Church protests Trump immigration policies with fence around nativity: ‘Holy family was a migrant family’

The Fellowship Congregational Church in Tulsa, Okla., is using its nativity scene to send a message to the Trump administration about its immigration policies.

The church has recently gained attention for a display it erected earlier this month showing Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus surrounded by a chain-link fence, The New York Times reported on Friday. 

“The holy family was a migrant family,” the church said in a Facebook post featuring photos of the display.  

{mosads}The Rev. Chris Moore, lead pastor of the church, told the Times that the church installed the display to draw attention to how immigrants are being treated under the Trump administration.

Moore told the newspaper that he believes that there are migrants who are “fleeing the same kinds of oppression and threats to their safety that the holy family was fleeing.”

The display is also a reference to the Trump administration’s controversial “zero tolerance policy,” which led to the separations of hundreds of families at the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this year.

However, Moore also added that it’s a “place of shame or regret” to him that this is the first year he’s installed such a display because he was “silent during the last administration on this issue.”

Earlier administrations, including the Obama administration, detained migrant families at the border but did not implement a policy that separated migrant families.

Moore went on to say that he thinks “the church has a very important role to play in politics.”

“It’s the partisanship that I don’t want to be involved in,” he added.

Moore’s church is not the first to use its nativity scene to protest the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

A Massachusetts church captured headlines earlier this month for putting a baby Jesus doll in a cage as the three wise men were cut off from the rest of the scene by a fence to protest against Trump’s immigration policies.