Drs. Lloyd Barba, Anita Huízar-Hernández, and Sergio González were 2024-2025 PRRI Public Fellows studying the intersection of politics, religion, and immigration/migration. This Spotlight Analysis details the findings of their original, collaborative research conducted with support from PRRI.
“Y así, por la fe se ha hecho todo.” [“And so, everything has been done by faith.”]
-Sister Lika Macías
What kind of data can help us understand the relationship between faith identities and immigration policy? This question is at the center of this collaborative Spotlight, which offers a qualitative perspective to complement PRRI’s substantial quantitative research on shifting immigration attitudes in the U.S. As humanities scholars, we turn to personal narratives to explore the complex interplay among border policing, immigrant rights activism, and faith.
We spoke with seven faith-based immigrant rights activists working in the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. We focused on this region because it has long been at the crossroads of strict immigration enforcement and faith-rooted social justice organizing. Each person we talked to was keenly aware of this tension, which was the backdrop against which their work unfolded.
The Current State of Immigration Attitudes
Among the most notable shifts in the American electorate over the past three election cycles has been a rightward shift on matters concerning immigration, especially regarding the building of a wall in the southern U.S. border. PRRI’s American Values Survey data shows that support for building a physical wall at the U.S.-Mexico border increased from 41% in 2016 to 51% in 2024, with increases across all religious groups, including Hispanic Catholics, from 26% to 37%, and Hispanic Protestants, from 36% to 49%. A growing wave of anti-immigrant sentiment and calls for restrictionist immigration policies among voters in large part fueled the election of Donald Trump to a second presidency in 2024. In fact, according to PRRI’s 2024 Post-Election Survey, a significant portion of the voting population supported Trump’s third run for office in large part because of his restrictive immigration policies.
In his first year in office, Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress have responded to these shifting political winds with executive orders and legislation that have increased military presence at the U.S.-Mexico border, reduced access to asylum procedures, attacked sanctuary municipalities, and ramped up interior detention and deportation operations. A consistent sentiment among Americans that undocumented immigrants represent an existential threat to the nation accompanies these policy shifts. PRRI polling has found that about one-third of Americans believe in the Great Replacement Theory, which posits that “immigrants are invading the nation and threaten to replace its cultural and ethnic background,” or that “immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of the country.” White Christian groups are more likely than Christians of color, including Hispanic Protestants and Hispanic Catholics, to agree with these statements.
Despite this general shift toward restrictionist policies among the electorate, as mixed-methods scholars, we contend that survey data — while a compelling entry point — must be complemented by a more diverse set of research tools to better understand how these dynamics play out at the local level, as well as how these trends can be understood within a larger historical context.
New Perspectives Via Oral History
To provide deeper and richer context, we conducted seven virtual oral history interviews with people who have engaged in faith-based immigrant ministry in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for multiple years.[1]Oral history is an invaluable tool for studying shifting immigration politics because it centers the voices and experiences of people whose perspectives are often missing from polling snapshots, institutional archives, and policy statements. For example, oral histories trace how personal stories, identities, and strategies of dealing with increasingly restrictive immigration policies are carried across generational cohorts, highlighting both continuity and change in the ways people of faith develop and maintain migrant ministries in the U.S-Mexico borderlands. As historian Mireya Loza notes, individuals’ oral histories “embody the complexities and contradictions” that might otherwise remain silent in normative narratives. By recording and preserving the personal stories of historical actors, researchers become better equipped to unearth and value the voices of individuals and communities often ignored by or subsumed across broader political narratives.
What We Learned
While survey data show a nationwide shift toward more restrictive immigration views related to the border across most religious groups, our oral histories reveal how some faith workers differ in their interpretations of their experiences at the border. Oral history allows researchers to collect firsthand accounts that reveal how political shifts are lived and interpreted on the ground.[2] The oral histories we conducted demonstrated that engaging in faith-based work on the border does not follow a predictable timeline or trajectory. However, there are moments in individuals’ lives that shape this kind of work. In virtually all our cases, the life stories from ministry at the border revealed turning points in their lives.
Previous scholarship on the Sanctuary Movement noted that involvement — especially finding one’s place in a religious community via social justice activism — resembles a phenomenon of conversion wherein individuals commit to causes out of deep moral concern. This was clearly the case for Sister Eileen McKenzie of the cross-border Kino Border Initiative, who for 25 years served as a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She drew connections between her congregation’s founding mission to serve German immigrants and the caravans and migrant crisis unraveling at the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2010s. After a period of discernment, she reasoned, “I just felt a strong call to come to the border and be a part of border ministry.”
For the Rev. J.J. Bernal of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona, a conversation with two sisters after his own arrival to the U.S. from Mexico fundamentally shook his notion of migration and humanity. The sisters shared that the first thing they did after deciding to make the trek to the U.S. was seek contraceptives from a doctor because they knew that they would likely be sexually assaulted on the road north.
Most of the individuals we interviewed came from outside of the border area, though they joined longstanding organizations with deep roots in the borderlands. For Presbyterian elder and retired Border Patrol agent Robb Victor, who has engaged in various capacities in serving migrants at the border, several major milestones in his life shaped how he has come to view immigration. As a teenager in South Florida, he witnessed the bodies of five Haitian men and women washed ashore. In another transitional moment, while working as a Border Patrol agent in Arizona, he saw an image in a periodical of an immigration officer pouring tea for a migrant in his jail cell. He said the paradox was striking, but at the base of it he saw a fundamentally human moment in which the jailed migrant was shown an act of dignity.
For Sister Lika Macías, the roots of the work she conducts with La Casa de Misericordia (Mercy House) in Nogales, Sonora, stretch back to the 1980s when, as a Catholic sister in Guadalajara, she learned the fundamentals of Christian collective action and ministered with Sanctuary Movement organizers in the Mexico-Guatemala border. She also saw firsthand (on a different border) a severe human crisis of which migration was the symptom and not the cause.
The individuals we spoke to shared stories deeply grounded in scriptural ideas of hospitality. Holly Herman has engaged in various kinds of border ministry because “Jesus would welcome the stranger. Jesus would feed the hungry. Jesus would heal the sick. Jesus would do these things. Jesus accepted everybody. So that’s kind of the way I’d like to be, and this gives me a framework to do that.” Alejandro Nava similarly referenced Biblical teachings to describe his work in Tucson with the migrant aid group Tucson Samaritans and at the former Casa Alitas migrant aid shelter. Thus, the border shapes one’s view of faith, for those closer to the border bear strong witness to the underside of the immigration system.
As our interviewees demonstrated, attitudes about faith and immigration are not formed in a vacuum, nor are they static; they evolve in response to personal experiences, community relationships, and broader political climates. As the Rev. Mark Adams, who has ministered at the binational Frontera de Cristo for nearly three decades, noted, “Maybe even more than how my faith informs me, is how the border informs my faith.” Adams’ insightful remark should serve as a reminder to scholars, to borrow from historian Tracy E. K’Meyer, that by “encouraging interviewees to reflect on their beliefs and motivations,” we might be better able to explore the “nature of personal faith, the connection between faith and behavior, and the role of religion in historical events.” These interviews thus show that oral history can provide a means of accessing memory, narrative, and emotion, all of which illuminate the everyday consequences of shifting migration patterns, immigration laws, and enforcement practices.
Explore more research conducted by the 2024-2025 PRRI Public Fellows:
– Americans’ Responses to Abortion’s Uncertain Legal Landscape
– Faith, Freedom, and the Future of LGBTQ Rights in America
– Democracy Today: Insights on Race, Religion, and Democratic Principles
– Why Are All the Black Christians Choosing to Go to Church Together?
[1] We conducted one-hour oral histories from May to August 2025. Given that all interviewees had been involved in faith-based work in the border area, we asked about five major themes: (1) the nature of faith-based organizations they are involved with; (2) how they became involved; (3) how faith informs work commitments; (4) changing perceptions over time regarding immigration; (5) hope for the future in their line of work and what faith communities have to offer.
[2] Oral histories also offer researchers a more human-centered, ethically engaged lens for understanding the interplay between policy, public sentiment, and lived experience