"There’s a profound contradiction at the heart of contemporary American Christianity: the disconnect between claimed allegiance to Jesus and actual allegiance to state power.
The irony is devastating when Christians defend ICE killings and deaths in custody with appeals to “law and order.”
The standard response has become predictable: they shouldn’t have been here illegally, they should have complied, they should have obeyed the law. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) message is that these deaths are therefore justified, or at least understandable, or at minimum not something to get particularly upset about.
This is the “they should’ve just obeyed the law” response to state violence. And it fundamentally misunderstands who Jesus was and what he stood for.
The Human Cost
Consider the recent killing of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother shot and killed by an ICE agent during an immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis. Or the dozens of people who have died in U.S. immigration custody—people like Roxsana Hernández Rodriguez, a transgender asylum seeker who died after severe abuse and medical neglect while in U.S. immigration custody; Jakelin Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old girl who died after being taken into Border Patrol custody; Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old former DACA recipient who died after weeks of untreated fever and cough in ICE custody; and Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old who died at a Texas ICE facility after fellow detainees alleged guards choked him to death.
The list goes on. 2025 saw 31 deaths in ICE custody—ICE’s deadliest year outside the COVID era—while 2026 has already claimed at least four lives amid surging detentions and reduced oversight.
Since 2010, well over 100 to 200 people have died in ICE custody or shortly after release, many amid allegations of medical neglect, inadequate care for chronic conditions, delayed treatment, and conditions that human rights organizations have characterized as cruel and inhumane.
When confronted with these deaths, the response from much of “law and order” Christianity remains the same: “Well, they shouldn’t have been here illegally.”
As if immigration status justifies death.
As if modern nation-state borders carry divine authority.
As if Jesus would have cared about papers and documentation when confronted with human beings suffering and dying.
Jesus the Criminal
Jesus was executed by the state for crimes against the established order. He was charged with sedition, with claiming kingship in defiance of Rome, with disrupting the temple economy, with blasphemy against religious authorities.
From the perspective of Roman law and Jewish religious law, he was a criminal who refused to comply with legitimate authority.
The Pharisees and Sadducees who handed Jesus over to Pilate would have said exactly what modern “law and order” Christians say about victims of state violence: “He should have just obeyed the law. He was warned. He brought this on himself. What did he expect would happen when he challenged authority?”
The Romans who crucified him were just following orders, enforcing the law, maintaining order. They probably went home that night feeling they’d done their duty. They’d eliminated a threat to public order. They’d made an example of someone who refused to comply.
The Profound Betrayal
What makes this so tragic is how completely certain forms of Christianity have inverted Jesus’s actual message.
Jesus consistently sided with those victimized by power—the poor, the sick, the outcast, the foreign, the condemned. He reserved his harshest criticism not for common sinners but for religious authorities who used law and tradition to justify their power while crushing the vulnerable.
“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” he said. “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness.”
Justice, mercy, and faithfulness. These are what Jesus said mattered more than technical legal compliance.
The Immigrant Jesus
The historical irony runs even deeper when considering immigration specifically. Jesus was himself a refugee—his family fled to Egypt to escape Herod’s violence.
The Hebrew Bible repeatedly commands care for the stranger: “Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).
Over and over, the law that these Christians claim to value commands hospitality to the stranger, protection for the vulnerable, justice for the oppressed.
Yet when people die in immigration custody—mothers, fathers, children, human beings made in the image of God by Christian theology—the response from much of American Christianity is: “Well, they shouldn’t have been here illegally.”
The Real Question
This forces an uncomfortable question: If your theology consistently leads you to side with state power against the vulnerable, with enforcers against the condemned, with the powerful against the powerless—then you're not following Jesus. You're following the people who killed him.
The Romans who crucified Jesus thought they were maintaining law and order. The religious authorities who handed him over believed they were protecting social stability. They would have said exactly what "law and order" Christians say today about those dying in ICE custody: “They should have just obeyed the law.”
But Jesus didn't die for technical legal compliance. He died because he refused to accept a world where law justified cruelty, where religious piety masked exploitation, where the comfortable defended their comfort by condemning the struggling.
If you find yourself making the same arguments about immigrants dying in custody that Pilate's soldiers made about Jesus on the cross, you've chosen a side. And it's not the side of Christ. It's the side of empire, of nationalism baptized as faith, of Caesar wearing the mask of Jesus.
What Jesus Actually Stood For
Jesus’s message was fundamentally about the inversion of worldly power.
“The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”
“Blessed are the poor.”
“Woe to you who are rich.”
He touched lepers, ate with tax collectors, defended an adulteress from stoning, and consistently prioritized human need over legal propriety.
When challenged about his disciples picking grain on the Sabbath—technically breaking the law—he said “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
The law exists to serve human flourishing, not the other way around.
This is the opposite of “law and order” Christianity, which treats legal compliance as the highest virtue and state authority as sacrosanct.
Jesus would recognize this immediately as exactly the kind of religious hypocrisy he spent his ministry condemning.
The Deaths Continue
While Christians debate theology, people continue to die. Abelardo Avellaneda-Delgado, a healthy 68-year-old Mexican citizen, died suddenly during transport to the notorious Stewart Detention Center. Parady La, a 46-year-old Cambodian man, died of brain and organ failure at a Philadelphia ICE facility just three days after arrest, following inadequate treatment for severe drug withdrawal.
These aren’t abstractions. These are human beings, each with families who loved them, each with inherent dignity and worth. And the response from those who claim to follow Jesus—a man who said “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” and “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me”—has too often been indifference justified by legalism.
The Choice Before Us
American Christians face a choice: Are they actually following Jesus, or are they following a nationalist religion that uses Jesus’s name while rejecting everything he stood for?
Because both cannot be done. One cannot pledge ultimate allegiance to both the Gospel and the state when the state is doing precisely what Pilate did—maintaining order through violence, protecting power through law, justifying cruelty through appeals to legal authority.
You cannot serve both God and Caesar, especially when Caesar is killing mothers, letting children die from medical neglect, and separating families in the name of border enforcement.
The logic of “they should’ve just obeyed the law” applied to those dying in immigration custody is the same logic that justified the crucifixion: maintaining order matters more than preserving life, legal compliance matters more than human dignity, state authority matters more than divine compassion.
It is the same values. The same choice of order over justice, compliance over compassion, law over love. And it is exactly what Jesus died opposing.
In the end, the real question isn't whether Renee Good or those who died in detention should have obeyed the law. The question is whether Christians will choose to follow a man who was executed by the state for refusing to accept a world where law justifies cruelty—or whether they'll side with the executioners, secure in their own compliance, pointing to the condemned and saying they got what they deserved.