In recent weeks, news outlets have reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has deported refugees and migrants seeking asylum from places like Iran, Türkiye, and Afghanistan. But because these migrants would likely face persecution or harm in their home countries, the U.S. Administration is using a “legal loophole” and deporting them to various countries in Africa instead.

On Friday, June 12, a flight landed in the capital city of the Central African Republic (C.A.R.), Bangui, carrying at least two dozen of these migrants. Among them are women who may be exposed to even greater risk to their safety and security.

Lutheran Partners in Global Ministry has been working in C.A.R. for over 30 years, walking with Central African Christians through times of immense post-colonial poverty, struggle, and civil war. We currently support a women’s literacy program run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of C.A.R.

Despite the many dedicated Central African people who work tirelessly to care for their neighbors and communities, C.A.R. is one of the most fragile nations in the world, a country still navigating the deep wounds of colonial exploitation, civil conflict, and political instability.

It is abhorrent and immoral that the United States would dump dozens of people who came to the U.S. as “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free” into a context where they have no relationships, no ties to the culture, and little resources for support.

At the heart of Lutheran faith is the belief that our good works don’t save us, but that we are made right with God (“justified”) only by God’s grace, through faith. And yet, Martin Luther himself was very clear that Christ calls us to love and care for our neighbors. “God doesn’t need your good works, but your neighbor does.”^[1]

Living out our faith means caring for our neighbor. 

Jesus’ parable about the good Samaritan defines “neighbor” broadly. A man beaten and left for dead on the road to Jericho was passed over by the religious authorities, the people who were considered the “good religious people” of their day. It was, instead, a Samaritan — a foreigner, an outsider, someone the crowd would have considered beneath consideration — who stopped, bound up his wounds, and bore the cost of his care. "Go and do likewise," Jesus said (Luke 10:37).

The migrants being flown to the Central African Republic came to the U.S. seeking safety. They asked for asylum — a legal, internationally recognized right. Instead, they have been stripped of that claim, loaded onto planes, and dropped into country completely unknown to them. This is not law and order. This is abandonment.

Throughout scripture, God's concern is most intensely with those crushed beneath the weight of unjust systems. The prophet Amos thundered against those who "trample on the heads of the poor" and "push the afflicted out of the way" (Amos 2:7). Mary's Magnificat celebrates a God who "has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly" (Luke 1:52).

Lutheran theology, at its best, stands in continuity with this tradition: the church is always called to stand where Luther stood when he wrote, "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none" — and equally, "A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant, subject to all."

What is happening to these migrants is a moral crisis. It is not a partisan policy disagreement. The use of bureaucratic loopholes to circumvent asylum law, to move vulnerable human beings across the globe like cargo, to offload responsibility onto nations already strained to their limits — this is the kind of systemic injustice that the prophets named, that Jesus confronted, and that the church in every generation has been called to resist.

As Lutherans, we call on our elected officials — regardless of party — to end third-country deportations that circumvent asylum protections. We call on congregations, partner organizations, and people of faith to raise their voices. And we call on every person who has ever sung "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" or prayed "Lord, have mercy" to ask themselves: what does mercy require of me right now?

Our neighbor is on that plane. Our neighbor is in Bangui. Our faith demands we act.

[1] This is often misattributed as a quotation of Martin Luther, but instead is a paraphrase of Luther’s teachings by scholar Gustav Wingren.