For many in Detroit’s Iraqi Chaldean Catholic community, the election of President Trump appeared a positive development. They envisioned a bright future with an administration led by a man who had advocated strongly on behalf of Christian minorities in majority-Muslim countries.
“Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers,” Trump tweeted in 2017. “We cannot allow this horror to continue!”
A few months into his presidency, however, scores of Iraqi immigrants were swept up in immigration enforcement raids for overstaying visas or criminal convictions. Many are Christians who fled their war-torn homeland, some when they were children decades ago.
