenhouse’s Second Amendment rights while trampling on the Second Amendment rights of an ICU nurse who never drew his weapon?
I grieve for the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I grieve for every immigrant neighbor who has endured the smashing of their doors, the violation of their bodies and the trampling of their rights. I grieve for every immigrant family who fears the enticement and removal of their children. I mourn the deportation of people who legally sought asylum and had their TPS documentation stripped away after entering our nation legally.
I stand with every parent who keeps their child home from school, every adult who stays home from work, every person who chooses to attend their immigration appointments in order to follow the law, knowing full well they may be arrested after their appointment by ICE agents lurking in the hallway.
“We are the land of the free for the privileged, but not for the ones deemed undesirable.”
I weep because people, including American citizens, are arrested and detained without appropriate warrants. People are arrested and denied access to their attorneys. People are arrested and their families are not even notified about their whereabouts. These are the actions of a police state, not the land of the free.
I fear we are no longer the land of the free. We are the land of the free for the privileged, but not for the ones deemed undesirable. The undesirables we now break down doors and arrest without warrants. Anyone who interferes or asks questions, risks being ostracized, bullied, arrested or shot.
I grieve because our current national agony was preventable, but so many American Christians and other Americans were duped by lies. Lies like ICE is only going after violent criminals. Lies like all immigrants are aliens, illegals and animals. False claims that American citizens are not getting arrested by ICE. The willingness of American evangelical Christians to avert their eyes from immigrants languishing in detention centers with inadequate food, staffing, space, medical care, access to attorneys and enforced, inhumane disconnection from their families.
Far too many have eagerly consumed the lies even in the face of their own Bibles.
Perhaps this is the greatest lie and betrayal of all: Evangelical Christians have heard from celebrity pastors, news commentators, leaders and dubious “news” sources that flood their inboxes and social media pages with misinformation and anger that biblical commands to love and welcome the stranger have nothing to do with how Christians should view ICE and immigration in the current context.
“Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.”
Far too many American Christians have bought the idea that the current administration represents Christian values and priorities when the actions and beliefs professed in Christian nationalist rhetoric violate the absolute core of following Jesus. As Paul says in Romans 13, a chapter loved by Christian nationalists: “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.”
We traded the center of our faith for a seat at the table of partisan power in a kingdom that will not endure. Many American Christians endorse harming our neighbors in order to preserve their sensibilities, preferences and privilege. Many of these Christians are our family members, friends, church members and colleagues. I grieve the loss and brokenness of these relationships, destroyed by the embrace of lies made palatable as truth.
I grieve for the people of color I am grateful to call my friends and colleagues. I remember the Black and brown friends in my high school, people I have not seen in ages who taught me the wonder of diversity even though I was too young to absorb all the lessons. From my diverse college and seminary experiences, to the churches I have served in communities where white was far from the only color present in the sea of neighbor faces, to Puerto Rico where I was befriended and loved by so many brown-skinned friends, and to the church I serve as pastor now where a significant portion of our membership are brown and Black.
To these, and so many others who hurt, fear, suffer and face agonizing choices at the hands of a nation who has forgotten your value and ignored the call to love our neighbor, I see you, I grieve with you, and I stand with you, until God’s kingdom comes.
Until that day, I cry out as a person who grieves with hope, because I live under the call of the way and reign of Jesus. I will love him by loving and seeking justice for my neighbor. May the depths of grief in this present time lead to ever-deepening love as we meet the hate and violence in our world not with force, but with love.
Randy Shepley serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Newport News, Va.