Persecuted Abroad, Suspected at Home

What's happening

Terez Metry, a 28-year-old Coptic Christian, arrived at a Department of Homeland Security office in Nashville for a routine green card step and was detained and transferred to an immigration facility in Alabama. Her family fled Egypt during the Arab Spring when she was a teenager. A removal order had been issued when she was 13 without her knowledge. Copts make up roughly 10% of Egypt's population and belong to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. American politicians and evangelical leaders have mobilized on their behalf, with Franklin Graham calling violence against Middle Eastern Christians a "Christian genocide." Yet as anthropologist Candace Lukasik documents in over a decade of fieldwork, Coptic migrants in America face the same detention system as any other migrant. In 2019, a Coptic asylum-seeker visiting the Museum of the Bible was reported to the FBI as a security threat.

What the text says

Leviticus 19:33-3433"'If a stranger lives as a foreigner with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.34The stranger who lives as a foreigner with you shall be to you as the native-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you lived as foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am Yahweh your God.

The command is addressed to a people who were themselves once strangers. The Hebrew word ger does not mean tourist or temporary visitor. It means a resident alien, someone who has left their homeland and now lives permanently among a people not their own. The Torah's instruction is unambiguous: do not mistreat them. Love them as yourself. The reason given is not abstract ethics. It is memory: you were foreigners in Egypt.

This law appears in the Holiness Code, the section of Leviticus that defines what it means for Israel to be set apart. Welcoming the ger is not a secondary obligation or a policy preference. It is placed alongside commands about honest scales, fair wages, and not profaning God's name. How you treat the foreigner among you is, in this text, a measure of your holiness.

The reflection

The Coptic Christians detained at American borders are members of a church that predates every denomination in the country detaining them. They fled persecution that American politicians publicly mourn. The biblical framework does not distinguish between deserving and undeserving strangers. It asks one question: do you remember what it was like to be the one who needed welcome? The answer determines whether solidarity is a conviction or a speech.