Legacy corporate media is awash with sob stories about the plight of illegal immigrants afraid of what might happen to them because of Trump administration policies. “Pregnant asylum seekers fear birthright citizenship will end before their deliveries,” reported The Washington Post on Feb. 9. “How teachers are preparing themselves and their students for immigration sweeps,” was a Feb. 8 CNN headline. “’We are all afraid’: Migrants with temporary status live in fear amid Trump’s crackdown,” was another headline from NBC News in January.

Yet as much as all of this fear-mongering is intended to provoke outrage among American audiences empathic to the plight of the millions of illegal immigrants currently living in the United States, it has the opposite effect for me. The more I hear about illegal immigrants afraid that the government might hold them accountable for breaking U.S. laws, the more firm I am in my conviction that illegal immigration must be stopped, immediately. What makes me this way might surprise you: a decade of advocating on behalf of asylum seekers. 

The Terrible, Never-Ending Struggles of Christian Asylum Seekers

I first began advocating on behalf of Christian asylum seekers 10 years ago while I was living in Bangkok, Thailand. There I encountered literally thousands of evangelicals and Catholics who had suffered religious persecution in Muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria. Most of them had overstayed their 30-day Thai visas and were living there illegally in constant fear of being apprehended by the Thai authorities.

One such Christian I met was a man named Michael D’Souza, a Catholic from Pakistan who on multiple occasions was physically assaulted by Muslim militants. His sister-in-law was abducted and forcibly converted to Islam. He never saw her again. Fearful for his life and that of his wife and small children, he fled to Thailand, where he was repeatedly arrested and kept in a Thai detention center.