Last year, the conservative evangelical blogger Samuel Sey published an article on his blog, Slow to Write, defending the Trump administration’s plan for mass deportations from a Christian perspective. “Christian ethics do not denounce deportations,” he wrote. “They demand it.” Born in Ghana and a resident of Canada before he moved to the United States, Sey went on to write that “America doesn’t owe anything to people born outside of the country—including me.”

Last week, on October 21, ICE arrested Sey, who now faces deportation from the United States––a devastating blow to his American-born wife and three American children. A DHS spokesperson called Sey “an illegal alien” in a statement to news outlets. A statement attributed to Sey’s wife asserts that he entered the U.S. legally “and has been working ever since in good faith with a lawyer to obtain permanent legal status.” Some of his supporters have blamed his arrest on a clerical error. (The DHS spokesperson claimed in the statement that the 39-year-old Sey overstayed his legal entry by four years.)

Arrests of this sort are nothing new in most respects. Federal-enforcement efforts in the United States’ interior have recently averaged 19,000 deportations a month. Although some deportees are doubtless unsympathetic criminals, many thousands are good people with families or friends who suffer their absence acutely. Sey is unusual, however, in being known personally to many prominent MAGA-aligned Christians, some of whom have backed a fundraiser for his family and affirmed his good character. That support has angered some within the MAGA coalition. A prevailing MAGA narrative is Illegal immigrants are members of a lawless, untrustworthy out-group that is justly hated for the significant harm that it does to America. That narrative is threatened when a member of the MAGA in-group, whose personal and professional life many MAGA allies affirmed as good for America, is accused of being an “illegal alien.”

Perhaps that’s why the debate about Sey’s arrest has been so polarizing, and why MAGA participants are finding it harder than usual to ignore the complexities of the issue and the fissures in their coalition.

Joel Berry, who has described himself as “a right-wing protestant conservative evangelical Christian Trump supporter,” is the person who created a crowdfunding effort for Sey and his family. In past commentary, Berry has called for a moratorium on U.S. immigration; stated that “if we’re going to save America, it won’t be enough to deport all the migrants”; and argued that “there’s no such thing as an ‘illegal immigrant with no criminal record’ because illegal immigration is a crime.” He once asserted that “the only due process owed to an illegal alien is deportation.” The crowdfunding appeal he launched states of Sey: “His wife is working to get him released on bail so he can fix any clerical issues that need to be addressed for his legal residence. We are raising money to help his wife and children with expenses while he’s out of work, as well as any legal fees they incur.” It concludes, “Samuel is a good man and a brother in Christ, and his ministry at SlowToWrite has been a blessing to many. Please consider helping. Thank you for standing with them!”

Many in the MAGA coalition criticized Berry for standing with someone they believe to be a lawbreaker. In response, Berry stated both that “Samuel Sey is in my tribe, and he is my brother. And he would make an excellent American,” and that “I of course believe the law should be enforced no matter who it involves.” The due process that Berry has previously dismissed is exactly what could determine whether his friend was arrested because of a clerical error or because he was in fact here unlawfully.

The debate has altered Berry’s perception of his coalition’s moral character. “This has been probably the darkest 24 hours I’ve ever experienced on social media,” he wrote. “The things being said about Samuel, his wife, and his small children are unthinkably evil. There is a segment of the so-called ‘Christian’ nationalist crowd that has given itself completely over to Satan. I’ve never had more resolve to defeat these subversive demons invading the Right and invading Christianity.”

Allie Beth Stuckey, a Christian conservative podcaster for Blaze Media and the author of Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, has criticized what she sees as “toxic empathy” in the immigration debate. People are “so focused on the hard journey of the migrant that it belittles the effect of the chaos of illegal immigration on children, innocent citizens, and victims of illegal immigrant crime,” she wrote. In her telling, “Being so empathetic toward one set of people that you’re blinded to everyone and everything else isn’t just misguided, it’s evil.”

But in Sey’s case, she urged her followers to understand and connect with his family’s feelings and perspective. “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,” she wrote. “Please pray for all of the Seys.”

Megan Basham of The Daily Wire, who is also a conservative Christian, posted this after learning that Sey had been detained: “I have spoken to people close to my friend Sam Sey, and this is not a question of any deliberate law breaking. Anyone saying otherwise is not telling you the truth. And anyone rejoicing over his and his precious wife Annie’s difficulties in this situation is disgusting.”

I was struck by the contrast with a social-media exchange I had with Basham earlier this month, when I was critiquing the Trump administration for deporting dozens of Venezuelan men to a brutally abusive prison in El Salvador. She was defending it. “Should overstaying your visa in the United States carry the risk of being beaten and sexually assaulted by sadistic prison guards in a foreign dictatorship where you’ve never set foot, paid for by the US government?” I asked her, adding, “I don’t think it should carry that risk. I don’t think Jesus would think it should carry that risk either.”

She replied, “Yes, because you should go home when your visa expires. That’s how Visa’s work. If you don’t, you’re breaking the law and you run the risk of whatever penalties come along with that.”

Some commentators in the MAGA coalition seem to adopt rhetoric and positions on illegal immigration that they can maintain only when they think of illegal immigrants as an abstract “them.” When they confront one who is a concrete “us,” their rhetoric shifts significantly. They raise rather than ignore the possibility of procedural errors, extoll the value of due process, note personal circumstances, draw attention to the suffering of family members, and urge empathy rather than vilification.

Others in the MAGA coalition object to this shift. Some are bigots who use racial slurs in their posts or attack interracial couples such as Sey and his wife. Others are restrictionists who believe that mass deportations are necessary and will cease if illegal immigrants are humanized and shown empathy. I wonder how many of those attacking Sey and his humanizers are those who are triggered by the simple cognitive dissonance of hearing good things about a person who may belong to categories such as “illegal alien” or “lawbreaker”—categories that they are accustomed to coding as evil.

Many in the MAGA movement hope that uncompromising harshness toward all undocumented immigrants will result in maximizing the number of people whom the country is able to deport. But the longer that the mass deportation of otherwise law-abiding people persists, the harder it will be to maintain support for that approach: Rather than assume that deportees are mostly villains, more and more people will have personal connections to productive members of society who got deported.

Certain questions follow. Why does immigration law require someone who marries an American to spend years filling out onerous paperwork with catastrophic penalties for errors? Wouldn’t Americans benefit if the law drew more distinctions between, for example, a visa overstay by a gainfully employed, noncriminal father of American children and a serial perpetrator of violence who twice snuck into the country? A movement that genuinely prioritizes the interests of U.S. citizens would have better answers to such questions than Trump, whose approach is deportations first, not “America first.”