Evangelical groups warn Trump's deportations could leave 1.3M 'torn apart' from families

A new report created by a pair of evangelical Christian organizations is raising alarms about the effects of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort on families, arguing that more than 1 million people could be “torn apart” from their families if current immigration policies continue at expected rates.

The report, which was released on Monday (May 4), was produced through a partnership between two prominent evangelical Christian organizations: World Relief, which helps resettle refugees, and the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella organization that represents a broad swath of evangelicals. Titled “Joined Together, Torn Apart: How U.S. Immigration Policies Are Separating Families,” the report argues Trump’s controversial immigration policies are harming families by separating spouses as well as children from their parents through deportations and detentions.

The authors stress they are “not saying that all deportations are unjust or unwarranted,” but cite Scripture to argue that “Jesus makes abundantly clear that what God has joined together in marriage, human institutions should not separate.”

Religion & Politics

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A humanoid robot, center, and Buddhist monks walk during an ordination ceremony at Jogye temple in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

In Opinion

And finally, MLK was a teen agnostic who rediscovered faith on a tobacco farm, new book reveals

Child orator. Farmhand. Agnostic.

Only one of those titles would be commonly guessed to describe the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But a new 420-page book by scholar Lerone Martin reveals those and other little-known pieces of King’s history. In “Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr.” he describes the family, friends and educators who helped shape King into the man who would one day draw some 250,000 people to the 1963 March on Washington.

Martin, 46, is the director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. To write the book, he delved into resources such as King’s letters to his parents, hit tunes on the jukeboxes during his college days and a health examination to determine the future civil rights leader’s 5-foot-7 height.

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