American politicians talk about persecuted Christians abroad – but here’s what happens when those Christians migrate to the US

Terez Metry, a 28-year-old Coptic Christian whose family fled Egypt during the 2011 Arab Spring, was detained by Department of Homeland Security officers in Nashville two months ago while applying for a green card, despite being married to a U.S. citizen. She had been unaware that a removal order was issued when she was 13 after her asylum claim was denied. The case illustrates a contradiction: American politicians and evangelical leaders have mobilized around the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt—including violence by the Islamic State group that killed 21 Copts in Libya in 2015—yet those same Christians face detention and deportation under standard U.S. immigration enforcement when they arrive in America. An anthropologist who studied Coptic migration between Egypt and the U.S. from 2016 to 2022 found that Copts encounter the same immigration system suspicions as other Middle Eastern migrants, despite the international political attention to their religious persecution abroad.