Lake Street Church of Evanston in Illinois is facing backlash after displaying a Nativity scene featuring a zip-tied baby Jesus. Figures surrounding the display are pictured as ICE agents while Mary and Joseph wear gas masks.
“This installation reimagines the nativity as a scene of forced family separation, drawing direct parallels between the Holy Family’s refugee experience and contemporary immigration detention practices,” the church said in a Facebook post. The display is intended to ask viewers to “confront the disconnect between professed religious or moral values and immigration policies.”
“The emergency blanket references the actual materials used in detention facilities,” the post describes. “The zip ties on the infant’s wrists directly reference the children who were zip-tied by agents during a raid on a Chicago apartment building earlier this year, where most residents were U.S. citizens: a stark reminder that enforcement terror does not discriminate by documentation status.”
According to the church, the “Holy Family were refugees.”
“This is not political interpretation, this is the reality described in the stories our tradition has told and retold for millenia,” the church argues. “By witnessing this familiar story through the reality faced by migrants today, we hope to restore its radical edge, and to ask what it means to celebrate the birth of a refugee child while turning away those who follow in that child’s footsteps.”
Similarly, a church in Massachusetts displayed an “ICE was here” sign with a missing baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Rev. Stephen Josoma told WCVB that the display is to emphasize the “plight of people who are really in dire need, and how we’re treating them.”
