Migrant God: A Christian Vision for Immigrant Justice

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

By Isaac Samuel Villegas (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2025, 161 pages)

Review by Cody J. Sanders

As someone who reads books for a living – and occasionally writes them – I pay very careful attention when I suddenly and immediately want to put down all the other books that I should be reading for my teaching and writing because a new book has captivated my attention and won’t let go. Isaac Samuel Villegas’ book, Migrant God: A Christian Vision for Immigrant Justice, came to my attention in February of 2025 as the immigration orders from the new presidential administration came rolling in, crueler and more heinous by the day. I knew I needed to read this book immediately. I needed someone to converse with who had dedicated his life and ministry to immigration justice and ministries of compassion for migrants. Villegas’ book was the book I needed. His is a prophetic, compassionate, companioning voice. And I couldn’t put the book down. Every time I tried, it summoned me back.

Villegas lives and works as an immigrant justice community organizer in North Carolina and is an ordained minister in the Mennonite Church USA, a denomination in the Anabaptist tradition rooted in the peace and justice ways of Jesus, committed to “bear witness to this gift of peace by rejecting violence and resisting injustice in all forms, and in all places.”[1] Migrant God is tethered to that commitment from page one. Villegas’s own familial legacy stretches across three nations’ borders – the United States, Costa Rica and Colombia – giving him what he describes as “a transnational sense of belonging” (p. 120). His familial stories enrich the entirety of this text.

The book takes readers on an expansive journey alongside Villegas and the migrants he accompanies. We begin in the desert of Douglas, Arizona, at a cemetery next to the U.S. border wall. Over 7,000 remains of migrants have been recovered in the U.S. borderlands. “A whole landscape of anonymous skeletons and mass graves, untold horrors—the dead are victims of enforcement mechanisms that conceal personal responsibility. Indirect murder” (p. 16). This chapter is the most profound treatment of migrant death in the U.S. borderlands that I have ever encountered, detailing vigils that are kept in the desert, graves sanctified with crosses for unknown victims labeled “no identificado” or “no identificada” where names should be (p. 18).

But Villegas goes further to explore the theological weight of the crucified people caught in political and economic violence, and the social death that occurs when undocumented people are locked in detention centers, like the one Villegas takes readers to in Eloy, Arizona, (where I have also twice visited on accompaniment journeys into the immigration courts housed inside this for-profit detention facility). “Imprisonment is a labyrinthine passageway into the realm of social death,” he argues, “alienation from kinship, from community, from life…deaden[ing] a person’s humanity, estranging them from their sense of self” (p. 23).

Villegas then invites us into the Sonoran Desert where border patrol conducts warrantless searches and seizures, driving some 20 miles from the border where he and his companions create a cenotaph at the place where Lucio Sanchez-Zepeda was found dead some time ago, most likely of hypothermia. “To memorialize the dead is to claim a relation, to honor a mutual belonging, an intermingling—to recognize another’s life as somehow part of our own” (p. 28). Words of profundity and tenderness like these are a staple of Villegas’ writing.

We then encounter Villegas’ own Abuelita briefly in her kitchen as she serves up arroz con pollo to her grandchildren. Soon to join Villegas in another kitchen – that of La Casa del Migrante in Tijuana, Mexico, as he puts the coffee cauldron on for the 50 migrant adults living there before they go off to work for the day. Here “the domestic arts of the kitchen were sacred rites of communion…Every meal was a last supper” (p. 46).

We move from the kitchen to a protest outside the unmarked brick office building of the local ICE facility in a business park in Cary, NC. (I’ve stood in similar demonstrations outside of almost identical unmarked ICE buildings in Massachusetts and recognized the scene immediately.) Villegas and about 50 others from local churches have gathered to witness the injustices taking place in that unmarked facility by singing hymns, praying prayers and requesting to wash the feet of those detained within. While that request is not granted, they wash each other’s feet amid increasingly serious and loud threats of arrest from the local police. As he points to an empty chair in the parking lot representing those who have been taken from their community by ICE, Villegas says to the crowd, “In this holy act, we bear witness to God’s love for us and for those who’ve been taken from us, leaving us wounded, dismembered, with holes in our hands and side: the pierced and severed body of Christ” (p. 52).

Next comes a crash course on community defense as neighbors and congregants develop a method to alert immigrants in their city to the presence of ICE and to track that presence through their neighborhoods. Community defense is pastoral care, in Villegas’ view. As a professor of pastoral care, I couldn’t agree more. “The community we want is already here,” he says, “among us, in our neighborhoods and workplaces” (p. 75). The work is protecting that community from unjust immigration policy and enforcement and providing the mutual aid necessary to keep our neighbors from falling through the cracks created by inadequate affordable housing, detention bonds, utility bills and grocery needs that mount when a family member has been taken by ICE.

Then we get a glimpse into the creation of a sanctuary coalition in North Carolina comprised of several congregations that accompany an undocumented person, Rosa del Carmen Ortez-Cruz, for two years. Volunteers slept on cots across the hall from the makeshift apartment inside one of the churches for those years where Rosa lives after she was targeted for deportation at the outset of the first Trump administration. She worked through the legal channels against deportation for several years prior to needing to enter sanctuary, or else return to a dangerous situation in her home country where her life was threatened by a former partner who had already once attempted to murder her. He explains the churches’ commitment to Rosa: “All of us were ready to assemble ourselves as a shield of protection, to intercede on her behalf, and to stand in solidarity with her by blocking the entrance into the church building” (p. 83). Additionally, the chapter provides a helpful history of sanctuary practice in the U.S. beginning in the 1980s and roots this practice in the history of Christianity all the way back to St. Augustine.

I am a former pastor in an American Baptist/Alliance of Baptists congregation that practiced sanctuary with undocumented people in the 1980s, when the sanctuary movement began in the U.S. We renewed that sanctuary practice with a coalition of 10 other congregations and communities at the outset of the first Trump administration in 2016. Back in the 80s, we even had an FBI informant in the pews each Sunday, and every Sunday the congregation would pray for their informant, never knowing who the person was.[2]

As I reflected on Villegas’ words about sanctuary in light of my congregation’s experience, I became grateful for the ways this book opens a window for readers into so many communities making that same precarious sanctuary journey with immigrants in other parts of the country. The recent Trump administration has tried to take away the sanctuary protection that churches can offer to undocumented immigrants – along with that of other protected areas such as schools and hospitals. That executive order is now being challenged in court in a lawsuit joined by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. The idea behind the protection of immigrants in those sensitive spaces from the risk of ICE detainment is that everyone, no matter their documentation status, should have the ability to seek medical care, receive education, and worship their God without fear.

Involvement in sanctuary work has been one of the most transformative seasons of my entire ministry. Our congregation, along with 10 other communities, accompanyed one family living in sanctuary inside one of our churches for nearly four-and-a-half years until they achieved documentation status. We celebrated the birthdays of the two children in a church fellowship hall through those years. Congregants walked the children to school every day because their mother could not leave the church building without risk of detainment. Several of us accompanied her to immigration court hearings every time she was summoned, witnessing the arduous and often cruel process one must go through to prove one’s life is in danger if returned to their country of origin. Among the other ways she passed her time inside the church walls for all those years, this young mother learned to sew and made paraments for our communion table that we used throughout the church year.

This family in sanctuary transformed the lives of our congregations while we protected theirs. Anyone who reads Migrant God will understand why churches do this work and, hopefully, be inspired to stand in similar acts of solidarity with immigrants and the God who shows up with those on the move, in wilderness places.

Finally, Villegas helps readers marry their understandings of liberation and worship, saying, “To prepare ourselves for worship is to set our faces toward liberation,” rooting that claim in the fact that the Hebrews’ liturgical festival upon leaving Egypt was in protest of their enslavement there. All the time since, the spiritual and the political, worship and liberation, have been bound up together in a communal process of social formation – liturgical acts “of belonging that create and maintain a community” (p. 105).

Preachers will find in this book a companion in the exploration of biblical texts that pertain to immigration. One text Villegas draws upon to reflect upon his own family’s life at the edges of Los Angeles where his father worked in a factory is the text at the end of Genesis when “socioeconomic forces pull the Hebrew people into ancient Egypt to survive the devastation of famine” (p. 95). Like many migrants since, they did whatever was necessary to keep their children alive and fed. “Despite the contemptuous gaze of the long-standing residents, the Hebrews made a home in this foreign land…even if this relocation will mean their constant subjection to their new neighbors’ disgust” (p. 96). The Egyptian economy required precarious Hebrew labor, yet the Hebrew people were considered alien, and Pharaoh feared that the foreigners would someday become more numerous than the Egyptians (Exodus 1:9-10).

Like his treatment of this text, wherever Villegas touches upon a biblical text in the book, the light and shadows cast between the sacred text and the sacred lives of migrants refuses to let go of the theological imagination. The reader cannot unsee what Villegas helps us to witness, both in the Bible and in the lived experience of immigrants living in the U.S. This book will live with you long after you finish reading it.

The book will also be ideal for the layperson and for book groups. Aside from the rich theological reflection on the socio-cultural and political landscape for immigrants in the U.S., readers will also learn a great deal about U.S. immigration policy and enforcement, and the historical trajectories that have led us to where we are today. Seven short, well-cited, highly accessible, and beautifully written chapters are a crash course education for readers wishing for a more descriptive understanding of U.S. immigration realities. And if you watch and read the news thinking, “I know in my heart that this is wrong, but I wish I knew how to talk about this with more theological depth,” Villegas accompanies you beyond the religious shallows into the theological depths where the migrant God is troubling the waters.

Finally, I believe many seminary professors will find this a welcome addition to course reading lists. What this book offers to seminarians is a window into embodied faith praxis and religious leadership that cultivates courage to stand with those whose lives are made precarious by our political situation. As Villegas says, “The Bible reminds us that God has been known to join caravans in the wilderness. The Spirit of God dwells with people on the move. A migrant God for migrant life” (p. 117). This is the God students should encounter in their formation as clergypersons, if they haven’t already. Migrant God offers to expand imaginations for ministerial possibility in an era of creeping fascism and provides a crash course in what congregational and ministerial courage looks like in practice. My seminary students will be reading this book in semesters to come.

The only limitation that I can see in this book whatsoever is that, while it was published in 2025, many of the contemporary narratives that root the book’s theology in lived immigrant experience and congregational ministry are set within the first Trump administration. (The book was published just as Trump was being reelected to his second term.) Though while the contemporary context has shifted toward more dramatic and brutal federal policy and practice related to immigrants, the theology and ministerial praxis that the book advances remain as prescient as ever. And far from simply an anti-Trump screed, he also brings into view the harmful immigration policy and enforcement of the Obama and Biden administrations. Most importantly, perhaps, Villegas’ critique reaches far back into U.S. immigration policy and practice – for example, colonial “lantern laws” in New York City aimed to track and regulate the movement of Black and Native American enslaved persons at nighttime. Some of these historic precedents of contemporary law were new to me, as I imagine they will be for many readers.

The political onslaught against immigrants in the U.S. continues unabated since the re-election of Donald Trump. As some immigrants are now being deported without due process to a “Terrorist Confinement Center” in El Salvador, the administration’s sights turn toward the possibility of deporting U.S. citizens, too. As of the week of this writing, the U.S. House Republicans voted against a measure that would block immigration officials from detaining and deporting citizens.

There is no more time for churches to dither over whether we are on the brink of catastrophe. Ministers and congregations must organize and respond to a crisis that threatens to entangle so many vulnerable lives in webs of injustice and violence and draw our entire country into the terrors of fascism. Isaac Samuel Villegas has gifted the church with Migrant God: A Christian Vision for Immigrant Justice at a time when we desperately need accessible theological resources to help congregations understand how to practice the historic Judeo-Christian call to compassion for “foreigners who live in your land” (Leviticus 19:33 CEV). I can’t recommend this book strongly enough.

— Cody J. Sanders is Associate Professor of Congregational and Community Care Leadership at Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, MN, Interim Pastor at The Table in Minneapolis, MN, and a member of the CET board.

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[1] “What We Believe,” Mennonite Church USA, accessed May 3, 2025, https://www.mennoniteusa.org/who-are-mennonites/what-we-believe/

[2] Congregant and theologian, Harvey Cox, wrote about this experience at the time. “The Congregation, and Its F.B.I. Spy, Will Rise,” New York Times, March 3, 1985, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/03/opinion/the-congregation-and-its-fbi-spy-will-rise.html

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