Allow me to put my four-year master’s degree in theology and my twelve-plus years of full-time pastoral service to some use.

So many of the migrants trying to make it to the U.S. aren’t just coming “for a better life.” They’re truly refugees fleeing violence – violence in which America is complicit. It’s funded by American drug users, using mostly American-made guns, and founded upon the chaos resulting from decades of American foreign policy blunders in the region. (Excellent analysis here.)

Trump and Sessions continually paint all the migrants coming to our southern border, including the children, as being the worst elements of their “shithole countries,” to use the president’s own terminology from a few months ago. Not only are Trump and Sessions lying, as the president does with unprecedented frequency, Sessions and Sarah Sanders are claiming the Bible as justification for the administration’s abusive policies.

Treating people in need of mercy in this way runs counter to numerous passages in the Bible. It was even one of the primary reasons God explicitly cited in the Old Testament for why He permitted the enemies of His people to massacre them and plunder their land, carting the survivors off to generations of exile in Assyria and Babylon. (E.g., Jeremiah 7 places such oppression on a par with murder and idolatry.)

And of course, lying in Jesus’ name is generally a bad idea. (It is essentially the sin that condemned Ananias and Sapphira to their sudden deaths in Acts 5).

When politicians say they care about the lives of unborn children, but are willing to abuse thousands of them after they’re born, causing traumatic brain damage by seizing them from their parents and hiding them thousands of miles away for months on end, then they’re hardly the pro-life people they claim to be.

The same holds true for potential Supreme Court justices.

If we have ears to hear, let us hear.