I can imagine NOT MY pres drumpf / trump actually doing what herod did after the birth of Christ, he is enough of a psychopath / sociopath / narcissist to not be bothered by the slaughter of innocents to get his way, to maintain his power. Just look at what he is doing to our country, the dhs domestic terrorism and violence he has unleashed on the residents of America and the wanton military terrorism and aggression he has unleashed on the rest of the world, on our friends and foes alike. He is an evil person and all who support him and do his bidding are complicit in his war crimes, his crimes against humanity, his sins. This from Sojourners.....
The Bible Character That Most Resembles Trump
Chaos fills the streets as families are separated by force, and mothers cry out as their children are taken from them. To exert control and maintain power, a ruler orders agents to detain people off the street. Those the ruler labels as “subversive” are treated as a threat to his reign. The violence is indiscriminate and unrelenting. It does not matter who gets hurt, as long as the ruler stays on the throne.
If your mind went directly to President Donald Trump or the news of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shooting and killing two Minnesota residents—mom and poet Renee Nicole Macklin Good, and intensive care nurse Alex Pretti—you are not alone. But in this case, I am talking about Herod and his order to kill the children in Bethlehem and its surrounding region (Matthew 2:16). While the parallels are not identical, the shared logic of unrestrained state power is unmistakable.
Herod the Great was a Rome-backed king who ruled Judea. He had a multiethnic background, with his family being Idumean, Arab, and Jewish, and was considered, both by himself and others, as the “king of the Jews.” Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, recounts how Mark Antony had resolved to make Herod king and even advocated on his behalf to the Roman Senate, showing how imperial power backed his reign. While Herod’s identity and rise to power might be complicated, his abuse and crimes were not. Josephus records how Herod had one of his wives strangled, and multiple sons killed.
In Matthew’s gospel, the author chronicles how news that the true “king of the Jews” has been born put Herod and all of Jerusalem on edge (2:1–5). He recruits the magi to be his spies, asking them to return with word of the child’s location so that he can eliminate this rival to his throne (2:7–8). Matthew’s point is not only that Herod is cruel, but that anxious power is easily threatened. It treats the most vulnerable, such as children and those marked as outsiders, as dangers that must be eliminated.
Some people attempt to justify ICE raids with stories that cast undocumented immigrants as dangerous, subversive, and incapable of assimilating. Claims that noncitizens are voting in federal elections persist, even though credible investigations have repeatedly found this to be extremely rare. The result is a politics of suspicion that makes it easier to profile, detain, and separate people on the basis of who they appear to be, not on the basis of any actual evidence.
The dangerous logic of suspicion and fear surfaced clearly in September 2025, when the Supreme Court stayed a district court order that had temporarily barred immigration agents in Los Angeles from making stops based on racial, linguistic, and cultural markers. Another common basis for aggressive enforcement is the claim that immigrants commit higher rates of crime than U.S.-born citizens. But research from the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute shows that “immigrants in the United States commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population.” Empowered by the Trump administration, ICE is operating with a logic of anxious state power, where fear turns the outsider into a threat and that “threat” is used to justify indiscriminate violence.
The biblical story of Herod offers an example of what happens when a ruler embraces indiscriminate violence. When Herod realizes the magi are not planning to return to tell him the location of Jesus, he responds with a blanket order: He has boys 2-years-old and younger in Bethlehem and its surrounding region killed (Matthew 2:16). He does not need to know which child is Jesus. He does not care. His command sweeps up an entire community to eliminate a perceived threat to his power. This is one of Matthew’s clearest portraits of how anxious power operates. When rulers feel that their power is being threatened, they reach for indiscriminate force.
Like Herod’s violence in Bethlehem, ICE raids often operate with a blunt, sweeping logic. In practice, raids can upend households in minutes, separating parents from children and forcing families into sudden displacement. Some people detained in the United States have even been transferred to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, with families struggling to learn where their loved ones are, as immigration agents disappear them without notice, and without an opportunity to retain legal representation. Some have even been deported by “mistake.” And these “mistakes” do not end with noncitizens.
In October 2025, ProPublica reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by immigration agents. Earlier that year, federal agents raided the wrong home and degradingly forced a family of U.S. citizens in Oklahoma City, Okla., to wait outside in the rain before they could fully dress. This atmosphere has intensified in our current moment. On Jan. 7, 2026, an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis during a confrontation captured on video. And then again, on Jan. 24, officers with Customs and Border Protection fatally shot Alex Pretti. In both cases, federal officials have tried to frame the shootings as self-defense, accusing the victims of being “domestic terrorists” who were trying to harm immigration agents. This, despite video evidence and eyewitness accounts that directly expose such characterizations for what they are: lies.
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To be clear, my comparison between Herod and Trump is not meant to suggest they are the same, as if history, context, and specific actions directly parallel one another. Instead, I am drawing on what New Testament scholar Love Lazarus Sechrest calls “associative hermeneutics,” which reads ancient and modern situations as analogues, identifying the “rhyme” between their social dynamics. In this case, the Trump administration initially claimed it would target the “worst of the worst,” yet these actions have instead swept up innocent families, people in our congregations, and others who are simply trying to survive in our society. Even if you think deporting some individuals is justified, disregarding their humanity, sending them to prisons in a third country, and separating families is not moral. Setting Herod and Trump side–by–side reveals how Trump’s brutality, carried out by ICE agents, “rhymes” with Herod’s indiscriminate actions. In this case, the sound is not a symphony of love and moral action, but a cacophony of violence.
This chorus of threats is spreading fear across immigrant communities. ICE pressures neighbors to police one another. They treat whole populations as threats. They treat nonviolent resistance as tantamount to domestic terrorism. In the face of these seemingly insurmountable powers, Christians can embrace prophetic responsibility. On Sunday, Jan. 18, protesters nonviolently disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., a church in the Southern Baptist Convention. One of the pastors, David Easterwood, serves as the acting director of the ICE St. Paul field office. The peaceful protesters raised their voices in unison, bellowing “ICE out” and “justice for Renee Good.” In shouting this melody of protest, they offered a beautiful example of how Christians can tell the truth, name what is happening, and speak to unjust systems with moral clarity. Despite being arrested on felony charges for her participation in organizing the nonviolent protest at Cities Church, Rev. Nekima Levy Armstrong told Democracy Now! after her release that “We cannot be silent at a time like this … I am continuing to use my voice to speak out against this fascism, tyranny and authoritarianism of the Trump administration. And others have to do the same.”
As we continue to witness ICE’s actions against our neighbors, I cannot help but see echoes of Herod’s world in our own, as state terror abounds, and tyranny reigns. Yet Herod did not have the final word. He could not stop God’s purposes. Rev. David Black, the Chicago pastor one who was shot with pepper balls outside an ICE processing facility in Broadview, Ill., put it plainly to Sojourners in October 2025: “When I look at a lot of my Christian siblings, who I see being so profoundly confused and misled, I believe that they have been made to follow a faith that is based in fear, coercion, and control.” Instead of living in fear of the “other,” we can and should embrace our neighbors, treating them as if we were caring for Christ himself (Matthew 25:31–46).
Rubin James Yi McClain is an opinion writer for the 2026 Sojourners Journalism Cohort.
