Over the last several months, immigration enforcement in the United States reached a scale rarely seen outside of major legislative overhauls. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detained more than 65,000 individuals — a historic high — and in that population, roughly 74 percent had no criminal convictions, even as federal rhetoric has emphasized removing dangerous offenders.
Across the country, communities have watched federal agents conduct interior enforcement operations that do not begin at a border but at workplaces, bus stops, and neighborhoods. In September alone, ICE reported tens of thousands of “at-large” arrests — apprehensions of individuals outside of criminal custody — far above levels in any previous decade. Nationally, more than 328,000 people were reported arrested and deported during 2025, with ICE’s detention population ballooning well into December.
For many Christians, these numbers are unfamiliar. Immigration remains too often a political abstraction — a topic to be mentioned in generalities or reduced to tropes about borders and law enforcement. Yet the lived realities of enforcement have entered the daily rhythms of American cities, especially those with diverse congregations. In that intersection of policy and personhood, Bri Stensrud finds the church’s greatest calling.
“Evangelicals are often painted as one big monolithic faith community that doesn’t care about immigrants,” she said. “And that’s just absolutely not true.”
Stensrud directs Women of Welcome, a network of evangelical women aiming to bridge biblical conviction with informed engagement on immigration and refugee issues. What unites this community is not agreement on specific legislation, but a shared determination to move conversations from fear and slogans toward grounded understanding.
“Women of Welcome is an online community of evangelical women who are generally conservative to moderate, theologically and politically,” she said. “They want to engage issues of immigrants and refugees from a faith-based perspective without getting pulled into partisan politics. They want to understand how to show up well in public policy and in the public square.”
For Stensrud, the priority is proximity. Before engaging policy, Christians must first understand the people behind the numbers — their stories, contexts, and humanity. On a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, she encountered realities far removed from headlines: children who were already parents, families whose risks and losses defied simplistic narratives about migration.
“What I learned was that the issue was vastly more complicated than anybody had ever explained to me,” she said. “I had never understood what was pushing people out of their home countries.”
In a shelter for unaccompanied minors, she met an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old, each caring for a baby.
“And I remember thinking,” she said, “this is a pro-life issue. I don’t understand how this is not a pro-life issue.”
That reframing is crucial. If immigration is a moral issue at all, it shares ground with every other arena where Christians lean into vulnerability, sacrifice and dignity. Proximity — the lived experience of knowing someone whose hopes and fears resemble our own — changes discourse. It turns abstractions into obligations.
“Compassion is never political,” Stensrud said. “Compassion is given to us so that we can be prophetic in a world that is lost and in pain.”
One of the most persistent obstacles to engagement is fear — fear of complexity, fear of conflict, fear of the unknown. In many churches, fear has yielded silence. But Stensrud suggests that fear, when unexamined, becomes a form of worship: worship of comfort, of certainty, of self-protection.
“We have been curators of comfort,” she said. “And that has been crippling to us.”
The discipline of curiosity, she argues, allows Christians to encounter others without the pretense of expertise or the compulsion to win arguments.
“You have to engage with people, especially on this issue, from a deep sense of authentic curiosity about why they think what they think,” she said.
That posture also acknowledges the ambivalence many Americans feel — support for orderly law enforcement on the one hand, unease at the human cost of its implementation on the other. Rather than dismiss that tension, the church can illuminate it.
“There is a high level of ambivalence that people have around immigration,” Stensrud said.
And here the numbers matter. When federal enforcement expands into communities, the effects are not concentrated only on those detained. School attendance declines in areas where children fear seeing parents or neighbors taken into custody. Workers avoid jobs in industries reliant on immigrant labor. Congregations lose members who quietly withdraw rather than attend services amidst apprehension. These shifts are not mere statistics; they reshape community life.
For Christians who want to act, Stensrud insists the threshold is not policy mastery but presence.
“You don’t have to be an expert in immigration policy or law,” she said. “You just have to love people well.”
To show up well might mean attending services at an immigrant-led church, building relationships with families affected by enforcement, or working with local nonprofits that provide legal and pastoral support. Over time, these embodied practices can inform public witness — a witness not anchored in slogans but in shared humanity.
That witness does not preclude honest engagement with law and order. Some Christians may affirm the state’s role in regulating immigration; others will critique it. But the church’s contribution should not be fear; it should be clarity of compassion informed by lived solidarity.
“For Christians, we are a pro-life people,” Stensrud said. “And immigration is a pro-life issue.”
Her theology does not exempt the church from hard questions or costly commitments. Instead, it situates the church’s vocation within a long arc of biblical witness that refuses the numbness of detachment. It calls Christians toward proximity in place of polarization, toward understanding in place of caricature, toward presence in place of prejudice.
This does not mean the church must dissolve into partisan advocacy. It means the church must embrace the hard work of moral formation — a formation that wrestles with law, dignity and human complexity simultaneously. It means equipping congregants not to avoid public conversation, but to elevate it with nuance shaped by relationships, not rhetoric.
There is hope in this angle not because it solves political gridlock, but because it roots action in what no government can legislate: the awareness of another person’s face, story and worth. When Christians see neighbors not as vectors of policy but as bearers of image and story, the church can genuinely offer a conversation the nation sorely needs.
That conversation will be neither easy nor quick. It will require patience with ambiguity and courage to risk misunderstanding. But if the church can hold compassion and conviction in the same hand, it can model a public witness that resists fear and embraces faithfulness.
In a moment when enforcement headlines dominate the public square, the church has an opportunity not simply to react, but to lead — not with applause or accusation, but with presence, rooted in what it means to be human together.
