When Safety Demands Silence 

“Deportability disciplines people to be silent.” When I heard Dr. AHyun Lee speak these words in a 2025 AAR/SBL panel presentation about clergy sexual abuse, you could feel the collective intake of breath. Much has been written about how federal raids stoke fear in immigrant communities, and still the scholarship from Garrett’s associate professor of pastoral care, theology, and psychotherapy illuminates untold tragic dimensions of this unfolding horror. In her recent book, Protestant Clergy Sexual Misconduct and Intercultural Pastoral Care: Invisible Mask, Dr. Lee details how clerical abuse in immigrant churches affects victim-survivors’ own psychology and sense of belonging. Speaking shortly after federal killings in Minneapolis, however, she powerfully articulates how the ongoing violence creates circumstance that make abuse more likely. “Deportability is always in the room,” she explains. “An abuser can simply imply, ‘If you speak out, you might lose everything.’” By deportability, Dr. Lee means living under the constant possibility of detention or deportation (regardless of your legal status)—an ever-present vulnerability that shapes choices, relationships, and risk.

A crucial facet of Dr. Lee’s work is her careful attention to the myriad reasons why victim-survivors often do not report their abuse, and how external systems can make that choice fraught with peril. Churches are often a center of migrant life, offering physical support as much as spiritual sustenance. “New immigrants sometimes stay in the pastor’s house until they can find their own housing. The church offers language translation, small groceries, sometimes even sponsor people’s visas,” she notes. “To speak up, you might lose all your resources, your connections, your community.” There’s also a potent desire, when policymakers label all immigrants as criminals, for the wider community to be perceived in a positive light—something that reporting abuse can threaten. “Often, the victim-survivor wants to protect their people,” Dr. Lee reports, “to emphasize, ‘we are a good community, we are good citizens.’”

The psychological factors that complicate reporting run deeper than concern for communal perception. When the Supreme Court rules that ICE can employ racial profiling, people practice invisibility as a form of safety. “Deportability isn’t just a threat to people who are undocumented, it affects the whole immigrant community,” Dr. Lee says. “Even if you’re born here, there’s a fear you will be criminalized or detained, that you might experience violence just for running a stop sign.” In those circumstances, people become well-practiced at not being seen. “People connect being safe with being invisible,” she continues. “It’s better to hide, it’s better not to speak. That’s much safer than making noise.” That’s why it’s not enough to ask victim-survivors to report their abuse. “If visibility is dangerous, how can you tell someone to speak with a police officer?” she asks. “To engage the legal system becomes a threat.”

All this shapes the way Dr. Lee teaches students about trauma-informed counseling. An increasing number of students come to Garrett seeking careers as licensed clinicians, and it’s essential to name these often-unseen dynamics. “The best resources we can offer victim-survivors are not ones that force them to trade safety for help,” she says. “Many times, asking a victim-survivor to come forward isn’t about protection, it feels like asking them to bear the cross by themselves so that we can change things.” A fuller understanding of what shapes immigrant life is essential to provide ethical care. “You must make sure you are attuned to their immigration status, sensitive to how the legal system impacts their job, shapes their decisions and choices,” she notes. “Particularly when you’re working with an undocumented or a mixed family, reporting is never simple.”

And there are limits to what care providers can offer when broader systems are deliberately crafted to maximize harm and suffering. “Abusers and unjust systems will benefit from silence when you discipline people into invisibility,” Dr. Lee notes. As the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously put matters, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” Again, those unjust wheels extend far beyond undocumented people and their families. “Immigration policy impacts everyone. In Minneapolis, for example, people aren’t going to church because they’re fearful about what’s going to happen if they leave their homes,” she observes. “They lose that experience of belonging for the cramped safety of invisibility.”

All of this is especially tragic because of the immense blessings that immigrant churches bestow. “They can be the one place where people feel refuge and safe against the dominant culture,” Dr. Lee describes. “Some Korean immigrants spend the week in physically demanding, often invisible work—laundry, dry cleaning, cleaning, or other service jobs. Church can be one of the few places they feel fully seen: greeted by name, speaking their language, and showing up in their Sunday best—reclaiming dignity after a week of being overlooked.” Clergy sexual abuse adds ongoing pain as that place of refuge becomes a place of harm. “When church becomes abusive, there’s so much betrayal and fear,” she notes.

Obviously, clergy sexual abuse could and likely would still happen even if the U.S. had more equitable immigration laws. It would, however, be easier to confront and create institutional systems that mitigate the potential for abuse and facilitate victim-survivors telling their stories without fear of reprisal or state violence. “Even with more just policies, churches still need to do the hard internal work,” Dr. Lee concludes. “We need ways to report abuse that don’t run through the pastor, and we need trained lay leaders who can put real safeguards in place—especially around counseling, private meetings, and situations like rides or housing. We also need trauma‑informed, whole‑person support and trusted partners—immigrant‑rights groups and culturally competent pastoral caregivers and clinicians—so victim-survivors have options for safety and belonging without being pushed into the legal system or forced to give up their culture or faith.” But this work will take deliberate effort, and it is unlikely to succeed or even take steps forward when U.S. federal policy is designed to stoke fear and criminalize visibility—forcing people to trade silence for survival.