The Word Became Flesh—and Crossed a Border

Isaac Villegas' evocative book opens in the Southwest desert along the borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico as a group of people leave crosses in the places where migrants have lost their lives. These crosses, writes Villegas, are “...an act of devotion to a stranger who should have been our neighbor… Each crucifix remembers a life lost to the violence of immigration policies.”

Migrant God: A Christian Vision for Immigrant Justice is only 167 pages, but it incorporates theology, history, activism, and most of all, solidarity with immigrants in vulnerable situations. This is a book about faith, a faith that has hands and feet — not just hashtags.

Villegas, himself a child of immigrants, is a writer, an ordained Mennonite pastor, and a community organizer and activist. He details how the Christian community faces a society that rejects immigrants. “As people living on the front lines of an ever-expanding war on immigrants, we decided to look for points of resistance to disrupt their plans,” he writes. Villegas goes on to describe the work he and his community have done with and for immigrants, all the while sharing the way God is revealed in this work.

Each chapter begins in a different setting: the Arizona desert where Villegas delivers jugs of water, a church fellowship hall turned into an apartment that provides sanctuary for a person threatened with deportation, the kitchen of a migrant shelter in the borderlands, and a foot-washing station on the premises of an ICE field station, just to name a few.

Though the book was written prior to the current U.S. administration’s ICE raids and mass deportation plan, its discussion of the people who were disappeared by the U.S.-funded repressive governments in Central America in the 1980s is strikingly relevant to our times. Many of those people fled to the U.S. and Canada in search of safety. In Canada they were deemed refugees, but in the U.S. — the country that funded the war in their nations and created their displacement — they found no such welcome. However, some were given sanctuary in churches, the only places that provided protection from the violence of the law.

Now, decades later, history repeats itself. The U.S. is arresting and deporting immigrants and sending them to prisons in El Salvador. People are kidnapped by the government without due process and not to immigrant detention centers, but prisons.

Though the sanctuary movement is needed today, the Trump administration has revoked long standing policies that limited immigration enforcement in sensitive locations, such as churches, schools, and hospitals. These unjust acts by our own U.S. government reinforce the need for a new kind of sanctuary movement today, one that is still being defined since churches are no longer exempt from immigration enforcement. Communities, like Villegas’ are still finding ways to resist and obstruct unjust laws that harm their neighbors.

In hopeful defiance of the U.S.’s exclusionary immigration policies and the violence they perpetrate, Villegas and his community stand with immigrants not as saviors but as siblings who follow a liberating God. These are people willing to put their bodies on the line for the sake of their neighbors.

Ultimately, Migrant God is a book about discipleship and its cost to individuals and communities. Villegas and his friends risk arrest as they spend their time and their resources to protect their immigrant neighbors. This is faith in action: delivering water, cooking meals, and buying groceries for a migrant in sanctuary. It’s not the kind of exciting activism most people imagine, but it’s the kind that makes a difference in the lives of immigrants.

I especially appreciated Villegas’ honest discussion of former President Barack Obama’s mass deportations as well as former President Bill Clinton’s harmful immigration policies, wrapped up in the language of economics and fearmongering. The author dispels the myth that presidential administrations headed by Democrats are inherently pro-immigrants and pro-immigration, as this is demonstrably not true in any way. What is true is that neither party has had the will to enact meaningful legislation to support immigrants. So, it is up to us, the people, to step up if we want justice for immigrants.

Perhaps the only fault I found with the book is that it is, in some places, too academic and has some examples that are esoteric and scholarly, which makes it not quite accessible to everyone. I found it hard to figure out the target audience for this book. I don’t think it’s written for a general audience, but it should be, because it’s a book about Christian formation and civil engagement, and the Christian community sorely needs that right now.

Villegas’ vision of mutual liberation and transforming love is inspiring. Toward the end of the book, he writes, “...we assemble as people of God’s Spirit whose power liberates us for a life of love — to pledge ourselves to the well-being of our neighbors, near and far, to give ourselves to a freedom that is bound up with theirs.” May many more pledge this allegiance.