With President Donald Trump locked in a legal war over whether to return an immigrant deported without due process back to the United States, Christian scholars and legal professionals are sounding the alarm.
In the high-profile case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the administration initially admitted that his deportation had occurred due to a legal error, and the Supreme Court ordered his return. Yet officials also accused Garcia of being a member of the MS-13 gang, defended the move, and failed to act.
“It threatens the very basis of the constitutional order that our legal system is premised on,” said Jennifer Koh, a Pepperdine University law professor who has written about how Christianity intersects with immigration law.
The Supreme Court’s decision largely cosigned a lower court order calling for the government to facilitate Garcia’s return. The justices also sent the decision back to the district court judge to clarify her directive.
While Trump’s political allies double down on Garcia’s reported gang affiliations, others have called out the central issue in this case—and others like it—as whether American law enforcement applies equally to everyone. Critics worried about the implications of denying due process have spanned from MAGA-world podcasting favorite Joe Rogan to lawyers and judges.
“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders,” Judge Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a ruling, “what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?”
American Christians recognize a biblical dimension to the principles of justice and fairness found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Reminders from Scripture “suggest that we should be very grateful for the checks and balances that laws and due process create,” said Old Testament scholar Michael Rhodes, pointing back to how ancient societies viewed who was subject to the law.
In many cases, rulers saw themselves as above the law because they authored it. Hammurabi, the Babylonian king who authored the Code of Hammurabi claimed that his authority was granted to him by the gods. Yet in the Israelites’ view, the Torah subjected kings to the law as well.
“The Torah says God writes the law,” said Rhodes, a professor at Carey Baptist College and an ordained Presbyterian minister. “And 2,000 years before the Magna Carta makes a similar move, Deuteronomy is saying, ‘People, if your leaders think they’re above the law, it will be deeply problematic.’”
Deuteronomy 1:16 charges Israel’s leaders to “judge fairly, whether the case is between two Israelites or between an Israelite and a foreigner residing among you.”
Foreigners fall into a category that some Bible scholars call the “quartet of the vulnerable,” including the immigrant or refugee, the widow, the orphan, and the poor—groups that lacked legal representation of their own.
Someone who falls into one of these categories should not automatically be presumed innocent, but “they have the same right to a fair trial that everyone else has. And there’s a strong condemnation of any kind of false charges, false witness, bribery, in the court system,” said Carmen Joy Imes, an Old Testament scholar at Biola University.
“We can be confident that God cares that people are not mistreated in either direction in our court system: that we’re not just letting people off the hook because they’re one of our boys and we’re also not condemning people because they’re not one of us,” she added. “And I see both things happening under this administration.”
Though the US is not a theocracy, the preponderance of passages in Scripture that focus on God’s anger against injustice show Christians what matters to God, Imes said. Exodus 22:21–24 and 23:1-9 warn against denying justice to the poor, perverting justice, and showing favoritism, while passages like Proverbs 17:15 call both justifying the wicked and condemning the innocent abominations to God.
In Garcia’s case, US district judge Paula Xinis wrote that US authorities didn’t have the grounds to arrest, detain, and deport him—“let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere.”
After legal back-and-forth, the government has sent notices in English to some individuals, informing them they are subject to deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. The notices contained no information on how recipients could challenge their deportations.
“Nobody is arguing that, at the end of the day, the government cannot deport or enforce immigration laws against these individuals,” Koh said. “At a very base level, the Supreme Court has already said, there is some process that needs to happen so that evidence can be heard and the basis for their inclusion within the Alien Enemies Act can be assessed.”
The way the Trump administration is handling the legal fight so far gives the deeply concerning impression, Koh said, that “the laws and the processes and the protections of the law don’t mean anything at all.”
