ICE-Style Nativity IGNITES Christmas Firestorm

A beautifully decorated house with Christmas lights in a snowy setting

The real shock in Evanston this Christmas is not who showed up in the manger, but who ended up symbolically wearing the handcuffs.

Story Snapshot

A historic Illinois church turned its Nativity into an immigration protest tableau, placing baby Jesus in zip ties under the gaze of ICE-styled guards.
The display rides a years-long pattern of activist Nativities and a local raid where children were reportedly restrained, most of them U.S. citizens.
Supporters call it prophetic solidarity with migrants; critics call it blasphemy and a distortion of Scripture and law-and-order values.
The controversy exposes a widening rift over whether churches should comfort, confront, or campaign when they set out the manger scene.

When the manger becomes a protest sign

On a quiet street in Evanston, Lake Street Church did not place a serene infant in a straw-filled cradle; it laid out a baby figure wrapped in a foil-like blanket, wrists cinched with plastic restraints, watched by helmeted figures in green vests clearly marked “ICE.” The familiar silhouettes of Mary and Joseph appeared with masks in the original arrangement, shifting the Nativity from sentimental postcard to living indictment of modern immigration enforcement.

The church framed this as a meditation on family separation and detention, explicitly tying the crib-on-lockdown imagery to a Chicago-area immigration raid earlier in the year where children were reportedly zip-tied and most residents were in the country legally. That local episode, where ordinary citizens suddenly found themselves treated as suspects in their own home, became the emotional engine driving this year’s tableau.

A congregation that preaches with visuals

Lake Street Church is not a neutral backdrop that suddenly discovered politics; it is a progressive Protestant congregation known for Black Lives Matter banners and previous public art challenging injustice, including a 2023 Nativity that placed Jesus amid rubble to evoke civilians in Gaza. This is a church that treats its front lawn as a pulpit, using biblical scenes as rotating billboards for whatever crisis most haunts the headlines and its conscience.

Senior minister Rev. Michael Woolf has personally joined that activism, including being arrested with others during a protest at an ICE processing facility in nearby Broadview, underscoring that this Nativity is not a one-off stunt but part of a pattern of embodied advocacy. When a pastor is willing to wear handcuffs at a federal facility, depicting a bound baby Messiah under ICE guard fits a broader narrative of deliberate confrontation with the machinery of enforcement.

Supporters see prophecy, critics see profanity

Reactions split along familiar theological and political lines: progressive clergy and ethicists highlight the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt and describe Jesus as a paradigmatic refugee, so placing him in detention garb reads to them as faithful, even necessary, commentary on migrant suffering. They argue that if Christians sing about “Emmanuel, God with us,” they must accept that God is also “with” terrified children under fluorescent lights in detention centers.

Illinois church faces criticism for Nativity scene showing baby Jesus zip-tied by ICE agents https://t.co/ZkGV2gIW8V pic.twitter.com/D1kW2vZ3fh

— New York Post (@nypost) December 5, 2025

Conservative voices, including many laypeople and commentators, see something darker: a sacred story hijacked to demonize a lawful agency and equate due-process enforcement with Roman brutality. They emphasize that at the time of his birth the Holy Family traveled under a census order, not as asylum claimants, and warn that collapsing every complex immigration case into an image of a bound Christ child cheapens both theology and the rule of law.

Facts on the ground, values in the foreground

Media across the spectrum consistently describe the same core facts: an Evanston church, a baby Jesus figure in zip ties and foil-style blanket, ICE-labeled guards, a pastor with a record of immigration-related protests, and a prior Gaza-themed Nativity. The fights are not over what sits in the yard, but over what that yard sign should mean for how a nation secures its borders and treats vulnerable families.

From an American conservative, common-sense perspective, the scene forces two uncomfortable questions at once: How far should government go in restraining or detaining people—especially children—when enforcing immigration laws, and how far should churches go in turning central Christian symbols into partisan theater. Many conservatives will affirm humane enforcement and the sanctity of the Nativity while rejecting any imagery that casts officers as centurions and the Christ child as a prop for policy advocacy.