Allow me to introduce you to a man named Samuel Sey.
He was born in Ghana and lived in Canada before he entered the United States legally in 2022. He’s married to an American woman, and he has American children. Sey has been a teacher, a blogger and a podcaster. He’s widely respected on the Christian right, where he has developed a substantial following.
He’s pro-life, opposes critical race theory and most definitely supports ICE and the Trump administration’s policy of mass deportation. In February 2025, for example, he wrote, “The majority of people who are complaining about the deportations are not principled people defending Christian virtue. They are insincere people using Jesus’ name in vain to attack Trump.”
“It’s not un-Christian to deport illegal immigrants,” he continued. “Christian ethics do not denounce deportations. They demand it. Since illegal immigration is a crime, Christian ethics demand justice. That justice includes deportation.”
In January of this year, he posted on X, “If you love America, you should support ICE. That doesn’t mean every member of ICE will always do the right thing (not even the Church is filled with perfect people). But ICE is a force for justice. We should support them.”
These are exactly the arguments and sentiments that helped him build his platform. When he said those words, Republican evangelicals cheered.
And then, on Wednesday, Oct. 21, ICE arrested him.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, Sey arrived in the United States in 2022 and overstayed his legal entry by more than four years. It also claimed that he “has no pending applications and accepted voluntary departure.”
His family disputes that characterization. In a statement shared by Joel Berry, a writer and producer on the Jeremy Boreing Show, a popular right-wing podcast, Sey’s wife said, “My husband, Samuel Sey, entered the United States legally and has been working ever since in good faith with a lawyer to obtain permanent legal status. Our family is trying to understand what went wrong in the process.”
Sey, like hundreds of thousands of other immigrants in Trump’s America, has been caught in ICE’s dragnet. His family is confused, and his friends are distraught.
And the public? We’re in the dark. There’s no way to know who’s telling the truth.
I’m highlighting Sey’s story for two reasons. First, it’s directly relevant to a debate about empathy that has long been spreading across the Christian right. Second, it demonstrates the foolishness of mass deportation. Mass deportation doesn’t put America first; it puts vengeance first, and vengeance is a poor substitute for a moral and rational immigration policy.
Let’s begin by talking about empathy. As I’ve written before, one of the most striking aspects of the Trump era has been the evangelical attack on empathy as a virtue.
Books like “Toxic Empathy,” by the popular Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, and “The Sin of Empathy,” by an evangelical pastor and theologian named Joe Rigney, have warned Christians against allowing their hearts to be influenced by progressive appeals to empathy.
I’ve never met a serious person who believes that empathy alone should guide our moral decision-making, but empathy does have one cardinal virtue — it prevents us from having to endure injustice in order to care about injustice.
If we wait for something terrible to happen to us or to our friends before we bother to care, then we can find ourselves passive or even complicit in the face of profound evil.
Indeed, when I look back on my own failures of judgment, I can root them time and again in my lack of empathy — a failure to even try to put myself in the shoes of others.
Most shamefully, it took the experience of seeing my younger daughter face terrible racism (Nancy and I adopted her from Ethiopia) to realize that my Black friends and neighbors weren’t relaying “isolated incidents” or “unusual events” when they described racist events in their own lives.
It is to my profound regret that it took personal experience for me to finally understand what systemic racism is and what it does to our nation, to our neighbors and to ourselves. I lacked empathy, and that was entirely my fault.
So when I see Stuckey post an empathetic message about Sey, I understand her shock and concern. “As you can imagine,” she wrote on X, “his wife, who’s at home with their 3 babies, is devastated and also trusting the Lord to help them find a resolution quickly. Please pray for all of the Seys. Pray for wisdom and provision.”
Berry, who first gained a following as the managing editor of the Babylon Bee, a popular Christian website, has been an extreme immigration hawk himself. In 2025, for example, he posted on X, “The only due process owed to an illegal alien is deportation.”
Yet he has now started a fund-raising campaign to support Sey’s family, and wrote, “It seems to me they’ve made good faith efforts to follow the law, and are making every effort to cooperate and do the right thing.”
In other words, the family’s only hope to stay in the country rests on the very due process that Berry rejects — or at least used to reject.
And then, when Berry saw parts of the right celebrating Sey’s potential deportation and hurling racist insults at Sey and Sey’s family, which is very typical MAGA behavior online, Berry posted, “This has been probably the darkest 24 hours I’ve ever experienced on social media in my life. The things being said about Samuel, his wife, and his small children are unthinkably evil. There is a segment of the so-called ‘Christian’ nationalist crowd that has given itself completely over to Satan.”
I’m grateful that Berry sees this darkness and is clearly condemning it. But it’s not new. It’s what MAGA has done to its perceived enemies for more than a decade.
I post these statements not to mock Stuckey or Berry. As I said, I’ve been there as well, and I very much appreciate any and all resistance against the racist ghouls on the MAGA right. But I am hopeful that their experience can yield greater understanding.
As they have now seen, at least as far as Samuel Sey goes, deportation isn’t simply a matter of following the rule of law. It’s a policy choice rooted both in legal mandates and in acts of presidential discretion. And this president is using his discretion in a way that harms Americans and American national interests.
Or, as Neil Shenvi, an influential conservative evangelical writer posted, “Why are we even debating whether a man of good character with an American wife and American kids ‘belongs’ in America? Of course he does. If the law doesn’t welcome that, it’s a bad law and it should be changed.”
American immigration law is a mess. The system is overly complicated and often internally contradictory. But one thing is clear — the rule of law does not require mass deportation. It does not mandate that a man like Sey has to leave the country.
And it certainly doesn’t require his detention, away from his family, while the system adjudicates his case.
First, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a 2023 case, United States v. Texas, the president has considerable “enforcement discretion over arrests and prosecutions” and that discretion “extends to the immigration context.” This means the president “retains discretion over whether to remove a noncitizen from the United States.”
This isn’t a new principle. More than a decade earlier, in a 2012 case, Arizona v. United States, the court held, “Federal officials, as an initial matter, must decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all.”
If removal isn’t mandatory, then neither is detention. For decades, presidents of both parties have allowed immigrants who are arrested and detained in the interior of the country (as opposed to caught at the border) to post a bond and return home to their families while the deportation process unfolds.
Defenders of the Trump administration, including many of Sey’s friends and allies, shake their heads at Sey’s plight, but still support Trump’s mass deportation. Berry, for example, said, “I don’t think it’s wise to let your opinion of an entire immigration policy be dictated by outlier cases, tragic cases, or sad stories.”
“I support ICE and I believe mass deportations are necessary,” Berry continued. “I believe in law and order and I believe in justice. So does Samuel Sey.”
I give Berry points for consistency, but — as Sey’s case helps illustrate — the mass deportation program is not just. It isn’t a triumph of the rule of law. It’s a product of Trump’s own hatreds and bigotries.
After pledging to deport the “worst of the worst,” he has decided to pursue otherwise law-abiding residents for deportation, even residents with American families. He has decided to detain people who are eligible for bonds. Again, that is not what the law requires. It is what Trump demands.
Sey’s case isn’t some kind of perverse outlier. Trump’s roundup has snared thousands and thousands of people who are living peaceful, productive lives in the United States — including people who had been living here lawfully, right until Trump arbitrarily revoked their lawful status. He didn’t have to move to end temporary protected status for immigrants from 13 countries, including Haiti, Venezuela and Honduras, but he chose to anyway.
The numbers are shocking. According to a Migration Policy Institute analysis, “just 20 percent” of deportations during Trump’s first 18 months in office this term “were of people who had been convicted of a crime.” Among deported immigrants who had been living in the United States two years or longer, 71 percent did not have a criminal conviction.
If you want to know why the public has turned on Trump’s immigration policy, this is one reason. According to a January 2026 YouGov survey, 22 percent of American citizens believe that an immigrant who has lived illegally in the United States “for many years” without committing crimes should be deported. A mere 11 percent think we should deport illegal immigrants who are married to an American citizen.
These views aren’t the result of empty-headed empathy, but rather basic decency and common sense. Doesn’t a man or woman with a job and a family contribute to the peace and prosperity of the United States? Doesn’t it inflict terrible harm on Americans when you rip an immigrant spouse or parent from their home?
At the same time, to ask for sensible compassion for peaceful, productive immigrants doesn’t mean that the United States should throw open its borders. Uncontrolled mass migration — as we’ve seen here and in Europe — can strain social services, enrich criminal gangs (Latin American gangs have grown rich smuggling people into the United States) and endanger social stability.
But we don’t have to choose between open borders and mass deportations. In 1986, for example, Ronald Reagan signed a comprehensive immigration reform bill that was rooted in exactly the right ideas. He created a path to legalize millions of peaceful, law-abiding undocumented immigrants while imposing new legal restrictions designed to limit the flow of illegal immigrants in the United States.
Reagan’s law is sadly remembered mainly as a failure, but not because America was harmed by legalization. Instead, we failed at enforcement. The border remained too open — and interior controls on employing illegal immigrants too lax — to effectively stanch the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States.
As I become older and, I hope, wiser, I’ve grown more and more committed to a legal and political version of the Golden Rule — meaning that I try to fight for the rights of others that I would like to exercise myself. Or, to extend the principle into partisan politics, we should ensure that our political opponents enjoy the same rights and the same compassion that we extend to our political allies.
That’s a hard thing to do. The truth is that many of us have a terrible tendency to rejoice in the suffering of our enemies and lament the pain of our friends. But Christians, of all people, should know better.
In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus could not have said it more clearly. “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?”
So yes, grieve for Samuel Sey. Support due process for Samuel Sey. But don’t reserve your grief and support only for your ally — extend it to every law-abiding person facing Trump’s brutal dragnet, and then act to bring this terrible chapter of American injustice to an end, a righteous end.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about the evil ad that Vivek Ramaswamy ran against Amy Acton in Ohio. I tried to explain why MAGA has become so comprehensively cruel:
If there were a column hall of fame, Adam Serwer’s 2018 essay in The Atlantic called “The Cruelty Is the Point” should hold a place of honor. Rarely has a single piece so completely captured the zeitgeist of a movement.
Trump’s “only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty,” Serwer wrote. “It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.”
Serwer wrote those words eight years ago, when cruelty was already central to the entire MAGA enterprise. Trump supporters delight in Trump’s cruelty, of course, but they also engage in their own vile speech and actions as a virtual initiation rite into the MAGA movement — it’s the way that they demonstrate that they have the courage necessary to take on the left.
Indeed, in a Truth Social post, Trump applauded the “courage” of Acton’s mother. Vice President JD Vance, as I said, praised the ad’s “audacity.”
My Saturday round-table discussion with my Opinion colleagues Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle focused on the midterms. Why might we have a blue wave so soon after the decisive Republican victory in 2024? In part because Republicans have governed so poorly:
I can’t remember the last time in an election where you could trace voter anger at specific issues to very specific actions by the administration. Normally, when you’re talking about things like inflation rates or job creation, it’s kind of debatable what’s causing all of the inflation or how are these jobs being created, how much is the government versus the private sector, etc. But here you’ve got: Why are gas prices high? The Iran war. Why is background inflation creeping up again? Why are wages falling behind? Tariffs.
You can look at very specific things that this administration has done, which is one of the reasons I think that that term you used — the red undertow — is very appropriate. You can go issue by issue by issue and say, “On what planet does a smart political party do this? On what planet do you do this if you’re actually trying to win elections?” And rarely have I seen a party squander a victory more thoroughly and more efficiently — and more comprehensively — than what the Republican Party has done to the 2024 victory. It is astounding what the Republican Party and what Trump has done after this vibe shift in 2024. And so that’s to Jamelle’s point: Voters can look at very specific things that Trump and the Trump administration have done that have made their lives worse, and I think it makes it easier to vote against them.
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The post Deport Immigrants? Oh Yes. But Not This Guy. appeared first on New York Times.
