Under pressure from angry members of his own party, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday putting a stop to the separation of children from their families along the southern border of the United States.

In April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy in handling migrants who illegally cross into the U.S., leading to the separation of more than 2,000 children from their families, some younger than age 2. These children are held in more than 100 Department of Health and Human Resource-run facilities along the border. In addition to warnings from health care professionals that children who are separated from their parents could experience psychological damage, reports of abuse and neglect within the often overcrowded facilities have also surfaced.

Pastors Dayton Wilson of First Presbyterian Church in Athens and Dusty McLemore, the longtime senior pastor at Lindsay Lane Baptist Church, both weighed in on the situation.

Wilson, who has been at FPC since March, calls the situation at the border “disturbing” and “completely against the church’s morals no matter where you stand on the immigration issue.”

He also had a lot to say about Sessions’ reference to the New Testament book of Romans to justify his new policies. In Romans 13, the Apostle Paul directs Christians to be subject to their governmental authorities.

“Jeff Sessions misinterpreted Paul’s words in Romans,” he said. “The book of Romans 13 is not a call to blindly follow a political structure.”

“The verse he used is surrounded on both sides with demands that we love our neighbors, even to the point that Paul tells us to feed our enemies when they are hungry (in the previous chapter).”

Dayton believes Sessions’ zero-tolerance policy has created the crisis at the border.

“I don’t know what the solution to the immigration problem is,” he said. “The only valid solution to this problem, a this moment, is not separating children from their parents, however they got there.”

McLemore took a more tempered approach to the issue, but agreed with Wilson that “all children need to be with their parents.”

However sympathetic he was to the migrants’ plight, McLemore said there is a fine line between obeying the law put into place by the government and God’s law.

“You have to understand how they (the migrants) got into the situation,” McLemore said. “But, I’m all for families and think children, especially younger children, need to stay with the parents. If you take a little bitty baby and separate them from their parent that is wrong. But, if you have someone who comes here illegally with ill motives that is a different story. Many of them are innocents but there is a group within them that wants to bring crime into this country.”

The Trump administration was heavily criticized for claiming laws passed by the Democrats forced immigration officials to separate children from family members attempting to cross the border illegally.

In realty, there is no law that dictates the segregation of children from their parents.

There are laws against entering the country illegally and there is a 2008 anti-trafficking statute that says certain minors must be taken out of immigration detention within 72 hours.

Additionally, Trump blamed the 1997 Flores court settlement for forcing them to to separate children from their families.

The agreement requires children to be released as soon as possible to either their parents, a legal guardian, another relative or a vetted entity willing to take legal custody of the child. It also requires minors to be placed in federal custody, provided with basic needs and kept separate from adults not related to them.

McLemore said he believes many of the people protesting the border separations are genuinely upset about the situation, but there are some who are using the situation as a political tool against Trump.

“Some people are anti-Trump and are taking this opportunity to bash him,” he said. “I think it’s important we make the distinction between the two.”

McLemore hopes Trump’s executive order will put an end to the problem at the border as quickly as possible.

“You can’t take a small child away from his mother,” he said. “We needed to find a way to resolve that.”