Hannah Heinzekehr is Executive Director of The Mennonite, Inc. 

Men, women and children flee famine and starvation in the Ukraine and resettle in parts of Canada and the United States. Local people and organizations help the families find food, churches and land to farm.

Five siblings, all under the age of 18, flee El Salvador to avoid their brothers being involuntarily drafted into military or guerilla groups. They travel north, supporting each other across the Rio Grande, and arrive at a safe house in South Texas.

A pastor and his family depart from their home in Nigeria after receiving threats from a local paramilitary group. They resettle in southern California and help plant a large and thriving church.

A large German-speaking family resettles in Pennsylvania, looking for a place to live in community and practice their faith without fear of persecution.

Two pastors and their young children leave Indonesia and travel to the United States to pursue graduate studies. While in the United States, riots break out at home, and they choose to pursue citizenship and education in the United States for their two children rather than return home.

Each of these stories is a Christian and a Mennonite story. Some of these stories are of refugees who fled to the United States and Canada seeking safety from violence or a reprieve from famine. Some are immigration stories of people moving in search of education and better opportunities for their children to survive and thrive. They came seeking the freedom to live faithfully as Mennonite Christians without the threat of persecution.

In fact, lest we forget, the quintessential Christian story, the story of Jesus, is the story of a brownskinned Middle Eastern resident who needed to flee to Egypt as a refugee.

The problem with trying to reify borders, with trying to carve out a clear us vs. them, is that we will always find that our “us” is full of “them” and vice versa. Our stories as Mennonite Christians are stories of (im)migration. There is no way to distance ourselves from the stories and experiences of today’s refugees and immigrants.

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively banned refugees from entering the United States for 120 days, as well as placing a 90-day ban on any individuals from seven predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East. In addition, earlier in the week, President Trump took the first steps toward the construction of a new multibillion-dollar wall along the border with Mexico.

The rationale behind each of these moves? As explained by the White House, protecting the needs of American citizens first and “keeping Americans safe.”

These executive orders took effect immediately. Refugees and immigrants from these countries, some who had been in the process of obtaining visas and paperwork to come to the United States for many years, were detained at U.S. airports or prevented from boarding airplanes in their home countries. Some individuals, upon arriving in the United States, were promptly deported. Some international college students who were visiting home before returning to the United States now find themselves stuck and unable to return.

Protests erupted at airports across the country. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union rushed to airports to try to advocate on behalf of people being detained. Some politicians and Christian leaders spoke out in favor of the executive action. Others loudly critiqued it. And judges considered claims about whether the executive action was in fact constitutional.

Although the divide has not been clean, in general, reactions to these executive actions have fallen along party lines, another example of the deep polarization in the United States.

For those of us who are part of Mennonite Church USA, we also know that our church is not immune to this polarization. In fact, our best guess based on past studies suggest that Mennonites have historically identified with Republican party politics and that today we might find ourselves split close to 50-50.

But the call to welcome and care for those who are vulnerable, including the immigrant and the refugee, is not actually a partisan call. It is foundational to the Christian faith, a faith that is centered on the story of Jesus and that follows the story of the migration and movement of the Jewish people.

In 2015, Immanuel Mennonite Church in Harrisonburg, Virginia, started a nationwide movement when it printed the statement “No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor” on a sign in English, Spanish and Arabic. This is not a radical, partisan claim but echoes Jesus’ expansive definition of neighboring  and care (see the parable of the Good Samaritan for a prime example).

As Mennonites and Christians, our primary loyalty is not to our government. And the call to follow Christ does not concern itself first and foremost with safety or shoring up national borders. After Election Day, I wrote about the call of the church to serve Jesus by serving the strangers and those who are vulnerable among us (Matthew 25).

In these days, we are being faced with a concrete opportunity to do just that. May we respond to these efforts to close doors and keep people out by modeling Christian communities of radical welcome and by resisting policies that would prioritize the care and livelihood of a few at the expense of the many.

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2).

You can find resources for learning more about immigration and supporting refugees via Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite Church USA.