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Evangelical leader says Trump’s deportation policies are ‘reshaping American Christianity’
By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter Monday, April 06, 2026
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents making an effort to deport an undocumented illegal immigrant. | U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Christian leaders in the United States warn that the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown is hurting churches, noting that pastors are being detained or are self-deporting.
During a press call last week, Evangelical and Catholic leaders voiced concern about how the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation policies have placed strains on American churches.
The call comes a year after the National Association of Evangelicals and other Christian organizations published a joint report titled “One Part of the Body,” revealing that most of the immigrants vulnerable to deportation in the U.S. are Christians. Organizations represented on the call include the Evangelical refugee resettlement organization World Relief, the National Association of Evangelicals, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s Center for the Study of Global Christianity.
The call also coincided with the release of new data from Lifeway Research finding that the overwhelming majority of Protestant pastors in the United States support legal immigration and refugee resettlement, while opinions about deportations are mixed.
National Association of Evangelicals President Walter Kim was one of several speakers critical of the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, stressing that immigrant communities have helped combat the rising religious secularism in parts of the country.
He recalled how when he pastored a church in Boston, “it was often noted that New England was one of the most secularized regions of the country, least engaged in Bible reading and the practices of going to church.”
“It may come as a surprise that in this increasingly post-Christian segment of [the] country, that the number of churches in Boston didn’t decline but actually doubled from 1965 to 2015,” he said. “And much of that doubling was fueled by the founding of immigrant churches from Latin America, Africa and Asia. In fact, over the past several decades, immigration has been one of the most significant contributors to church growth in the United States.”
Kim called immigrant congregations a source of “spiritual vitality in the American Christian church scene,” warning that “the current immigration enforcement strategy is having such a profound and deleterious effect on the Church.” He criticized “the mass deportation” and “unprecedented resources that are being devoted to carry that out.”
The NAE president said that many immigrant congregations are shifting to virtual services, clsing entirely or are suffering drastic declines in attendance “because of a deep climate of fear.”
“This is not simply within immigrant churches. Many multiethnic churches are experiencing this sort of secondary trauma as they’re witnessing their neighbors undergo [a] drastic climate of fear,” Kim said.
“This policy approach is reshaping American Christianity,” he insisted.
The Rev. Gabriel Salguero, an Orlando, Florida-based Pentecostal pastor who leads the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, which consists of several thousand Hispanic congregations, lamented that “the indiscriminate enforcement action” is “shuttering many immigrant churches.”
Salguero said church planters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city that was home to a massive immigraton enforcement operation earlier this year, have seen churches that they spent three years planting and growing closed down.
“Indiscriminate enforcement action is having a deleterious effect on church revitalization and church planting,” Salguero said. “These people who are in the heart of Minneapolis serving the most vulnerable through soup kitchens, through family counseling, worship and preaching, have now lost three years of work. They’ve been going to their hearings. They’ve been doing what everyone has asked of them to do. We can and we must do better.”
Individual immigrant pastors throughout the country have been directly affected by immigration enforcement. Salguero brought up how one of his associate pastors, Pastor Yeison Vasquez, has been in a Newark, New Jersey, detention center for nearly two weeks.
He said Vasquez was the “leader of intercessory prayer at our local campus” in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Salguero noted that one of his children has “lost her appetite because she keeps asking, ‘When is daddy coming home?’”
Salguero also mentioned Pastor Wilber Marenco, whom he described as an “Evangelical pastor who was detained in Brevard County, Florida,” and later released. He detailed how Marenco’s “predominantly Anglo” congregation is “helping his family pay their bills while he’s living with … an anklet.”
Marenco has launched a GoFundMe page elaborating on his experience.
“Upon my release, I was left without my driver’s license and work permit being returned to me,” the fundraiser states.
Marenco’s application for religious asylum, stemming from threats he received for participating in a protest in Nicaragua, where the government has prosecuted several Christian leaders in recent years, is still pending.
Alfredo Salas, who opted to self-deport to Mexico last June because of concern that “the risk had grown too great” to remain in the U.S. in light of the Trump administration’s policies, also participated in the call. Salas and his wife, Isabel Estrada, served as church leaders in the Chicago area for eight years.
While Estrada was naturalized decades ago, World Relief’s Lauren Rasmussen outlined how Salas “had to go back to Mexico for a family emergency in 2004, which has created a complication for his status.” Since June, Estrada has traveled between the U.S., where their daughter lives, and Mexico.
In January, a group of Hispanic Christian leaders, led by Pastor Samuel Rodriguez of the Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, held a similar event warning how immigration operations have put their churches in jeopardy.
Pastor Victor Martinez of New Generation Church in Minneapolis said that church attendance dropped 80% since last year and added that his church “is probably considering closing at this point now because it’s so traumatic for me as a pastor to worry about people in our church.”
“We have a pantry now out of our building,” he said. “A lot of our pastors on this call, there’s about six of us here, and most of ours are leading some sort of relief effort. Our buildings look like some sort of refugee center for food distribution.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: [email protected]
