Suffer the Little Children

The Evangelical coalition that claims to protect children built an apparatus that pins fathers to the concrete outside their children’s schools.

ICE agents held a man facedown on the sidewalk outside Commodore John Rodgers Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore on Thursday while children in school uniforms were rushed past by adults. A bystander video, shared with CNN, shows the man squirming under the weight of officers as a woman watches from a vehicle. Jesus Acevedo-Sanchez and the woman were arrested as preschoolers, kindergarteners, and their families arrived for end-of-year ceremonies and pre-K graduation.

State Superintendent Carey Wright and State Board President Joshua Michael called it what it was. The arrest, they said, “betrayed pledges from ICE that it would not arrest people on school campuses.” It “overshadowed what should have been a joyful day of pre-K graduation and end-of-year events.”

The administration maintains that immigration laws apply everywhere, including at educational institutions. ICE and DHS declined to comment on the operation in Baltimore.

This is a pattern that has been building across the country. Agents arrested a man at San Francisco International Airport while travelers looked on. They detained teen mariachi musicians before bipartisan criticism forced their release. At Columbia University, agents posed as local police to gain access to a campus. Each time, the administration has said the same thing: the law applies everywhere. Each time, the pattern extends a little further into the places where families gather, where children study, where communities mark the milestones of their lives.

But the weight of Thursday’s arrest does not rest on ICE alone. It rests on the political movement that built the apparatus ICE now operates, and on the theological claim that movement has made about itself for thirty years.

The Evangelical Right’s child-protection claim — from the Moral Majority through Dobbs, from the Hyde Amendment through ultrasound laws, from crisis-pregnancy centers through clinic buffer zones — has been the single most powerful card in their political deck. I know. I spent three decades inside the machinery that played it. The argument was always the same: we are the defenders of the children. We speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.

The same coalition now defends an apparatus that terrorizes living, breathing, school-uniformed children — the very subjects whose “protection” was the premise of every election-year homily — to enforce immigration law against their parents.

The Bible’s own texts are more specific on the stranger than on most things Christians argue about.

The Hebrew ger — foreigner, sojourner, resident alien — appears dozens upon dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible, outpacing many categories of command that receive far more theological attention. Exodus 22:21: “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” Leviticus 19:33–34: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” Deuteronomy 10:18–19: “He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” The formula “for you were foreigners in Egypt” — the command grounded in Israel’s own memory of displacement, of being the people without papers, without standing, without a country that would claim them.

Leviticus 19:34 commands love of the foreigner as yourself — the same construction Jesus will use in the second great commandment. Deuteronomy 10:18–19 grounds the obligation not in human charity but in God’s own character: God loves the foreigner. Our treatment of the stranger is a measure of our knowledge of God, not a footnote to it.

Jesus makes the connection unmistakable in Matthew 25:35–40. “I was a stranger and you invited me in.” The stranger appears alongside the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned — and the text identifies care for each as care for Christ himself. The Greek word is xenos. The passage does not ask about citizenship. It does not ask about documentation. It does not ask about the immigration politics of the host nation. It asks what you did.

The Evangelical legalist tradition has spent generations finding ways around these passages. “Stranger” in Matthew 25 is restricted to fellow believers. Leviticus and Exodus are Old Testament covenant law that does not bind the church politically. Romans 13 — “submit to the governing authorities” — trumps all of it, defer to immigration enforcement, the state has spoken. And the subtlest maneuver of all — that the biblical mandate to love the stranger governs personal charity, not immigration law — is the one that lets a deacon cheer the handcuffs while sending the check to the food pantry.

In 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the move explicit when he invoked Romans 13 to defend the administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border. The Evangelical Right followed his lead. Romans 13:1, quoted alone and without its surrounding chapter, says to submit. The Greek runs through verse 7. Verses 4 and 7 require that governing authorities themselves be “God’s servants” — subject to the standards of justice that the prior chapters of Romans laid out. Reading verse 1 alone against verses 2 through 7 is what the Pharisees did with the texts Jesus condemned in Matthew 23:23 — “You give a tenth of your spices… But you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy and faithfulness.”

The Good Samaritan — Luke 10:25–37 — reframes “Who is my neighbor?” by making the moral exemplar a Samaritan, a despised outsider. The religious insiders, the priest and the Levite, are the ones who step around the bleeding man in the road. The Evangelical tradition has sentimentalized the parable into a story about being kind to strangers, stripping away the ethnic edge that made the lawyer unable to say the word “Samaritan” out loud.

The biblical witness does not waver. Matthew 25 places the stranger alongside the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the imprisoned. The passage does not qualify. It does not offer an exception for political calculation. The Evangelical coalition has spent thirty years building a political apparatus that functions by closing the door on the very people the text identifies as Christ himself.

It is worth noting that the coalition’s own theological bodies have broken with this political position. The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith judged the COVID vaccines morally acceptable when the Evangelical rank and file refused them on moral grounds. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission has issued positions that cut against the coalition’s political line. The coalition that claims to speak for the God of the stranger has been operating at odds with the formal theological positions of major Christian bodies for years.

The pattern is documented. The administration maintains that immigration law applies everywhere, including at educational institutions. ICE and DHS declined to comment on the Baltimore operation. The political coalition that elected this administration did so on a promise of aggressive immigration enforcement, and the promise is being kept.

The Bible does not qualify its position on the stranger. Matthew 25 does not offer an exception. The Evangelical coalition has built an apparatus that functions by treating the stranger as the enemy, and the apparatus has now arrived at the door of an elementary school on the morning of a pre-K graduation.

But there is something deeper here that the Evangelical Right will not be able to walk away from. For thirty years, this coalition has claimed to be the voice of the voiceless, the protector of the child, the defender of the one who cannot defend itself. The Hyde Amendment. The ultrasound laws. The clinic buffer zones. The crisis-pregnancy centers. The campaign against Roe. Every piece of it wrapped in the language of child protection. The single most powerful card in their political deck, played again and again, election after election, legislative session after legislative session.

And now the same coalition defends an apparatus that pins living children’s fathers to the ground outside their schools while those children watch.

The father held on the concrete outside Commodore John Rodgers while his child, dressed for a ceremony, was hurried past — that is the image that collapses the child-protection edifice entirely.

That is the scandal, and it does not belong to ICE alone. It belongs to the movement that built the machine, the voters who powered it, the pastors who blessed it from the pulpit with Romans 13 quoted without its surrounding chapter. The coalition spent thirty years claiming to protect children. It has now built an apparatus that traumatizes them — openly, on camera, outside their school doors, on the morning of their graduation.

The video shows what the apparatus produces when it reaches the ground: a man held facedown on concrete outside a school while children in uniforms are hurried past. The coalition that built it and defends it will answer to the God who said, “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The children who watched it happen outside their school will not forget what they saw, and they will carry the memory longer than any administration.