The Trump administration’s vilification and authorization of violence against peaceful protesters at migrant detention centers may be appalling and terrifying but it is nothing new, scholar Sergio González said during the 2025 Shurden Lectures.
“The question — When did mercy become a crime? — in fact isn’t a novel one,” said Gonzalez, associate professor of history at Marquette University, co-founder of the Dane Sanctuary Coalition and keynote speaker for the annual series sponsored by Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
The Walter B. and Kay W. Shurden Lectures on Religious Liberty and Separation of Church and State travel to college campuses across the U.S. The University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., hosted the 2025 sessions in October. Walter Shurden was a celebrated church historian and founding executive director of the Center for Baptist Studies at Mercer University.
The question on the criminalization of mercy, Gonzalez said, “has been asked before in different decades under different administrations by people of faith who have found that compassion toward migrants could make them targets of surveillance, prosecution and even imprisonment.”
And there is no clearer recent example than that of David Black, the Presbyterian pastor shot in the head with a pepper ball projectile and gassed during nonviolent protests outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in a Chicago suburb in September, Gonzalez said.
Black joined a federal lawsuit filed in October accusing the administration of using arbitrary and unlawful force and illegal detentions in violation of demonstrators’ freedom of speech and religion while falsely labeling them as threats to law enforcement.
“What we’re witnessing in Illinois echoes earlier chapters in American history.”
“What we’re witnessing in Illinois echoes earlier chapters in American history when acts of conscience collided with the machinery of the state,” Gonzalez explained. “This story reveals how federal and state authorities have targeted religious and municipal actors who have defied immigration (policy) and how activists, clergy and communities have built resilient networks of resistance.”
Gonzalez began that history in the 1980s when civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua were driving migrants across the border into Arizona, California and Texas in search of asylum. But the U.S. refused to recognize thousands of immigrants as political refugees because it was backing the very regimes or rebel groups the migrants had escaped. Most were deported.
In response, clusters of churches “decided that mercy was worth breaking the law for” and began offering food and shelter to migrants emerging from the desert, while a growing number of borderland residents started organizing what was to become the sanctuary movement to provide protections from deportation.
As they began hiding immigrants in sanctuaries and basements, participants accused the U.S. of violating the 1980 Refugee Act and international law in its handling of asylum cases at the border. They saw the movement as rooted in Jewish and Christian tradition and drew connections to the Underground Railroad when abolitionists defied federal law by sheltering escaped slaves.
“The phrase ‘justice and mercy’ became the theological foundation of this movement. Sanctuary was not, these church people argued, a private act of piety, it was a public witness against state violence, an act of moral disobedience in defense of human life,” Gonzalez said.
But as the movement grew, so did an increasingly organized effort to discredit sanctuary churches as threats to American security. Conservative Christian leaders joined forces with right-wing politicians and media personalities to alert the nation what was happening at the border.
“They warned that Mainline denominations had been infiltrated by liberation theologians and Christian Marxists who used humanitarian language to undermine America’s moral resolve in the Cold War. From their vantage, sanctuary wasn’t an act of conscience, it was an act of subversion,” he said.
High-ranking White House officials, policymakers, think tanks and anti-immigration organizations eventually joined in the effort.
“What we might call a theology of suspicion emerged.”
“Together these alliances of neo-conservative theologians, policymakers and anti-immigration activists sought to delegitimize the act of mercy itself, portraying faith-based aid to refugees as naive at best and treasonous at worst,” he stated. “What we might call a theology of suspicion emerged with a conviction that compassion could be co-opted by political actors with ulterior, and perhaps even sinister, motives.”
The sentiment also took root in local communities where migrant shelters and sanctuary houses were located. Fear developed into a “national panic over migration” and morality itself became politically charged, Gonzalez said.
At one point, a Catholic-run shelter in Brownsville, Texas, was targeted by a neighborhood group that built a tower to monitor activities in the ministry’s backyard. “They believed it was not a ministry of mercy but a front for leftist conspiracy, a place where religion had been hijacked by politics.”
Multiple sanctuary workers were charged with harboring and transporting undocumented immigrants. “None of them served time, but the message was unmistakable,” Gonzales said.
The anti-sanctuary movement of that era was convinced the embrace of refugees was about heresy, not holiness, and came to embody the nation’s fear of the stranger.
Much the same can be said of present-day efforts to protect migrants from deportation, including the advent of more than a dozen sanctuary states and close to 20 sanctuary cities, Gonzalez said. “The new sanctuary movement emerged in 2007 as a revival to protect undocumented already in the country.”
The modern version of the ministry also faces stiff opposition on political and religious fronts. The Trump administration has filed multiple lawsuits against sanctuary jurisdictions and threatened funding cuts to others in keeping with his executive order on “Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens.”
“A vocal contingent of conservative pastors, meanwhile, has supported the administration’s restrictive immigration policies arguing that the United States, like heaven, has a gate that must be respected and protected,” Gonzalez said. “Others have argued that Christian love and compassion toward the sojourner and migrant must come second to a community and government’s responsibility to its citizens.”
At stake in these arguments is the nation’s vision of compassion and welcome, he said. “They cut to the heart of America’s self-understanding of who is worthy of safety, who decides where compassion ends and the law begins, and what happens when acts of mercy are treated as crimes and interrogating these intertwined questions.”