Among the 56 men who gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 to sign the Declaration of Independence, 8 were transplants to the American colonies. Two were born in England, the rest in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Some came to North America as children. Others sailed there in adulthood.

None of these men required permission from Colonial governors to immigrate. They just did—in the pattern that was typical at the time and would remain so for the first century and a half of the United States’ existence.

The New World was hungry for warm bodies. To lure them across the sea, colonies granted immigrants limited local citizenship, enabling them to own and inherit land. Eventually, Parliament offered British naturalization to any Protestant alien who resided in the Colonies for at least seven years. (Catholics were initially excluded, but Jews could swear a modified oath that skirted professions of Christian faith.)

Then, in 1773, Parliament rescinded the offer—and forbade local governors from granting citizenship to foreigners, effectively banning naturalization in British North America. It was the culmination of a decade-long effort by England to curtail migration to the increasingly belligerent Colonies.

The turn against immigrants didn’t go over well. Migration was foundational to the Colonies’ land-of-opportunity identity and strategic for their economic ambitions. Britain’s antinaturalization measures landed at No. 7 on the list of grievances against King George III, as articulated by the authors of the Declaration of Independence:

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.

Given this history, it’s unsurprising that critics of President Donald Trump see tyranny lurking in his assault on immigrants or that they are repulsed at the sight of federal immigration agents roaming the streets. Deportation policy riled the original No Kings movement too.

The Constitution assigns the federal government the job of granting citizenship. But wild as it sounds today, many of the founders believed that the authority to police immigrants rested solely with the states, indistinct from the ordinary work of policing citizens.

When the Fifth US Congress passed a law in 1798 allowing the president to deport foreigners deemed “dangerous,” Americans protested. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson objected, accurately, that the Constitution gave no such powers to the federal government.

Individual states did not hesitate to expel paupers, alien or otherwise, to other states. But the notion that immigrants enjoyed weaker protection from arrest than did citizens was anathema to many in the young country. Jefferson, who voiced plenty of concerns about the risks of recruiting immigrants to US shores, nonetheless insisted in 1781 that all people, “if they come of themselves,” are “entitled to all the rights of citizenship.”

We’ve fallen far from Jefferson’s ideal.

In two and a half centuries, Congress has revised US immigration policy countless times, dialing restrictions up and down in tandem with shifts in public sentiment toward the foreign born.

Changes often benefited the political party that made them, disenfranchising opposition groups or placating unions. Many changes were blatantly discriminatory: Preference for white immigrants, for instance, was written into the law until 1965.

America’s current immigration system is based largely on a 1965 law called the Immigration and Nationality Act, in which Congress scrapped limits on immigrants of certain races and from certain countries in favor of more skills-based migration and greater opportunities for immigrants to bring family members to the United States. Congress has since fine-tuned the statute in meaningful ways—significantly, in committing the United States to recognize valid asylum claims and in setting up a bureaucracy to process them.

But global economic and political changes long ago outstripped the US system’s ability to keep up. It is slow, cumbersome, and underpowered—a reality undisputed on either the political left or the political right.

Someone trying to “come the right way,” as we are fond of boasting that our forebears did or that our immigrant friend probably did, faces impossible backlogs. A married Mexican woman who applies today to join her citizen parents in the United States might wait in line 25 years for a visa.

And increasingly, many who were granted permission to wait in the US for their cases to resolve are being rounded up, detained, and deported.

Nothing qualifying as comprehensive immigration reform has succeeded in the 21st century. Washington has made modest attempts to reform our broken system over the past 30 years, all failing. Even a 2024 bipartisan border bill, which may have passed had then-candidate Trump not pressured Republicans to abandon it, was merely a tune-up of a machine in need of complete overhaul.

But there is no reason meaningful reform could not happen in 2026. This year, while Republicans still hold majorities in both houses of Congress, Trump has everything necessary to cement his reputation as the first president in a generation to secure immigration reform. He could simply command it, and his will would be done.

Or he could continue down the path of King George, steering the nation not toward more sensible immigration but toward what appears to be the kind of anti-immigrant plot America’s founders bled and died to overturn. We ignore reform at our own peril.

Last fall, I attended a pair of convenings in Nashville where leaders from faith communities, businesses, and law enforcement discussed the need for immigration reform. I was reminded repeatedly that immigration is baked into America’s founding documents and that President Trump is so excited about the 250th anniversary of independence that the White House website has a countdown clock. What better moment to take action?

The two groups organizing the meetings, the secular National Immigration Forum and the Evangelical Immigration Table, approach reform with mildly different sets of priorities. But both want a meaningful solution that addresses border security, provides pathways to legalization for longtime immigrants—including those who were brought here as children—and honors generations-old congressional commitments to welcome qualifying refugees.

Thus far in the second Trump administration, legislators and the White House have focused exclusively on immigration enforcement, funding an already-bloated deportation-and-detention apparatus to new levels that surely would have horrified our founding fathers. This, the consensus in the room held, is not immigration reform.

“There’s securing the border and then there’s closing the border, and I think what we’re seeing now is an attempt to really close the border,” said Tim Quinn, a former US Customs and Border Protection chief of staff and public liaison. “I don’t necessarily think that that respects the role that America plays in the world, in terms of being a place where people with asylum claims, legitimate asylum claims, can come and have those asylum claims adjudicated. We are not doing that.”

When I spoke with Myal Greene, the president and CEO of World Relief, he said the administration’s enforcement-only approach is not only impeding efforts at reform but also sabotaging immigration programs Congress already created and blessed, such as asylum and humanitarian parole.

“You look at people who’ve come on some of these statuses,” Greene said. “They were vetted before they entered the country. They came legally, and [now] they’ve had their status revoked. And what that is—it’s a desire not to have a functioning program.”

Of course, immigration policy must balance welcome with public safety. After a tragedy like the Thanksgiving-eve shooting of two National Guard members by an Afghan national who received asylum, it’s reasonable and achievable to audit the vetting process. But the administration’s knee-jerk response—temporarily shutting down the whole asylum system, barring immigrants from a swath of nations, threatening the residency or citizenship of entire ethnic groups Trump has called “garbage”—is clearly an overreaction and a victory for ethnocentrism.

When the executive branch acts alone on immigration, it tends to result in dysfunction. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans to be sent to concentration camps in 1942, subsequent administrations issued public apologies, and Congress eventually paid reparations to survivors. President Joe Biden’s attempt to control illegal crossings by forcing asylum applicants to use a government app was legally questionable, did little to quell the border chaos, and was leveraged against him by the Trump campaign.

And while immigration still polls as Trump’s most successful talking point, Americans have soured on his hard-line approach: His approval rating on the issue has slipped from early 2025.

Where presidents fall short, Congress must step in. The Constitution gives Congress the power to define the broad contours of immigration policy. Only Congress can design and safeguard a system that works for the 21st century and, to borrow language from the National Immigration Forum, that reflects the founders’ ideal of “a nation of laws and a nation of grace.”

There are respectable proposals languishing in legislative committee, just waiting to be put up for a vote. The Dignity Act is one—a bipartisan bill with significant support from both conservative and progressive evangelical groups. It would make meaningful changes to bring order to America’s asylum system, would provide a path to residency for “Dreamers,” and would allow longtime undocumented immigrants with clean records to pay steep fees to qualify for protected, noncitizen status.

Like any compromise bill, the measure is not ambitious enough to please either white nationalists or the “abolish ICE” crowd. But its tenets align well with what most evangelicals tell pollsters they want for immigrants to America.

Despite that, multiple leaders in Nashville told me they believe Congress will take no action on reform unless it is first championed by Trump. Greene said he had met to discuss the subject with staffers for a senior congressional leader. They told him, “We’re not going to move it until we get clearance from the White House.”

Influential Latino evangelicals have called on Christians to pray for passage of the Dignity Act. In Nashville, leaders expressed their frustration at churches’ general silence in response to immigrant cries for help.

Reid Ribble, a former Republican congressman from Wisconsin, said, “If the church is quiet on this—which they have a tendency to be—then members of Congress think that all the voices that matter are the ones that they’re hearing, which are clamoring for more deportations.”

The vibe at the Nashville gatherings was undeniably gloomy. It struck me how a year of unprecedented government crackdowns on immigrants and defunding of groups that help them had reshaped hearts in dark ways.

As I spoke with Latino pastors, I could almost see them glancing over their shoulders. Church and nonprofit leaders shared how they have moved communications to secure messaging apps like Signal, fearful of government eyes. Ministries teaching English have discussed whether someday soon they could be criminally liable for harboring illegal aliens.

The anecdotes at times felt like reports from underground churches in an authoritarian state, not from American evangelicals in the heart of the Bible Belt.

Then again, segments of the US church are in effect being driven underground: Some immigrant congregations report that Sunday attendance has dropped by a third, as worshipers fear venturing from their homes. A pastor in Los Angeles told me he’s lost 80 percent of his in-person worshipers.

If we accept dramatic enforcement as the sole solution to America’s immigration problems, we must also accept the ways it will deform the church and our national conscience. It will dull our sensibilities until we simply accept statements like the one from Rep. Jim Jordan, who, when asked in October about footage of masked federal agents arresting journalists and shooting a pastor with a pepper-spray ball, told a journalist, “ICE agents are doing the Lord’s work.”

Law enforcement, like almost all work, can of course be God-honoring and, per Romans 13, God-ordained. But to rest on such blanket statements is to refuse to see the moral mess of humanity that God sees. Alabama state troopers presumably arrested plenty of dangerous criminals in the weeks before they loosed their billy clubs on peaceful Black marchers in Selma. Was that all the Lord’s work?

The administration’s overt aim is to use federal agents as tools of terror in immigrant communities, multiplying that fear by sending masked videographers on ambushes and churning out Call of Duty–style video cuts for government social media. That might be a good recruitment strategy, but it’s hardly a Christian vocation. Why would Jordan—who only months earlier told Breitbart, “Grace is amazing; we all need it”—want to associate Jesus with imperious menace?

The greatest harm of an enforcement-only immigration policy, however, is how it is battering segments of society to which Scripture repeatedly commands Christians to give special deference: the poor, the foreigner among us, the “least of these.” When the legislature doesn’t articulate sensible immigration policies or insist on adherence to them, the poor have little defense against capricious enforcers.

Even immigrants who thought they were following the rules—entering the country lawfully under a special program, staying out of trouble, going to church, paying taxes—are being torn from their families and stuffed into detention centers.

All of this is driving what might be called “Beatitude communities”—the “blesseds” of Matthew 5—into deeper levels of isolation and mistrust. This is the antithesis of a Christian objective. Christ calls people into community and into the light, not into the shadows.

The response du jour in some Christian circles is to dismiss such concerns as worldly empathy corrupting the faithful. Even if that were true, it would not explain away the words of James in his epistle: “Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?” (2:5, ESV). It’s an odd stance for voters and for professionals “doing the Lord’s work” to prioritize tormenting the people to whom Christ has willed his inheritance.

Mingling at tables in Nashville, I caught glimpses of how the administration’s crackdown, now entering its second year, might already be distorting some of those heirs of the kingdom in the long term.

I sat with two pastors of local Latino congregations. One of them told me about a child in his church who begged his mom not to go outside to feed the dog, because there might be ICE agents in the yard.

The other pastor was more grave. He told me he worries about the 10-year-old in his community who was born in the United States to immigrant parents. When that boy watches ICE arrest his father or his aunt, the pastor asked me, “What does that do to the child?” You can deport his parents, the man said, but you’re going to have that kid with you forever.

Then the pastor made his hands into a little pretend rifle and said, “He’s going to learn to hate.”

Andy Olsen is senior features writer at Christianity Today.