Today an icon of liberation theology, Óscar Romero was considered theologically and socially conservative at the time of his appointment as archbishop of San Salvador in 1977. What radicalized him was not a leftist political ideology but encounters with those in abject poverty, whom Romero came to see as victims of a largely hidden form of violence. Romero compared this everyday violence to ­Bermuda grass, whose underground system of rhizomes makes shoots that rise to the surface. Romero asks, “When the roots are firmly in place, should we be surprised to find new weeds sprouting up everywhere?” 

Because of his theological vision, Romero was able to see this form of violence as an affront to God and to humans made in God’s image. His adherence to Catholic Social Teaching allowed him to see what so many others tried to ignore and led him to become a witness — indeed, martyr — to this violence.

As I read Mennonite pastor/theologian Isaac S. Villegas’ Migrant God, I was reminded of Romero’s imagery. Villegas offers a theological vision not only of a God and a church that stand in solidarity with the immigrant but also of the violence of the U.S. immigration system itself. This violence thrives by remaining largely hidden from public view. Migrant God is thus apocalyptic in the truest, most ancient sense of the word: It unveils the violence of the state while also revealing a God who tabernacles with the immigrant, who is so often the victim of state violence.

Villegas’ unveiling takes the form of seven short chapters, or vignettes, about his and his church’s encounters with immigrants and the immigration system. He describes a trip to the border town of Douglas, Ariz., where a municipal cemetery has graves marked “Unidentified” along with the date the body was found in the desert. Villegas writes that “these deaths are like that first murder. Immigration policies and border enforcement strategies have deafened us to the blood. We are like Cain.” Quoting historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, Villegas describes how immigration law enforcement techniques have “converted the stark beauty and sand and rivers and mountains into ‘a system of violence without perpetrators’ — anonymous killers, murderers shielding themselves from liability behind reams of internal memos.” Villegas joins a vigil to honor the dead by shouting “Presente!” as a friar places a crucifix in the street for each person who was killed trying to cross the desert to safety.

Villegas describes such actions as “signs of solidarity in defiance of our country’s policies of alienation, in defiance of the violence involved in policing the division between citizen and alien.” In another sign of solidarity and defiance, Villegas describes his church’s Maundy Thursday foot-washing service on the premises of the ICE field office in Cary, N.C. During the service, they set out an extra chair and asked ICE agents for permission to wash the feet of detainees. Instead, ICE called the Cary Police Department, whose officers quickly arrived and encircled the group, demanding over a megaphone that they disperse. Villegas slowly and deliberately continued the foot-washing service until everyone gathered had their feet washed, as the police officers looked on. 

“There, in the ICE parking lot,” Villegas writes, “we assembled to declare our solidarity with undocumented neighbors and to conjure a political imagination for a society without deportation.”

With stories like these, Villegas’ aim is not to offer an apologetic for caring about immigrants. Solidarity with immigrants is so integral to the biblical narrative that it should be assumed. “In the biblical story,” Villegas explains, “God leads the Hebrews into freedom with a pillar of fire by night and a cloud during the day.” He continues: “In this story, the experience of God is not only personal but political: a multitude becoming a people on their way toward an undisclosed redemption.” Villegas’ goal is thus to expand the Christian vision to imagine what forms this redemption takes today. Following his teacher Stanley Hauerwas, Villegas writes, “We are our ethical vision.”

One of the great tragedies of the contemporary U.S. church — as with the church in El Salvador in the 1970s and ’80s — is that large segments have aligned not with the victims of violence but with the structures and institutions that perpetuate violence. 

It is my hope that the witness of Villegas and the many ordinary Christians he describes — as with the witness of Romero and ordinary Salvadorans — becomes the seed of resistance that sprouts into justice and peace.