Suburban Chicago church’s Nativity depicts baby Jesus zip-tied by ICE agents

EVANSTON, Ill. — Mother Mary wearing a respirator mask to protect herself from tear gas. Baby Jesus with zip-tied hands, wrapped in a thin blanket that looks like aluminum foil. Masked centurions with sunglasses and green vests labeled “ICE.”

This is how the Lake Street Church of Evanston chose to assemble its Nativity scene for the Christmas season. The church and its leaders have been vocal critics of the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz and expressed a message with their holiday decorations.

“Enforcement terror does not discriminate by documentation status,” the church wrote on its Facebook page on Nov. 25.

The organizer of the nativity scene, Associate Minister Jillian Westerfield, told Pioneer Press that in the months prior to organizing it, she has been reflecting on the impact of Operation Midway Blitz, in which hundreds of immigrants have been detained, the overwhelming majority of which do not have criminal histories that have a “high public safety risk,” the Chicago Tribune found.

“For me at least, I have experienced seeing the face of Christ in the people who are suffering,” Westerfield said, pointing to arrests, detainments and altercations in Evanston and Chicago. “We just really saw a parallel between the ICE forces and the centurions.”

“Of course it’s political,” but the set is not up for political interpretation, Westerfield said.

“This is what the Bible says happened to Jesus, and we use our contemporary imagery to illustrate that,” she said. “I do feel like it’s a pretty straightforward representation of what the Bible says happened to Jesus’s family.”

According to Biblical texts, King Herod, fearing that a rival had been born to usurp his power, tried to kill infant Jesus by ordering the murder of all baby boys in Bethlehem. Jesus’ father Joseph acted quickly to take his wife Mary and baby Jesus and flee Bethlehem to avoid the bloodshed.

Most traditional, popular renditions of the Nativity depict peaceful scenes of the newborn Jesus lying in a manger with his parents, angels, shepherds and their animals prayerfully looking on.

Westerfield said the feelings about ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, are not just shared by the church’s leadership, but also its congregation. “This is who we are, and this is what’s important to us. And we would be much more afraid to hold back, because ultimately, we feel like we answer to God, not to anyone else,” Westerfield said.

Outside of the reaction from the church’s congregants, Westerfield said there are always concerns about reactions from outside forces, but that they will not let themselves cower from expressing themselves. If someone is really upset by the nativity set, “I hope that what happens is they examine why they’re upset and maybe find within their own conscience a change of heart,” she said.

Rev. Michael Woolf, a frequent protestor of Operation Midway Blitz and the lead pastor for the Lake Street Church, told Pioneer Press, “Christians have to look at the birth story — not just a sort of a rosy sort of tale that we can just read in scripture — but actually sort of wrestle with its coming into being in context.”

“We don’t speak for all Christians, but we certainly speak for a certain strand of community that’s trying to take that message and say, ‘If Jesus were born in America right now, what would this nativity set look like?’” Woolf said.

Lake Street Church and Westerfield have previously organized nativity sets with political messages. In 2023, the church organized a nativity set with only Baby Jesus surrounded in rubble, as an homage to the people trapped in the war in Gaza.

“We were all very, and still are of course, very concerned about the situation in Gaza, and the suffering of people all over the world,” Westerfield said. The reception the church received then was largely positive, she said. The church also held an outdoor prayer vigil for Palestine then.