Brad takes listeners through two heartbreaking stories that reveal how religion, immigration policy, and selective notions of freedom collide in today’s political climate. He first looks at the attempted deportation of a Holocaust survivor born in a refugee camp after World War Two who has lived in the United States for decades.
Brad shares details about the survivor's health struggles, the harsh conditions he has faced in detention, and what his case says about the cruelty baked into ICE’s approach to long-term residents. He then turns to an incident at the Broadview facility in Chicago, where clergy were suddenly told they could not pray for or with detainees. The conversation digs into religious liberty, the right to worship, and the way vulnerable people are denied both care and dignity inside these facilities.
Throughout the episode, Brad connects these cases to larger themes of religious populism, civil liberties, and the uneven ways religious freedom gets applied in America. He contrasts the peaceful interfaith protests at Broadview with the violence of January 6th and reflects on who gets labeled as a threat when faith enters the public square. Brad also shares updates about the future of the show, including a redesigned website, new ways to connect, and expanded content for subscribers that digs into the shifting MAGA coalition and early positioning for the 2028 presidential race.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 850-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi.
Great to be with you today.
Gonna talk today about two distressing cases related to ICE and religion.
One is about the attempted deportation of a Holocaust survivor, and the other is about preventing clergy from praying for those who are detained at an ICE facility.
Also, for subscribers, got bonus content today about the ways that MAGA folks are looking past Trump and you're seeing the cracks in the coalition because people are starting to announce that they are running for president and openly breaking with Trump, something that seemed unthinkable just a couple of months ago.
And so I want to highlight that and really zero in on why it is important.
All right, y'all, before we get going, I want to just talk to you about some things ahead for Straight White American Jesus and just kind of let you know where we're at.
If you don't want to hear that, you're like, Brad, I just get to the point for today.
Talk to me about what's going on with ICE and mass deportations.
Feel free to skip ahead here, about two minutes.
I just want to be open with you all about where I'm at and what we're planning for the future.
Right now, I'm feeling really stretched and really kind of warmed in.
I'm finishing a book about tech monarchists and Christian theocrats who are trying to take over the country.
And it's going to mean a lot of, I'm going to share a lot of that on this podcast.
And I'm going to talk about what I'm writing a lot here in the coming months.
But at the moment, it means a lot of my brain and my creativity and my energy is going towards just trying to get over the finish line with this book.
And so that's one thing.
The other thing is that something I really haven't talked about behind the scenes is that we are really trying to renovate and renew our show in ways that we feel will set us up for 2026.
And hopefully just our biggest goal is to connect with you in more dynamic ways.
And so what are we doing?
We are redesigning all of our websites and all of our online presence to really reflect the work that we do on this pod.
We have a thousand episode archive.
We have so much work that we've done over the last eight years and we just want to present that.
And so those websites are going to be unveiled here in the next couple of weeks.
And they're going to offer opportunities to connect and to understand everything that's on offer on this pod in ways right now I don't feel like are possible.
So that's number one.
Number two is that in the new year, we're going to be live streaming and we're going to be doing that regularly.
The plan right now is for me to live stream on Mondays come January and to do that basically every Monday.
And so that is our vision for the future.
That is my vision for my individual episodes going forward.
We're also going to try to start live streaming our weekly roundup.
Now, I don't know how soon that will happen, but I'm going to aim for that to be happening soon into the new year.
But what that means is we will be live twice a week, and you can join us and watch and participate and contribute in that way.
So that's there.
So you're wondering, all right, if you're going to live stream on Mondays, what about the interviews?
What about the books and the authors and the journalists that you talk to?
And my hope and my plan is really to shift those to Sundays and to have long-form interviews that go a little more in depth than normal right now.
Right now, the interviews are about half an hour.
We're hoping for a more long-form format.
And you'll definitely hear from me, but I'm also trying to set up a plan so that we'll have friends of our show, people you're familiar with, who will also step in and do some interviews with great people about important books and articles and other events that are taking place.
And so what that would look like is a Sunday interview and a Monday live stream.
It's in the code and then the weekly roundup.
Moreover, if you're a subscriber, we're looking forward to setting up ways that we can connect with you on a weekly basis.
And so Dan and I are exploring office hours where you could drop in and hang out and ask questions of me.
And on alternate weeks, you could talk to Dan.
We have to get those details worked out and figure out how that would all operate.
But these are the kinds of things we're working on and trying to organize for the future.
We want to bring this pod into video format in a really full way.
And we want to connect with all of you more often.
Finally, we're going to have a newsletter that is really robust and really intentional that will go out on a weekly basis.
And so if you are somebody who is a Substack person or a newsletter person, or if you have friends who might be interested in our content, but just are not podcast people or video people, we're hoping that will just be one more way to connect with a larger audience and also provide updates in written form about events and other things.
We're going to be highlighting different comments from Discord and putting in quotes that we love, as well as articles from friends and what we think are the best clips from the week.
Just a great newsletter that will really be multifaceted.
So that's what's on the horizon.
And I just, I'm going to ask you to bear with us because right now, about a week before Thanksgiving, I am pretty much exhausted trying to finish a book that is due in a month and also get some of these renovations going on our show as well as just finish out the year strong.
Thanks for your patience on that.
Thanks for hanging with us on this show.
Here is today's episode.
I want to tell you about a grandfather, somebody who is almost 80 years old.
His name is Paul John Bojerski.
He was born to Polish parents in a German refugee camp a year after World War II ended.
So here we are in the mid-1940s, and his parents are in a refugee camp.
They survived the Nazis.
They survived the Holocaust.
Most of you will remember that many, many, many Polish people in the millions were killed by the Nazis.
Bodjersky never became a U.S. citizen.
It's not clear why, but that is the reality.
He had a few run-ins with the law in his life, and there was a deportation order put out for him.
He had some run-ins with the law earlier in his life, and he attempted to get permanent residency, and that failed.
So he has stayed in this country for decades, and he's checked in with immigration officials when they have asked him to.
In July, he went to an ICE office for what he thought would be the regular routine, and he was instructed that ICE would deport him unless he voluntarily left.
So here's a man who came to this country decades ago after his family survived the Nazis and the Holocaust.
A man who was born in a refugee camp, a man who has built a life, has daughters and granddaughters, has been married for 37 years.
ICE told him that unless he deported, unless he self-deported, they would take him out of the country.
So he got together with his family.
They had dinner.
They laughed.
They told stories.
And then he turned himself in.
He then took an eight-hour bus ride to the place that was known as Alligator Alcatraz.
Since then, his health has gotten worse.
He uses a wheelchair.
He doesn't have access to his medication.
He's not eating well.
Things are going downhill.
After the closure of Alligator Alcatraz, he was transferred to another facility.
And there have been fewer phone calls because he can't get access to the phone.
At one point, he fell out of his wheelchair and was left on the ground for hours by the guards.
Now, this man has had trouble with the law.
I'm not here to make him out to be perfect or an angel.
I'm not here to do any exaggerating.
I'm not here to say that he is somebody that we should all look up to.
Here's what I'm here to say.
This is a man who came here with his family when he was a toddler.
His family survived the Nazis and the Holocaust.
He has been here for five decades, six decades, seven decades.
And at one point, when U.S. officials did want to deport him, Poland would not take him and West Germany would not either.
And West Germany, of course, no longer exists.
The point is, is that what's happening across the country with deportation raids are shocking.
I think we're seeing that all over the place.
I think all of you know that they are not just going after criminals.
They're not just going after gang members.
They're going after anyone.
And it doesn't matter if you are Latino, you are a suspect.
I think the cases like this that involve someone who came from Western Europe are not notable because they're white.
It's not that being white is somehow supposed to be something different or more important.
It's that they would have the gall to say to an 82 or 79-year-old man, a man nearly in his 80s, that we're going to take you to a concentration camp, even though you are working or you're retired and you retired from being an optician.
There's nothing here about him doing anything now or recently.
There's nothing here about him being a threat to somebody.
There's nothing here about him crossing an open border in a way that supposedly was illegal or not okay.
This is not somebody who sought asylum five years ago or who is a refugee from three years ago.
And this is also somebody, and I think this is where the shock of the story really comes in, is this is somebody who was fleeing the big bad other, the inhumane, disgusting example of history that the United States defeated in its greatest triumph as a nation.
This country has so many sins.
It has an original sin.
It has so many tragic, disgusting, hurtful steps as an empire.
There are so many ways we could point to the United States as not only never delivering on its promise, but also hurting the lives and thwarting the destinies of other people.
We can talk about World War II and why the United States didn't get into the war sooner.
We can talk about the ways that the history has been skewed.
We can talk about the fact that the United States did not accept many Jewish refugees during that time.
We can talk about a lot of things.
But one thing we can talk about is this.
The United States was the driving military force involved in defeating Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.
D-Day is one of the most proud events in American history.
The people who served in World War II liberated the camps, the kinds of camps where this man's family were held.
So to have somebody who escaped the tragedy of the Holocaust and of Nazi Germany, somebody who's been here for seven decades, somebody who's not come here recently, did not cross a border surreptitiously, is not claiming asylum or refugee status two years ago.
This is not the guy that JD Vance is always talking about in terms of just got here, taking jobs, et cetera.
And they sent him to a concentration camp.
When he fell out of his wheelchair, they didn't pick him up.
And he and other people who have been held there have talked about the fact that there's very few hot meals, unsanitary conditions, no medical care, and just a lack of regard for the human beings who are being held there.
So I want to just put that in your mind today.
Then I want to go to another story that comes out of Chicago related to ICE and deportation.
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Last Friday, a representative from the Broadview facility in Chicago, the kind of epicenter of ICE activity and protests in Chicago, told a group of faith leaders and activists that there is no more prayer in front of the building or inside the building because this is the state and it's not of a religious background.
According to an article by Charles Thrush at Block Cup Chicago, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for the Department of Homeland Security, Trisha McLaughlin, said, ICE only restricts access to federal property inside and outside the facility.
Please contact the Broadview Police Department for access to property outside ICE's jurisdiction.
According to Thrush, the inclusion of the federal property qualifier changes the nature of the initial directive that seemed to ban prayer in front of the building without further clarification.
It is unclear where in the chain of command the initial message originated.
Now, there haven't been religious ceremonies on the property for months, and that is when the feds put up a temporary fence that restricted access to areas close to the facility.
So there's kind of some dispute here.
Are they allowed to pray outside or inside the building?
Does this only pertain to federal property?
Well, for some people, it doesn't matter.
The Reverend Chera Bates Chamberlain said this.
This is a flagrant violation of religious freedom.
DHS has previously said that people detained have the right to worship and access spiritual care.
And yet they are now backtracking and barring clergy from providing that care.
Our immigrant neighbors deserve better.
And faith leaders will not be silent in the face of this injustice.
Now, McLaughlin, the representative of DHS, came back and said that pastoral care was restricted at the processing center because it is a field office, not a detention facility.
Religious organizations are more than welcome to provide service to detainees in ICE detention facilities.
But reports have contradicted the idea that the Broadview facility holds people only briefly.
In an ongoing federal court case, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettelman uncovered testimony from detainees describing being crammed into cells for several days with little food or water and being left asleep in plastic chairs or on cold floors next to overflowing toilets.
I wanted to bring you these two stories today, one of them from Chicago, the other from Florida, because I think they highlight some aspects of ICE deportation efforts and the Trump administration mass deportation crusade that need to be kept at the foreground.
Number one, it does not matter who you are.
And I've said this for a while on social media.
I've said it on this podcast.
This is not about people who are violent.
It's not about people who are part of gangs.
This is a purge.
This is a sense that whoever you are, if you are considered not to belong here, then you will be put in a cell, asked to sleep in a chair, not given food or water, and treated like an animal, treated like somebody who is not a human being.
And so you have this man who survived, whose family survived the Holocaust, who came here from a refugee camp in Poland, who's been here seven decades, who's now in a wheelchair in a facility and may never get out.
You also have the fact that people who've been taken into custody in Chicago are being barred from receiving pastoral care.
And I want you to think about that for a minute.
And I just want you to think about things that are so important to folks in the Trump administration, the Christian nationalists, JD Vance and Paula White, people from as diverse backgrounds as like a Catholic like JD or a charismatic like Paula White.
I want you to think about all the people that voted for Trump who claimed religious liberty is of paramount importance.
I want to think about the Supreme Court who's continually ruled in favor of the Christian imposition of religion on others.
The idea that if you are a public school kid in Texas, there is a very good chance that you will go to school, regardless of your faith, regardless of who you are as an atheist or a humanist, a Hindu or a Muslim, and you will go as you sit and learn math or language arts and see the Ten Commandments on the wall of your classroom.
All the times that federal money, your tax dollar, not federal money, state money, has been diverted to private institutions, educational institutions, that some of you who live in certain states have had your money diverted to places that are teaching the Christian religion in various forms, barring LGBTQ people, so on and so forth.
All the ways that religion is supposed to be this sign of America's soul.
And not just any religion, but Christianity.
And here we have DHS saying that prayer is not allowed outside, that religious ceremonies are not okay, and that we will not allow pastors to come and minister to the people inside.
This is like one of those examples, just clear, overwhelming.
Nothing really to debate examples to me of how it is always about the right kind of religion and the right kind of American.
That only those who are considered the real people are allowed the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, the freedom to gather, the freedom of the press.
That one of the things I talked about Friday, and Dan Miller talks about this all the time in this show, is that populism is not about whether or not you're popular.
It's also not about some kind of mob mentality, although populists often descend into this, into that kind of thing.
Populism is about saying that only certain people who live among you are the real people of your nation, your country, your community.
What populism does is it says those who are not us do not deserve rights like we do.
They don't get the same treatment.
And they shouldn't.
They don't deserve it.
And so every time you hear about religious liberty, every time you hear about religious freedom, religious practice, every time you hear about us being the good guys who defeated the Nazis, I want you to come back to these two stories.
That they're willing to deport folks who came to this country after surviving World War II in Poland.
And they're willing to tell pastors and other clergy, you can't pray here.
You can't pray for these people.
These people are not the kinds of people who get prayed for because they're not people.
They're certainly not citizens and they're certainly not us.
So it's not just that we might need to deport them.
It's not just that we're going to kidnap them from their communities in unmarked cars wearing masks.
It is also that we're going to say, you don't get to pray for them.
This sounds, I want you to think about if you read this in a Greek tragedy, if you read this in Sophocles, right?
Or one of the other ancient poets, where there was a group of people who were barred not just from access to society, people who were segregated, people who were cordoned off, not just that.
You're not allowed to pray for them.
Just think about that for a minute.
All the noise, all the things we know about DHS and ICE and everything swirling around us every day, all day, all the ways that our country is being invaded by these malignant policies and actions and officials.
They're telling you that certain people are not worth praying for and that you are actually, as a U.S. citizen, not allowed to do that.
You can tell me, oh, Brad, no, you can pray for them at your house and you can pray for them in your heart.
And I'll say that's great.
What happened to the freedom of religion?
What happened to America?
What happened to the foundation of this country?
What happened to the freedom of speech?
What happened to the idea that no matter who you are, as long as you're not hurting someone else, you can stand on a street corner and pray for other people?
You're not blocking things, impeding things.
You're not in the way.
You're standing where you're supposed to stand.
What happened to that?
So now you want to tell me that I can only pray in my heart.
That sounds like the Soviet Union.
That sounds like Czechoslovakia.
That sounds like Romania.
That sounds like any other Iron Curtain communist place that you might think of from the mid-20th century, doesn't it?
You're only allowed to pray in your heart?
Great.
Thanks for that, ICE or DHS.
So just take this home today.
Your government is trying to tell you that there are certain people around you, your neighbors, who you're not even allowed to pray for.
That's where we are.
And I know that most of you listening don't need me to tell you this, but it's just worth bringing up over and over and over again.
It's not about just religious freedom.
Anytime you hear a court case in front of SCOTUS about religious freedom, it's not just about having the freedom to practice your faith.
It's not just about having the ability to be a Christian and act according to your holy scriptures.
It's never just about, do I get to choose to worship my God?
These cases are always about I have the power not only to impose my religion on you because that is the right religion, but I also have the power to tell you who you can pray for.
This is what we might call religious populism.
It's linked to an authoritarian regime that is trying to basically control the civil liberties and actions of the people who live in this country.
And it's related to what I talked about on Friday, what I talked about on Friday, was civilizational populism.
Civilizational populism goes like this.
There are the real people, and they have been sold out by the elites.
And the elites have sold them out by allowing invaders and polluters and subhumans to come into their country.
So the goal now is to get rid of the elites and the invaders so that the real people can get their country back.
The reason I think civilizational populism helps here is that I could talk about Christian nationalism.
And one of the things that we'd have to come to grips with would be twofold.
One would be a lot of the folks who are in ICE detention are Christians.
They can be Latino Protestants.
They can be Mexican Catholics.
There's a lot of folks in ICE detention who pray to God and worship Jesus.
Period.
It's not about being Christian.
And second, there's a lot of people who don't pray to Jesus who want the same thing.
They want mass deportation.
It could be Peter Thiel, it could be Curtis Yarvin, it could be people in Silicon Valley.
There's a lot of folks who want this.
And so to me, if you talk about this kind of populism in the sense of wanting to save Western civilization, a superior way of life by getting rid of those who can never assimilate,
who are not compatible civilizationally with us, then you can see how a diverse coalition of tech monarchists and traditional Catholics and religious right Protestants can all get on board with this kind of thing.
All right.
I want to leave you with some words from Tom Montgomery-Fate and a reflection.
So Tom Montgomery Fate is somebody who's been protesting and praying at Broadview and somebody who has been gathering with an interfaith group to do so.
Now, this has a history.
I should have said this earlier, but folks have been engaging in this kind of ritual in Chicago going back like 18 years since 2007.
It's not new.
This is not something that came out of recent events.
But nonetheless, here's what Tom Montgomery Fate says at the Christian Century.
So who are they really, these protesters, who show up each week with their signs and guitars and drums and prayer books and rosaries?
They're a mix, of course, and represent a range of political backgrounds.
But I think most of them are drawn to these protests by two fundamental tenets, both of them quintessentially American.
Detainees have the right to due process and humane treatment under the law.
And all people have the right to free speech.
On October 11th, several priests led a Eucharistic procession from St. Ulale Catholic Church in nearby Maywood to the detention center's gates where they sought to get inside to offer communion to the detainees.
In the program that preceded the march, Senator Dick Durbin offered words of encouragement and spoke about his mother's migration to the U.S. from Lithuania.
Nearly a thousand of us marched through Maywood that day.
Most wore yellow t-shirts that were handed out at the church.
God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, the church proclaimed, and has lifted up the lowly.
As we marched, we sang hymns and recited prayers.
Participants were notably kind and respectful of each other and of the people in the neighborhood, some of whom came out to sit on their porches as we went by.
When we finally arrived at the ICE facility, we encountered a line of state troopers.
The priest asked them if they could go inside and give communion to the detainees.
The troopers responded respectfully and promptly called inside to the ICE officers, who rejected the request as they had before.
We continued to sing and pray at the gate for a while and then slowly dispersed.
There were a thousand protesters there, but no violence and no riot.
This was not an angry mob, just a bunch of regular people who have jobs and families and busy lives.
We showed up because of our growing concern about the war our government is waging against immigrants who are simply trying to get about their daily lives without being assaulted or arrested.
As I read that, y'all, I can't stop thinking about January 6th and all the time that I spent and Andrew Seidel spent and Catherine Stewart spent and Peter Manseau and all these other scholars and journalists, Amanda Tyler, so many folks across different projects spent time chronicling the fact that if you look at January 6th and the riot, the mob, there was so much praying,
so much singing.
And those prayers and those songs, as I analyzed in my book, as I've talked about on this show many times with Matthew Taylor, those prayers and those songs were stories about why they were justified in overtaking our capital violently.
They were the story of how they had arrived to do God's work, to save the country, to restore the nation.
They violently overtook the Capitol, fought with police, led to death and pain and injury on the part of law enforcement.
The QAnon shaman famously prayed in the Senate on the Dais, talked about thanking God for bringing the people there.
All of those people have been pardoned by Donald Trump.
They have been whitewashed in a myth that says that was not a riot.
It was not violent.
It was nothing of the sort.
That kind of religion, the violent kind, that kind of prayer, the warfare kind, is permitted.
It's pardoned.
It's exonerated.
But this kind of religion, this kind of religion where people march peacefully, where people exercise their right of assembly lawfully, where people treat each other with respect, their neighbors and themselves, and law enforcement too.
This kind of religion where they offer help and assistance, communion, and pastoral care to the most vulnerable is not allowed.
Why?
Not only is it on the wrong side of power, not only does it undermine the authoritarianism of the regime, but it seeks to recognize that all of us are God's people.
All of us are equal under the law.
All of us deserve due process.
All of us deserve dignity and respect.
Those are the things that ICE and the Trump administration are trying to take away from the people they are detaining, whether it is 80-year-old survivors of the Holocaust, German camps, or if it is a 26-year-old construction worker, a 32-year-old mom, a 19-year-old asylum seeker.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter who you are.
At some point, this kind of regime will determine that you are not the right kind of person who deserves human rights.
And we see that clearly in the way that they are handling what is good religion and what is bad religion in our country.
One thing that religious studies scholars talk about a lot is in your culture, in your community, what is considered good religion and bad?
What is the religion that's helpful for society, that is pro-social, that is building and affirming the virtues of who you want to be?
And what is the kind of religion that's taking away from that?
Endless debates to be had about good religion and bad religion in all kinds of different contexts.
But the thing that stands out to me here is that bad religion is the religion that prays for those the regime says you're not allowed to pray for.
I think that's chilling.
I think that's something that should be on the forefront of our minds.
And I think it brings into relief the way that religion is operating in our country today.
All right, if you're a subscriber, stick around.
I got a few more minutes.
I want to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene and political violence and 2028 and all the people who are looking past Trump in a way that is now unprecedented in Trump's political career.
All right, y'all.
Thank you for your support.
If there's any chance, you can come out in Boston this Friday.
Come hang with us.
If not, like I said at the top, we've got big plans for this pod.
And if it has seemed like we've been running on fumes lately, there's a reason for that.
But it doesn't mean we don't appreciate all of you and can't wait to connect in our next bonus episode and other times that we have.
And just look forward to the new things that we are going to be launching in the new year.
