If you’re driving northeast out of Amarillo, Texas, up Highway 60 toward my hometown of White Deer, you might stop for gas at the Cefco in Panhandle, population 2,358. And at the Cefco counter, you might meet Sherlie Joseph, a young Haitian woman who greets her customers with a gentle accent and a kind smile.
She’s a legal immigrant who has lived in Panhandle since July 2023 with her husband, Kevenson Jean. They entered the US by applying for a spot in the CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) humanitarian parole program, which the Biden administration created in January 2023 in an effort to control the flood of people from those countries who were crossing the southern border on foot.
Like other approved applicants, Sherlie and Kevenson had to have American sponsors—ordinary people, not government officials—who were willing jump through bureaucratic hoops and financially support the couple while they got their bearings in the US. Only then could they apply to the program from Haiti and, after approval, travel here by plane.
That’s how Sherlie and Kevenson ended up in this small Texas Panhandle community. They are model legal immigrants, the kind of couple any politician would love to tout in a stump speech: They got in line. They filled out the paperwork. They completed background checks. They proved that they had the financial resources and personal support networks to make their own way in America without burdening the social welfare system. Once they got here, they entered the legal workforce, often doing jobs that few Americans want, slowly climbing the ladder to better-paying roles. They’re even church-attending, Bible-believing Christians.
And until a federal judge halted a Trump administration plan on Monday—a ruling sure to be appealed—the US government was kicking them out of the country.
That might seem bizarre if you’ve mostly heard discussion of a crackdown on illegal immigration. Kevenson and Sherlie are here legally, so why would they be removed?
The narrow answer is that on March 29, along with more than 500,000 other people who went through the same entry process, they received a form letter with orders to leave the country by Thursday of next week: April 24, 2025. President Donald Trump was ending the Biden-era humanitarian parole program, the letter explained, so back to Haiti they were told to go—back to a country with barely the semblance of a government, a country so troubled by gang violence that bodies rot in the streets and armed drones roam the capital city, aiming for gang members and sometimes hitting children instead.
The broader answer is that the president ran on a commitment to secure our borders, and, as pitched on the campaign trail, his plan hinges on deporting illegal immigrants, focusing on those with criminal records. This is a reasonable policy objective that has broad support among many Americans.
But since coming to office, the Trump administration has not limited its focus to people here illegally and people committing crimes. It has targeted an ever-wider group of immigrants, including people—like Sherlie and Kevenson—who followed the law at every turn. White House rhetoric has blurred the difference between illegal immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers and between visas like an H-1B (for professionals) and an F-1 (for students). Glib social media posts have suggested with varying degrees of subtlety that all migrants are criminals, lumping together legal immigrants like Kevenson and Sherlie with someone who walked across the border with pockets full of fentanyl.
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Legally, the president is within his rights to decline to renew the CHNV parole program, which was offered at the discretion of the Department of Homeland Security. (His authority to revoke the two-year paroles already granted is what was challenged in court.) But legal does not mean prudent, let alone right. And though border security is a good policy goal, the means we use to achieve that end matter. We can support strong border security and reject cruel and capricious policies that mislead the American people and upend legal immigrants’ lives. As Christians, we can want order in our immigration system and obey Christ’s command to care for the vulnerable (Matt. 25:31–46).
This is a lesson Kevenson and Sherlie’s friends in Panhandle have learned since that notice arrived in March. One of the couple’s sponsors, Kimberly (Kim) Snelgrooes, is a childhood schoolmate of mine. She met Kevenson back in 2019 when she was visiting Haiti on a short-term mission trip. They became good friends on that trip, and Kevenson eventually went to work for the nonprofit ministry Kim founded in Haiti, Hills of His Grace.
But as gang violence worsened, the job put Kevenson in danger. In 2021, thieves in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, held a gun to his head, demanding the US dollars he had just collected for ministry operations. So when Kim heard about the CHNV humanitarian parole program, she asked Kevenson and his then-girlfriend, Sherlie, if they wanted to apply with Kim’s family’s help.
That sponsorship was a big commitment: Anything Kevenson and Sherlie needed—from airline tickets and housing in Texas to medical care and legal assistance—the Snelgrooes family promised to provide. But though Kim and her husband, Jered, were the ones who signed the I-134A petition and hosted Kevenson and Sherlie in their home for their first six months in America, resettling the couple was a responsibility shared by their community in Panhandle, especially other members of the town’s First Baptist Church. This network helped the young Haitians find jobs, learn to drive, navigate the grocery store, and otherwise become self-sufficient new Texans.
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Since Kevenson and Sherlie received their deportation notice, their American friends have scrambled to understand what’s happening and determine what might be done. The more they learned, Kim told me, the worse it seemed.
Trump’s decision to cancel the program may hold up in court, even after Monday’s halt: Policies that live by executive action can easily die by executive action. But pushing for these immigrants to lose their legal status isn’t reasonable or just, for it goes well beyond simply closing the program to new applicants. It also rescinds the permission previously granted to people like Kevenson and Sherlie, people who have spent years building peaceful, productive lives in the US while taking legal steps to achieve permanent residency and then citizenship.
On paper, that might not sound like a huge deal. Tough breaks, perhaps, but just an unfortunate side effect of a necessary reform. But for Kevenson and Sherlie and the community that has come to love them, it’s chaotic, confusing, and cruel.
This couple was allotted less than a month to rearrange their entire lives and told they’d be fined $998 per day if they missed the deportation deadline. Kevenson was further told that he’d lose the commercial driver’s license he earned after completing a program at Clarendon College Pampa Center to become a commercial trucker—a gratuitous twist of the knife. If they head back to Haiti, Kimberly told me, they’ll return to a “very real humanitarian crisis.” Even reaching their families’ homes, they explained to a local news outlet, would be extremely dangerous.
For now, pending new legal developments, Kevenson and Sherlie will stay in Texas. But their lives are still in limbo. If the Trump administration wins on appeal, they’ll have to decide what to do.
One alternative would be to go on to a third location, maybe Canada. But that prospect isn’t practical or appealing—they love Panhandle, Kim said. “They have a community of friends here. We’re their family, and they want to be where their people are.” Yet how can they stay, if those daily fines come back in the mix? Monday’s court ruling was a welcome reprieve, but the matter is far from settled.
That’s not for lack of trying. If there’s anything like a silver lining in this story, it is the way Panhandle has rallied to the couple’s side.
This town is Trump country through and through. In the 2024 general election, nine in ten voters in Panhandle’s county cast their ballots for Trump. They voted for border security; make no mistake. But they didn’t vote for this. “I don’t know anyone in Panhandle who knows our story and thinks we ought to be forced to leave,” Sherlie told me.
I’m certain she’s right. This part of Texas is my home. I understand the culture. Respecting law and order means a lot out here, but so does justice and fair treatment and taking care of your neighbor. And as word spread about the deportation notice, locals stepped up on Kevenson and Sherlie’s behalf.
Their landlord said they can stay in their home rent-free if their work permits are revoked, “as long as it takes to get things sorted out.” They’ve had offers of cash jobs. Some church members have been researching whether the building can function as a sanctuary in the political sense or if immigration officials will force their way in. (Last week, a federal judge “declined to block [a] new Trump administration policy allowing immigration authorities to carry out arrests at ‘sensitive locations’ like churches and other religious spaces.”) Other church members have been consulting with attorneys, praying for promising legal appeals like the one on Monday, and writing letters to elected officials like Congressman Ronny Jackson, pleading for help.
“There was a 90-year-old lady at church on Sunday who asked if I could help her learn how to cut and paste on her computer so she could email her representatives expressing concern for this administration’s treatment of legal humanitarian parolees,” said Peggy Chaney, Kim’s mom. “She listens to Fox News 24/7, very conservative, and a die-hard Republican. But she thinks this is wrong.”
She’s right. And that realization—that willingness to place even the strongest political convictions beneath the authority of Jesus—is exactly what I pray to see here in West Texas and across our country over the next four years. It is possible to like Trump’s policies, including his drive to stop illegal immigration and secure the border, and yet refuse to cede an inch of our Christian responsibilities to do justice to the foreigner (Ezek. 22:29).
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“It is time that all the churches stir themselves to make plain to the nation the tragic mistake it is making. … The method is not democratic, is not in accord with American traditions, and is not right.” Charles Clayton Morrison wasn’t talking about Kevenson and Sherlie when he said that. The editor of The Christian Century magazine from 1908 to 1947, he was writing on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
I don’t want to overstate the similarities between the two situations. American politics does not need another overwrought World War II analogy. But lately I often find myself thinking about the internment program and how American Christians were slow to condemn its injustice.
The “churches failed to organize a unified protest against the evacuation during the first critical months of 1942,” documents historian Gerald L. Sittser in A Cautious Patriotism, though “they did pull together to meet the practical and religious needs of the Japanese later on. It was that early failure to protest the government’s policy, in fact, that reinforced their commitment to serve the Japanese Americans once evacuation began.” That commitment was good and redemptive—but what might have happened if Christians had acted before the evacuations were a sure thing? Could internment have been prevented altogether?
With time, many American Christians did protest the government’s treatment of Japanese Americans. For churches on the West Coast in particular, I suspect the injustice must have become impossible to ignore. That’s certainly how it is in Panhandle. While you’re chatting with Sherlie as you buy a coffee and fill up your tank, our country’s big and complex and amorphous immigration policy is at least partly simplified. It has a face, the face of a friend.
The task before us as Christians, I think, is to cultivate compassion and stay alert to injustice before it is glaringly present among us—before it’s too late to stop a big government bureaucracy grinding up innocent people’s lives. We can’t simply assume the courts will make things right.
As followers of Jesus, we each must cultivate a critical eye toward our “own” parties. We must stay alert, recognizing that earthly rulers are prone to manipulation, power plays (Matt. 20:25), and ungodly acts of injustice (Ecc. 5:8–9).
Again, that doesn’t mean being soft on immigration. It doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to crime or accepting disorder at the border. It’s possible to pair strong border policy with compassion and justice. It’s not possible to pair compassion and justice with indifference to human suffering (Luke 10:25–37).
That’s what makes the people of Panhandle such a worthy example right now. They’re overwhelmingly politically conservative Republicans. Most folks are evangelical Christians. They typically support Trump and his administration’s goals.
But they don’t support what’s been happening to Sherlie and Kevenson, and they are pulling together to protest the couple’s treatment and rallying to meet their needs. The people of Panhandle have not been idle in the face of injustice. They have “not become weary in doing good” (Gal. 6:9).
The question before the rest of us is whether we’ll follow that good lead. And right now, that question is particularly pressing for those of us who may wield some small influence with the party in power. Criticism from Democrats is unlikely to have much sway on Republican leadership, but for politically conservative, evangelical Christians who may yet broadly support this administration, this is an Esther moment.
The people of Panhandle have been pleading for the king’s mercy, but the moment demands a louder and broader outcry, especially if the administration tests Monday’s judicial ruling. For, as Esther asked (8:6), how can we bear to see disaster fall on people like Kevenson and Sherlie? How can I bear to see the destruction of this family, and so many others too? How can we remain silent in such a time as this?
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
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