A Religious Rebellion Against Mass DeportationAmerican Christians are showing increasing discomfort with Trump’s signature policy.
Donald Trump posted a new “tariff letter” yesterday, and this one was notable because it didn’t follow the template of the others. Yes, it included the standard complaints about “Brazil’s Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers” as it threatened/announced a 50 percent tax on all imports to the United States from Brazil (sorry, fellow coffee drinkers). But half the letter was a specific complaint about the supposed mistreatment of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whom Trump says he “respected greatly.” Bolsonaro was a Trumpian populist strongman who encouraged his supporters to storm the Brazilian legislature after he lost re-election. No wonder Trump was a fan. Happy Thursday. Church Leaders Denounce Deportationsby William Kristol Donald Trump rode the issue of immigration to the presidency twice. What that issue primarily meant to Trump and his supporters, in both 2016 and 2024, was fixing a porous southern border, and preventing the kinds of crimes allegedly committed by immigrants who had come across that border. But the center of gravity of the immigration issue has changed. It’s now Trump’s mass-deportation agenda. And it’s becoming pretty clear that the politics of mass deportation could turn out to be very different from the politics of controlling the border. Could the spectacle of a mass-deportation campaign become a political vulnerability for Trump? I think so. But what’s newly interesting is the possibility that mass deportation could be creating particular problems for Trump among churchgoing Catholics and Protestants, groups that have disproportionately supported him in the past. There appears to be growing unease in the churches with Trump’s signature policy. We don’t know yet how widespread the discomfort is. We certainly don’t know how widespread it could become. And we don’t know whether discomfort will turn into active disapproval. But we may have seen a couple of leading indicators this week. In California, Bishop Alberto Rojas leads more than 1.5 million Catholics in the Diocese of San Bernardino, west of Los Angeles. It’s the nation’s sixth-largest Catholic diocese. And this week, Bishop Rojas took the extraordinary step of formally excusing parishioners in his diocese from the obligation of attending mass weekly, because of the possibility immigration officers would seize people coming to or from church. “There is a real fear gripping many in our parish communities that if they venture out into any kind of public setting they will be arrested by immigration officers,” Rojas explained.
Now it’s fair to point out that San Bernardino is more heavily Hispanic than most areas, and that Rojas’s action is for now an outlier, and may remain so. (One other bishop, in Nashville, has taken a similar step.) On the other hand, it’s still a striking action, and one wonders what ripple effects it will have in the Church and among churchgoers. Especially because Pope Leo XIV—who is, after all, the first American pope—has also indicated that he is sympathetic to the plight of immigrants here in the United States and is critical of mass-deportation efforts. (For more on this, read Joe Perticone’s excellent piece on the collision course that the Church and Trump seem to be on.) Will this ultimately affect the voting of American Catholics, who supported Trump by 14 points over Kamala Harris in 2024, a marked increase from Trump’s 5-point margin over Biden in 2020? It could. Trump doesn’t seem at all inclined to let up on his mass-deportation efforts. Nor is the Church likely to become less critical of those efforts over the next year. How many masses will there be against mass deportation? At the same time, the administration appears to be trying to marry its deportation campaign to the teachings of the Church—though in typically clumsy fashion. The Department of Homeland Security tried to enlist the Bible in its efforts, tweeting out a video with grainy footage of immigration agents on boats and helicopters carrying out their missions under cover of darkness, while featuring a voiceover of a Border Patrol agent:
As Austin, Texas pastor Zach Lambert pointed out, in a much-retweeted post, that Bible verse is Isaiah 6:8—and the context in Isaiah cuts against DHS’s message.
Pastor Lambert also pointed to Isaiah 10:1–3:
Pastor Lambert’s post, and others in the same vein, have gotten a lot of pickup and support on social media. Maybe the flacks at DHS should leave the prophet Isaiah alone, and go about their sordid business without seeking Biblical blessing? But they’ll presumably continue to claim the moral high ground for their efforts. Could that lead to a further backlash? In any case, the reactions of Bishop Rojas and Pastor Lambert to mass deportations seem notable to me. Are they important leading indicators of resistance to Trump in their communities? I wouldn’t claim to know. But sometimes politics, like the good Lord, moves in mysterious ways. ‘I’ll Still Be Here’by Sam Stein The Senate will soon consider a package of spending cuts known as rescissions, that was introduced by the White House and passed by the House of Representatives. Early indications are that Republican senators want changes. That’s partially because the package contains deep cuts to global health, including a $400 million reduction in PEPFAR funds and a $500 million reduction in programs to combat malaria and tuberculosis, among other items. Those initiatives have already been hit hard by the massive cutbacks the administration made to USAID. Additional funding restrictions would be absolutely disastrous. A Bulwark reader who does HIV prevention work in Africa—work that relies, in part, on USAID and PEPFAR funds—described a bleak situation. His email has been edited for length and to protect his identity.
—Sam Stein AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsTRUMP 💔 PUTIN, BUT TRUMP ❤️ POWER: Congress, when it remembers that it’s allowed to to have ideas of its own that aren’t dictated by Donald Trump, sometimes recalls that it’s not so fond of the Russian government and Vladimir Putin. There’s been a bill kicking around quietly in the Senate for months that would impose secondary sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil. The original sponsors are Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and it has 83 cosponsors in all. Now, fresh off a spat with Putin, Trump said he’s “very strongly” “looking at” the bill. But more recently he has given hints that he may actually not be in love with it. At a cabinet meeting, he said he wanted to ensure whether and how to enforce sanctions was “totally at my option.” More recently, it was reported that the administration is worried about “micromanaging” by Congress. (Some call that lawmaking; tomato/tomahto.) Still, absent a veto threat, Majority Leader John Thune says a vote on the bill could happen by August 1. There are serious arguments for and against so-called secondary sanctions. On the one hand, oil exports are a major source of revenue for the Russian government, and without revenue it’s really hard to fight a war. On the other hand, sanctioning a bunch of countries we should really be cooperating with—like, say, India—and raising the global price of oil might not be a diplomatic masterstroke. But Trump is probably thinking about this differently. If he has the authority to impose or remove sanctions at whim, just imagine how much extortion he can do! Maybe he could even build Trump Tower Moscow after all. IT’S JUST ONE MEASLY SHOT: The number of measles cases in the United States is now at a three-decade high. As of this week, nearly 1,300 people around the country have the disease—up from 285 in all of last year and 59 the year before. According to the CDC, 90 percent of the people who have contracted the highly infectious virus either were unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status. Some of those people have no one to blame but themselves (or their parents), and we hope they make full recoveries and learn from their mistakes, both for their own sake as well as for that of others. Because some people can’t get the measles vaccine for a variety of health-related reasons. Imagine being one of those people and then getting measles because the parents of some kid in your kid’s class decided they wanted to be “natural.” It’s infuriating, for sure. And scary. Measles is among the most contagious diseases in the world, with each case leading to between 12 and 18 other cases. Each COVID case, by contrast, was estimated to cause between one and three additional cases. Measles may be less deadly than COVID: The observed case-fatality rate for COVID in the United States was about 1.1 percent; for measles it’s closer to 0.3 percent. But measles has a nasty trick: In addition to attacking the nervous system, which causes permanent deafness in some patients, the virus also attacks the immune system. Specifically, it attacks the T and B cells, which are the cells that “learn” how to fight previously encountered infections. So a measles infection can leave a person almost defenseless against a host of other infections. Luckily, the measles vaccine appears to be one that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dislikes least—though he still insists on repeating false information about it. CHINA FIRST, AMERICA LAST: One of the most underrated jobs in any administration is the under secretary of defense for policy. Often called the Pentagon’s number-three official, behind the secretary and the deputy secretary, the list of powers and responsibilities for this job is enormous. But it fundamentally boils down to deciding what the Defense Department, its millions of employees, and its hundreds of billions of dollars should do. Elbridge Colby is the current holder of the office. He is the dean of the “China first” foreign policy school, believing that China is the most important challenge to American national security and everything should be focused on overcoming that challenge. But according to a recent report in Politico, there might be something other than China motivating Colby.
The upshot of the article is that Colby seems less interested in amassing as much united opposition to China as possible than in offending as many American allies as possible. His “restrained” and “focused” foreign policy really seems like old-fashioned isolationism. Using a Pacific orientation as a fig leaf for isolationism is nothing new. Back in the early Cold War, a bunch of formerly isolationist Republicans were in a difficult spot. They didn’t control their party; the New Deal Democrats had just presided over one of the great military victories in the history of the world; the United States was an undisputed superpower; and the Soviets were a real threat. Many of them, uncomfortable with “foreign entanglements” but unwilling to reprise their pre-war isolationism, became Asia-firsters. They pilloried the Truman administration for “losing” China to the Communists and they inveighed against European alliances like NATO, supposedly because Asia was the most important region of the world. Elbridge Colby’s China-firstism is just the same thing warmed over. Cheap ShotsYou’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. |
A Religious Rebellion Against Mass Deportation
July 10, 2025
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