(RNS) — When President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, one of his first actions was to abruptly block migrants from seeking asylum in the United States through the southern border. Immediately, hundreds of thousands of people seeking refuge lost a legal pathway forward.
But as despair flooded through the border city of Juarez, Mexico, where previously scheduled asylum appointments were canceled, some Christians cheered.
“We wanted to explore that tension,” historian and author Jemar Tisby told RNS on Wednesday (April 8). “How can people who claim to follow a migrant, Jesus, also celebrate when migrants are shut out from seeking safety?”
Tisby is something of an expert on contradictions within Christianity. Once an evangelical insider, he became a controversial figure among conservative evangelicals after the 2019 publication of his bestselling book “The Color of Compromise,” which examined U.S. Christians’ historical complicity with racism. Since then, he’s authored two other books about faith and resisting racism. And now, he’s taking his assessment of white Christian nationalism a step further through film.
“Jesus Was a Migrant,” which premiered in Los Angeles on Thursday, is the first official production of Tisby Studios, the filmmaking division of Tisby Media. It follows Tisby to the U.S.-Mexico border, where, in partnership with the Christian nonprofit FaithWorks, he encounters families finding hope through faith despite the hardships they’ve endured. From there, the documentary explores the relationship between Christian theology and U.S. immigration policy.
Others can sign up to host a screening of the film on its website. RNS spoke with Tisby, executive producer of the documentary, about the film and its hoped-for impact. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What were some of your biggest takeaways during your pilgrimage to the border with FaithWorks?
When we went to the first migrant shelter and we heard from two of the families, their absolutely gut-wrenching stories, I knew instantly that this was going to be more than a two- or three-minute recap video. I said, this needs a more robust treatment, because we need to honor their stories, and we were very careful about centering the migrants on the trip. We asked them, as Americans, as Christians, what can we do to help? And they said, tell our stories. And I could think of no more powerful way to do that than through a documentary film.
How does this look at immigration connect with your work about Christian complicity in racism?
I often think of Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote that we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. There was, to me, a very disappointing narrative among some Black people that said, this isn’t our fight. And the reality is, a lot of these tactics have been used on Black people in the United States before, and they will be used again. Even more broadly, we as people of faith and as neighbors should stand in solidarity with anyone who is marginalized or oppressed because of injustice. And so it dovetails with all of my work, even though it is U.S.-centric and tends to focus on Black and white race relations.
The documentary highlights evangelicals’ legacy of being pro-immigrant, pro-refugee. When did that begin to shift in a significant way?
You’re absolutely right, there is a long legacy of evangelicals being champions of immigration, and particularly refugees and asylum-seekers. I think that the poison pill was always embedded within white evangelicalism, and it showed up in pro-America language, particularly during the height of the Cold War, when the United States was set up as not only democratic as opposed to communist, but also Christian as opposed to atheist. You start to get these ideas of nationalism and America’s superiority, which is always going to then have the effect, even if unintended, of looking down on people from other nations.
Then, in the 21st century, it really picks up with the current president’s rhetoric about immigrants. He came to the fore politically questioning Obama’s birth and whether he was truly American. We also remember his infamous statements about Haiti and other countries being ‘s—hole countries.’ That only continued as the fringe far right became more mainstream, and they started talking about things like the great replacement theory and saying, white people in the United States, their bloodlines are being diluted. That historically has always led to xenophobia and much harsher immigration policies.
These days, I’m hearing some conservative Christians talk about assimilation. They argue that the Bible teaches to welcome immigrants only on the condition that they assimilate to Western, Christian culture. What are your thoughts on this perspective?
It’s a faulty theology and a bad hermeneutic. You are importing Old Testament ideas onto modern-day geopolitics, for one, and secondly, you’re importing ideas from or laws that apply during the Old Covenant, before Jesus, to the New Covenant. After Jesus and under the New Covenant, we see that you have unity without uniformity. You have diversity within the body of Christ, one body, many parts, there is no longer slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female. All are one. But that doesn’t erase differences. What unites us is stronger than what is different about us. We can retain those differences, and that’s part of the beauty of the family of God. We don’t all have to be alike, and there’s a place for everyone with their cultures as well.
The title of this film is “Jesus Was a Migrant.” How should that premise, that Jesus was a migrant and a brown, Middle Eastern man, shape how Christians view immigration policy?
It begs the question, if Jesus was at the border, would Christians let him in? All too often, it seems as if, not only would they not let him in, they would celebrate blocking him out. Leviticus says that you should treat the foreigner among you as your native-born. So this is more than a movie. This is a statement. This is not a film that is trying to persuade the white Christian nationalists, adherents or sympathizers. This is a film for a coalition of the willing, the people who are already empathetic, but they need, they want to take action. It questions systems and laws and policies and says what needs to change in order to bring about the kingdom of God. That’s where we hope people will land and ultimately use what they’ve learned from the film and apply it in their own context and toward the crisis of immigration policy.
How do the filmmakers hope viewers respond?
No. 1, asking that question, what should we do? Because that’s the beginning of action. No. 2, we have designed the distribution model to foster and facilitate dialogue and collaboration. So we’re not just slapping the film up on YouTube or Vimeo and hoping people watch. We are encouraging people to host a screening and gather a group of people. There’s a free downloadable discussion guide to lead the conversation. And there’s also a resource page that has more organizations and action steps. FaithWorks is encouraging people to go on a border pilgrimage themselves, if they’re able. So the reality is, even though the borders are in particular geographic areas, the kinds of actions we can take are almost limitless once we ask the question and begin collaborating with others.
Can you talk about the timing of this film release?
We’ve been working on this film for half a year, and throughout the making of the film, immigration has been at the forefront of the tension, both politically and religiously. So people are seeing videos of ICE agents brutalizing people, whether they’re U.S. citizens or undocumented, and we’re appalled, and we’re saying, “What can we do?” We wanted this film out as soon as we could do it in a way that honored the stories of the migrants because it is an urgent issue right now, and for so much of the second term of this administration, it has been the policy that has garnered the most attention and the most division among people in the nation and in the church.
