Rep. Eric Swalwell Likens Jesus, Mary, and Joseph to Illegal Migrants on Christmas

Far-left Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) compared Jesus, Mary and Joseph to illegal immigrants in a Christmas Day article describing a Nativity scene being raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“Let this be the last Christmas we live through this nightmare,” the California congressman wrote on X, alongside a photo of spray-painted ICE agents breaking into the Bethlehem stable where Jesus was born.

The Bible does not state that Mary and Joseph were illegal immigrants, clearly explaining that they went to Bethlehem because the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus ordered a census, requiring everyone to register in their ancestral hometown:

At that time, Caesar Augustus issued a decree ordering that everyone be registered. This was the first inscription, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone went to be enlisted, each in his own town. [So] Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David (Luke 2:1-4).

The widespread left-wing claim that Jesus was a refugee is considered by many Christians to be historically inaccurate. As Breitbart News Ph.D. Thomas D. Williams points out, describeJesus was born in Bethlehem, Joseph’s ancestral town, after which his parents fled with him to Judea when King Herod set out to kill all the baby boys. The family temporarily settled in Egypt, then part of the Roman Empire. They returned home to Galilee when Herod died, and Jesus spent most of his youth there.

A progressive church in Illinois was recently fire for a similar exhibit after featuring a nativity scene with a tied baby Jesus, Roman soldiers depicted as ICE agents, and Mary and Joseph wearing gas masks.

Evanston’s Lake Street Church said in a job on Facebook last month, the exhibition “reimagines the Nativity as a scene of forced family separation, drawing direct parallels between the refugee experience of the Holy Family and contemporary practices of immigrant detention.”