TIME magazine recently placed the image of a crying Hispanic toddler in front of the image of the President looking down at her. The caption states “Welcome to America.” While this particular child did not suffer the traumatizing fate of separation from her parents and transportation hundreds or thousands of miles away, her image has become iconic in its representation of the reprehensible policy of separating parents and children at the border. This story and the actions behind the story has not only divided the country, it has divided the church. This situation not only is wrong, it also should not be happening and Christians should not be okay with it.

This story exploded onto the headlines when it was reported that the administration had allegedly lost 1500 children after placing them into the foster care system after the children crossed the border unaccompanied by an adult relative. This story quickly became overshadowed by the tangentially related story that the current administration planned to prosecute every single person at the border regardless of asylum seeking status. Because of a 1997 settlement named the Flores Settlement Agreement, the government must release children from immigration detention without unnecessary delay, this new policy enacted by the current presidential administration also effectively mandated the removal of the children from the care of their parents who would be held in federal immigration detention indefinitely until their asylum or immigration case had been fully adjudicated. Before discussing the policy and the rationale of the administration behind that policy, I will reiterate that the 1500 children lost in the system came from the population of unaccompanied minors who illegally crossed the border, not children separated from their parents. That said, a history of losing track of children does not imbue confidence that no more children will be lost.

Many people have also questioned why the public just became aware of the situation and why we were not outraged before when this happened under that other president. This is a good question to ask. We need to scrutinize our motives, remove partisanship so we can see through clear, rather than rose-colored glasses. When I first determined that I wanted to write this essay, I sought detailed information on the government’s actions both in the current administration and the previous administration. I did not want my belief that the man who currently occupies the post of president, as well as several people he has appointed to key high-level positions, lack qualifications to hold those positions and have, through overt and covert or even subconscious decisions, damaged not only the reputation of the United States but also harmed many institutions in our country, to color my presentation of these facts. We have not yet had a perfect man to serve as president, nor will we ever.

Prior to the current administration, immigration officials operated under a policy colloquially called “catch and release.” Immigrants either caught at the border or who had presented themselves at a border checkpoint were released after they made an asylum claim. These immigrants left the border, on the United States side, with a court date and a summons to appear at the hearing of their asylum claim. Did all these immigrants obey these summons? No. Many of them perceived that they had little chance of earning asylum and chose to risk permanent, involuntary deportation for a chance at a better life. The current administration chose to close that loophole and eliminate any possible wiggle room. They chose a zero-tolerance policy in which every single person regardless of asylum status would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and held, not released on their own recognizance, until the criminal trial or asylum hearing concluded. This flies in the face of the human right to seek asylum. It is not a crime to see asylum. Let me repeat that. People who cross the border or who present themselves at border checkpoints with the purpose of seeking asylum are not criminals. They must do on of those two previous things to file a formal asylum claim. Since the processing of these claims often takes months to years, minor children cannot be held in federal detention. The Flores Agreement, as mentioned before, prevents minors from being held unnecessarily in federal immigration detention. Thus, the administration instituted a policy of taking the children form the parents without explanation and sending the children hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away to put them into the foster system. The reason that people did not express outrage before is because this situation did not occur before. The current administration instituted the policy of zero-tolerance and forced their own hand in the matter of family separation.

In the time since I first decided to write this essay until now, the administration has made several other equally egregious decisions. After weeks of stating that his hands were tied, that only Congress could fix this mess, the President signed an executive order ending the policy of family separation. However, the order made no provision regarding reunion of all the divided families. A federal judge on Tuesday, June 26, ordered that family separations at the border halt and that all previously separated families be reunited. To “solve” the problem of where to house these families the military is building several tent camps at various bases along the border. A chill of horror went down my spine as my mind immediately went to the unjust relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. History rarely repeats itself but often echoes.

How should we respond to this? How should Christians respond? Before I discuss how we should respond, I need to start with how we view those at the center of this tragedy. Rather than justifying this treatment by viewing them as “illegals,” as objects, rather than dehumanizing them to make ourselves feel better, we must look at them as fellow human beings, precious Image-bearers. All of these people, every single one of them, were created in the Image of God, we should treat them that way. The vast majority of them fled terrible situations like the immense threat of gang violence or the personal threat of domestic violence. As Christians, we are called to minister to them and as we minister to them, we show Christ to them. Instead of viewing gang members as animals, look on them as desperate human beings on the wrong path, in need of a Savior.

To do any of what I just mentioned, necessitates letting go of the so-called American dream. God does not promise us health, wealth, and prosperity; He lets us know that others will persecute us just as they persecuted Him. He promised to prepare us a place; that place is not the United States. The United States is not the embodiment of God’s kingdom on earth. American Christians need to divorce their ideas of heaven from the eminently flawed human kingdom that is the United States. We need to look on those migrants and their children as God would, as God calls us to do. It has been said that evil triumphs when good men do nothing. I will not be one of those men.