Immigration Crackdown Creates Fault Lines Among Baptists

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/us/southern-baptists-immigration-trump.html

https://archive.ph/xtP6C

Immigration Crackdown Creates Fault Lines Among Baptists
An increasingly loud contingent supports the Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants.
By Elizabeth Dias and Shannon Sims
Dec. 21, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET

When federal agents descended on Louisiana this month to pursue their aggressive deportation campaign, a group of Roman Catholic priests privately brought the Eucharist to the homes of immigrants too worried to step outside.

But Lewis Richerson, the pastor of Woodlawn Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, planned to take an opposite approach.

“I would not knowingly extend communion to an illegal immigrant who is visiting our church,” he said. “That person would be in sin by being in this country illegally, and Christians should obey the law of the land.”

Instead, the main way he would minister to them would be “to help them submit themselves to the authorities,” he said. “They should absolutely deport themselves.”

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