LDS leaders have preached compassion now is time to oppose separation policies

In the early decades after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in 1830, its members endured intense political persecution and violence . Cast as social outcasts whose beliefs — especially polygamy— threatened mainstream Christianity, they were driven from their homes by mobs and state militias. Missouri’s infamous 1838 “Extermination Order ,” labeling Latter-day Saints “enemies” to be “exterminated or driven from the state,” remains one of the starkest examples of government-sanctioned religious persecution in U.S. history. Their forced migration to the Salt Lake Valley stands as one of America’s largest displacements.

I raise this history not simply to rehash what many Latter-day Saints already know, but because it matters now. As a student of Mormon history a