Friday, August 22, 2025

SojoMail - The U.S. isn’t the Good Samaritan in this story

In this week's SojoMail: Why the DHS finds itself on the wrong side of a parable; how new federal workplace guidelines enable Christian nationalism; and what 803Fresh’s viral line dance has to do with church history.

The U.S. Is Playing the Wrong Role in the Good Samaritan Story

This week SojoAction’s Chad Stanton writes about how Trump has turned a program that was supposed to keep migrants safe into a source of fear and anxiety:

When I went to college in Austin, I got to know a lot of people whose families came from Ethiopia. In getting to know them, I learned about the conflicts that have forced people to leave their homes and to obtain protection under Temporary Protected Status in 2022 due to the nation’s ongoing wars and humanitarian crises. The TPS designation allows migrants to temporarily live in the U.S. when they cannot return to their countries safely, often due to dire circumstances. For the people I met from Ethiopia, TPS offered an escape from physical danger and a chance to thrive here in the U.S. while working to end the conflict back home and caring for their loved ones as best they can.

It is these classmates, neighbors, and friends who have been on my mind as I’ve read about President Donald Trump’s attempts to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Afghans, Cameroonians, and Nepalis. Yesterday, a federal court announced that the administration could proceed with ending protections for more than 60,000 people from Nicaragua, Honduras, and Nepal.

TPS can be described as a way our nation embodies the kind of neighbor-love Jesus describes in the parable of the Good Samaritan. In the parable, Jesus describes the Samaritan traveler who finds a man beaten up on the side of the road and lodges the man at a nearby inn, generously paying for the man’s care out of his own pocket (Luke 10:25-37).

But if the U.S. has been the Good Samaritan offering care to those who found themselves in harm’s way, the Trump administration thinks it’s high time we stopped paying for their care.

Read the full article