The ICE arrest of a pro-Trump evangelical has MAGA in an uproar

Samuel Sey spent the past two years telling American Christians that the Bible demands what Immigration and Customs Enforcement does. “Christian ethics do not denounce deportations,” the conservative Christian blogger and podcaster wrote in Feb. 2025. “They demand it.” Immigration was a privilege and not a right, he argued, and America “doesn’t owe anything to people born outside of the country — including me.” Should his own residency ever be ended, he allowed, that would be “inconvenient — not unjust.”

Now Sey, who is originally from Ghana and grew up in Canada, has found himself swept up in the very deportation apparatus he spent years cheering on.

The resulting uproar has exposed a particularly ugly contradiction in the MAGA movement: Its most enthusiastic defenders of mass deportation suddenly understand the human cost of immigration enforcement when the person facing removal belongs to their own. On Oct. 21 federal agents arrested Sey at the Columbus airport. He now sits in the Butler County Jail on an ICE hold. The Department of Homeland Security says he entered the country legally in 2022 but overstayed by more than four years, that he has no pending applications and that he accepted voluntary departure. Sey’s wife — who was born in the U.S., as were the couple’s three children was born in the U.S. — says he entered legally and has spent years working with a lawyer to secure permanent status. His friends call the whole thing a clerical error. The conservative movement that amplified him is tearing itself apart over what to feel about his detention, because the answer exposes what its immigration politics were always made of.

“This has been probably the darkest 24 hours I’ve ever experienced on social media,” wrote Joel Berry, the former Babylon Bee managing editor who calls himself a right-wing Protestant evangelical Trump supporter. “There is a segment of the so-called ‘Christian’ nationalist crowd that has given itself completely over to Satan.”

For a political coalition that has built its entire identity around the demonization of undocumented immigrants and the ruthless execution of mass removals, the detention of one of their own foot soldiers has triggered a profound internal fracture. Christian conservative influencers like The Blaze’s Allie Beth Stuckey and The Daily Wire’s Megan Basham immediately flooded social media to sound the alarm and rally support for their fallen comrade. Berry rushed to set up a GiveSendGo crowdfunding campaign that quickly hauled in more than $30,000 to cover legal fees. The right-wing influencers rallying around Sey have suddenly discovered that an immigrant can be a good person, that the government’s account might be incomplete and that separating a father from his children can be devastating. 

As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte has extensively documented, Stuckey has built a lucrative career railing against what she dismissively derides as toxic empathy whenever progressives advocate for basic human decency toward migrants and asylum seekers. Being so empathetic toward one set of people that you are blinded to everyone else, she has written, “isn’t just misguided, it’s evil.” Yet when Sey was taken, Stuckey asked her followers to empathize with his family. “As you can imagine, his wife, who’s at home with their 3 babies, is devastated and also trusting the Lord to help them find a resolution quickly. Please pray for all of the Seys,” she wrote on X. Berry, who produces the Jeremy Boreing podcast, which Sey was traveling to record when he was arrested, once declared that “the only due process owed to an illegal alien is deportation.” Now he says that Sey “is in my tribe, and he is my brother” and “would make an excellent American.”

But the reactions from the broader MAGA grassroots suggest that despite Sey’s relentless pandering to white Christian nationalists, he was never truly seen as an equal member of the tribe. “Lord, we thank you sincerely. We thank you for the arrest of Samuel Sey,” Joel Webbon, a prominent Texas pastor, said following the podcaster’s detention. “We thank you for shutting his mouth from spewing out more lies and slander against your servants and your church here in these United States of America.” Webbon described Sey as an “illegal alien wrongfully in our country” who lectures Americans about their heritage. 

Sey has spent much of the past year feuding with a set of conservative pastors who promote antisemitic and pro-segregation theology. In response to his arrest, evangelical pastor and author Dale Partridge, who has called himself an “aspiring general in the culture war,” said that he hoped “justice is served” with Sey, adding that “a black migrant who slanders Christian Nationalists is the White evangelicals’ ultimate hero.” 

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

The replies that appeared on social media beneath these marquee names were filled with racial slurs and attacks on Sey’s interracial marriage, indicating that the coalition’s submerged half is surfacing. For them, Sey was never a brother whose paperwork went wrong. He was a Black immigrant whose usefulness was conditional, and the condition has expired. The nativist core of the movement cares very little about theological alignment when it comes to crude racial purity. 

The teachings of Jesus Christ — which these Christian nationalists love to weaponize for political clout — explicitly center on radical compassion and hospitality toward the stranger. In the Bible, Christ never asked for someone’s legal status before offering grace or demanding justice, yet the modern American right has twisted religion into a cudgel to justify state-sponsored violence against the vulnerable. Sey believed he was one of the good ones. He thought that by loudly condemning other migrants and bowing before the altar of MAGA he had purchased safety for himself and his family. He learned the hard way that when you feed a beast built on xenophobia and exclusion, eventually it turns on you too.

Even now, leading allies are working overtime to keep sympathy for Sey from blossoming into actual political reconsideration. Berry has reaffirmed his support for ICE. Aaron Baer, Sey’s podcast co-host and president of the Center for Christian Virtue, said that after speaking with his colleague in detention, neither man’s position on immigration enforcement had changed. 

The polling suggests why. In its recent American Values Survey, PRRI found that 47% of white evangelical Protestants back identifying and deporting undocumented immigrants, down from a peak of 53% in 2024. Approval of Donald Trump’s handling of immigration among white evangelicals slid from 74% to 67% over the same year. According to Pew’s Oct. 13 poll, white evangelical approval of Trump stands at 58%, a dramatic decline of 20 points since he returned to office in January 2025.

When a prominent, token defender of the regime like Sey falls victim to the machine, it shatters the comfortable illusion that one can successfully pander to fascistic impulses and somehow remain immune to their collateral damage. The cruelty his friends cheered has no category for “one of ours,” because it never had a category for anything except the count.

---