Trump Cabinet’s Bible Study Minister Justifies Child Separation as Consequence of Immigrants’ “Illegal Behavior”

By Lee Fang

Amid increasing scrutiny of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, criticisms have been lodged against the policy of family separation at the border by, among others, members of his own party and otherwise stalwart Christian right allies of the GOP. One Christian ally of the White House, though, came out swinging in favor of taking children away from their parents: Capitol Ministries.

Ralph Drollinger, the head of the private Christian group, which leads Bible study sessions for Republican lawmakers and senior members of Trump’s Cabinet, led the charge to defend the administration even as photos and stories emerge showing children crowded into cages and snatched from their mothers.

“No one, especially my personal friend, the kind-hearted Attorney General Jeff Sessions, desires that a mother or father be separated from their children,” wrote Drollinger, in a message to supporters on Friday. But, the Capitol Ministries leader said, there are “three classifications of people in every country, as was true in ancient Israel in the Old Testament.” In Drollinger’s interpretation, there are citizens, legal immigrants, and foreigners — the latter were known as being “illegal,” he said — and the Bible only forbids family separation for citizens and legal immigrants.

“It follows that when someone breaks the law of the land that they should anticipate that one of the consequences of their illegal behavior will be separation from their children,” Drollinger wrote. “Such is the case with thieves or murderers who are arrested and put in jail.”

Sessions attracted controversy after citing a Bible verse to defend the administration’s “zero-tolerance” border enforcement strategy. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” the attorney general declared during a speech in Fort Wayne, Indiana, last Thursday.

Despite the support from a right-wing Christian group that’s especially close to the administration, other conservative Christians are pressuring the Trump administration to change its practices. Earlier this month, a group of evangelical pastors signed a letter harshly condemning the child separation policy. “The traumatic effects of this separation on these young children, which could be devastating and long lasting, are of utmost concern,” stated the letter, which was signed by the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who gave an opening prayer at Trump’s inauguration and is reportedly close to the president, among other evangelical leaders.

Drollinger, who has become immensely influential following the 2016 election, believes Sessions correctly invoked the scripture.

“The passage the Attorney General cited, Romans 13, bespeaks of this: there are and there should be serious, known consequences for breaking the laws of the land — otherwise the law becomes toothless and inconsequential and it is no longer a deterrent to harmful behavior, which is what God designed it to be,” Drollinger wrote, citing his own Bible study on illegal immigration, published on the Capitol Ministries website two years ago.

In the 2016 Bible study, Drollinger wrote that “immigration laws of every nation should be Biblically based and strictly enforced — all with the utmost confidence that assurance that God approves such actions by the nation’s leaders.” He added, “To procedurally exclude foreign individuals who might be criminals, traitors, or terrorists, or who possess communicable diseases is not racist in the least!”

Drollinger, a former college basketball star turned spiritual adviser to conservative politicians, has quietly amassed power in Washington, D.C., through his Monday evening Bible studies with conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Several Cabinet members, including the vice president and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, pray on a regular basis with Drollinger’s group. As the minister recently told a German newspaper, he provides the administration with “the high-protein diet of the Word of God.” In the past, Drollinger bashed gay rights and called Catholicism the “world’s largest false religion.”

As The Intercept first reported, shortly after the presidential election, Drollinger could barely conceal his excitement that members of his inner circle would soon occupy the White House. He published a press statement celebrating the fact that Trump’s appointments for his administration were drawn from “long time sponsors of the Members Bible Studies.”

“It follows then that the sudden rise of Pence, Sessions, and Pompeo — all men who are disciples of Jesus Christ — serve to vividly illustrate the truth of 1 Timothy 2:1-4!” Drollinger announced, referring to a Bible verse that calls for prayer “for kings and all who are in authority.”

Drollinger’s controversial interpretations extend to other areas of GOP orthodoxy. Capitol Ministries claims “that Islam and its Koran are nothing more than a plagiarism of OT truths” — a reference to the Old Testament — “and a non-chronological, sloppy one at that — topped off with a falsified diminution of Jesus Christ.”

Lawsuit Seeks Transparency as Searches of Cellphones and Laptops Skyrocket at Borders

By Murtaza Hussain 


A lawsuit filed today by the Knight First Amendment Institute, a public interest legal organization based at Columbia University, seeks to shed light on invasive searches of laptops and cellphones by Customs and Border Protection officers at U.S. border crossings.

Documents filed in the case note that these searches have risen precipitously over the past two years, from a total of 5,000 searches in 2015 to 25,000 in 2016, and rising to 5,000 in the month of February 2017 alone. Among other questions, the lawsuit seeks to compel the federal government to provide more information about these searches, including how many of those searched have been U.S. citizens, the number of searches by port of entry, and the number of searches by the country of origin of the travelers.

Civil rights groups have long claimed that warrantless searches of cellphones and laptops by government agents constitute a serious invasion of privacy, due to the wealth of personal data often held on such devices. It is common for private conversations, photographs, and location information to be held on cellphones and laptops, making a search of these items significantly more intrusive than searching a simple piece of luggage.

A number of recent cases in the media have revealed instances of U.S. citizens and others being compelled by CBP agents to unlock their devices for search. In some instances, people have claimed to have been physically coerced into complying, including one American citizen who said that CBP agents grabbed him by the neck in order to take his cellphone out of his possession.

The legality of warrantless device searches at the border remains a contested issue, with the government asserting, over the objections of civil liberties groups, that Fourth Amendment protections do not apply at ports of entry. Some particularly controversial cases of searches at the border have involved journalists whose electronic data contains sensitive information about the identity of sources. Last year, a Canadian journalist was detained for six hours before being denied entry to the United States after refusing to unlock devices containing sensitive information. It has also been alleged that border agents are disproportionately targeting Muslim Americans and people with ties to Muslim-majority countries for both interrogation and device searches.

This February, Sen. Ron Wyden sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security head John Kelly stating that he was “alarmed by recent media reports of Americans being detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and pressured to give CBP access … to locked mobile devices.”
Wyden’s letter also indicated plans for legislation that would require agents to obtain a warrant before conducting these searches.

The rapidly growing number of searches has prompted a legal effort to demand constraints and controls on the practice. In a press release issued today announcing the lawsuit, the Knight First Amendment Institute indicated more plans to scrutinize these searches in the future.

“These searches are extremely intrusive, and government agents shouldn’t be conducting them without cause,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director. “Putting this kind of unfettered power in the hands of border agents invites abuse and discrimination and will inevitably have a chilling effect on the freedoms of speech and association.”

The Future of Women Under President Trump

Wishful thinkers hope that Ivanka will curb her father’s worst behavior, but it’s unclear how much influence she will have. 

By Margaret Talbot

T here are many reasons to worry about what a Trump Administration holds in store for women. The President-elect has vowed to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade. Some states will be emboldened to impose restrictive new laws that can become test cases; the Ohio legislature did so last week, passing a bill that effectively bans abortions, with no exception for rape or incest, after six weeks of pregnancy—a point at which many women do not yet know they are pregnant. Janet Porter, an activist against the “criminalization of Christianity,” who has been pushing for the Ohio law since 2011, said, “It’s a brand-new day with a Trump-appointed Supreme Court, and we are very hopeful.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are feeling bullish about finally achieving a goal that they’ve sought for years: getting rid of federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides health services like cancer screening and contraception, as well as abortion. If a Trump Administration succeeds in dismantling the Affordable Care Act, or simply in eliminating the mandate that health plans include contraception coverage, many more women will lose access to health care and, especially, to more expensive, but also more effective, long-acting contraceptive methods, such as the I.U.D.   Tom Price, Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services Secretary, is an opponent of the A.C.A. who apparently doubts that any woman in America would have trouble affording birth control. “Bring me one woman who’s been left behind,” he told an interviewer in 2012. “There’s not one.” Under Jeff Sessions, the anti-abortion Alabama senator whom Trump has named as his candidate for Attorney General, the Justice Department is unlikely to provide robust protection for abortion clinics. Eric Scheidler, the head of Pro-Life Action League, a group that leads confrontational protests outside such clinics, wrote earlier this month, “With Jeff Sessions at Justice, pro-life activists like me can breathe a sigh of relief.” As members of Congress, both Sessions and Price voted against the federal Violence Against Women Act when it last came up for reauthorization.

For Labor Secretary, Trump has in mind Andrew Puzder, the C.E.O. of the company that runs Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s. An opponent of raising the minimum wage and of expanding overtime pay, Puzder, referring to the company’s ads, told the magazine Entrepreneur, “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American.”

Trump won the Presidency despite a well-documented penchant for the vulgar belittlement of women, and with the help of a fan base energized by chants of “Lock Her Up.” The oddly medieval demonization of Hillary Clinton continues among Trump supporters: see the conspiracy theory that posits her as a child-sex-trafficking witch, hiding in tunnels beneath a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant, where last week a man turned up with an assault-style rifle to “self-investigate” the claim.

To be fair, Trump has suggested one decent policy for women and families: a six-week paid maternity leave, which would indeed end a national disgrace. (The U.S. is the only developed country with no guaranteed family leave.) But the plan pointedly omits paternity leave, enshrining an old-fashioned view of families and potentially creating new grounds for employment discrimination against women.

Details of how the plan would be funded—by eliminating fraud in unemployment insurance—are murky.There is a popular notion that Trump’s daughter Ivanka, a self-proclaimed avatar of “women who work,” will ward off her father’s worst excesses. (It seems unlikely that Trump’s wife, Melania, will play such a role: after proposing, late in the campaign and apparently without irony, that her mission as First Lady would be to campaign against bullying, she has retreated to the background, and will reportedly be staying in New York with the couple’s son, Barron, when the President-elect moves into the White House.) Trump has already started outsourcing to Ivanka issues related to women. At a rally in Iowa, in September, he explained that it was because of his daughter that he took up the maternity-leave proposal. He imitated her, saying, “Daddy, Daddy, we have to do this.” A recent piece in the Times reported that, when Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, spoke to Trump by phone shortly after the election and raised the subject of women’s issues, he handed the phone to Ivanka.

Perhaps Ivanka Trump will succeed in persuading more people that she is an aspirational figure who can seamlessly combine running her (made-in-China and, in the future, Ethiopia) clothing line with advising her father on policy matters, keeping a hand in the old family business (she’s said to be considering a leave of absence from the Trump Organization), and bringing up her three young children. She does seem to have found a new way of having it all. After the election, she appeared in a family interview on “60 Minutes,” and her company sent out a press release touting the bracelet she wore, available for $10,800. The fact that she is negotiating licensing deals in Japan did not stop her from meeting with her father and Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, in the President-elect’s first sitdown with a foreign leader.

But, even if Ivanka does want to be a steadying hand on the wheel, it’s unclear how much influence she’ll have. Last week, she and her father discussed climate change with Al Gore, but a couple of days later the President-elect announced his selection for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency: Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a climate-change skeptic who has sued the agency he now seeks to run. And anyone who hoped that Ivanka might be a voice decrying the white supremacists and anti-Semites activated by her father’s campaign is still hoping.

In her unelected, unappointed capacity, Ivanka Trump calls to mind a daughter not so much of American democracy as of nepotistic autocracy. In the U.S., if family members who don’t hold office get too mixed up in governing, hackles are raised, as Bill and Hillary Clinton discovered when he put her in charge of health-care reform. And in countries where ruling families have used elected office to promote their own business dealings democratic freedoms tend to be correspondingly weak.

The United States almost had its first female President, who, however flawed as a candidate, would certainly have protected the fundamental rights of women, among other now newly vulnerable groups. Instead, we have a First Daughter, and what she will protect—or undermine—we really don’t know.