By Nathan Layne
CHICAGO (Reuters) -Sitting alone at her dining room table this past Sunday, Doris Aguirre took a bite of a soda cracker and a sip of the orange juice she had prepared to represent the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Eyes closed, she then made the sign of the cross.
It is an act of faith performed every week by millions of Christians who consume a wafer and a sip of wine blessed by a minister in churches around the world, in one of the holiest moments of the Sunday service. But for Aguirre it is a lonely ritual.
Aguirre’s church in Chicago moved its Spanish-language service online in late December in anticipation of President Donald Trump launching the biggest crackdown on illegal immigration in U.S. history.
Honduran-born Aguirre is married to a naturalized U.S. citizen but lacks legal status herself despite having lived in the country for 25 years. She has a standing deportation order after inadvertently missing an initial court date, and a later attempt to reopen her case was denied, her lawyer said.
For Aguirre, attending weekly service at Chicago’s Lincoln United Methodist Church was an important part of life. She said she misses taking communion with other congregants and gathering after service over coffee to talk through common problems in her native tongue.
“Ever since I joined the church, I have come to see the other members as family,” Aguirre, a 59-year-old housecleaner and mother of two, told Reuters at her home in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago. “This has been a very sad time for me.”
Aguirre’s solitary communion is an example of how Trump’s immigration sweep is disrupting the religious lives of thousands of immigrants in the country illegally.
On his first day in office, the Trump administration scrapped former President Joe Biden’s policy of designating places of worship, along with schools and hospitals, as sensitive locations off limits to immigration enforcement.
“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on January 21.
That policy change, along with moves by federal agents to detain a growing number of people charged only with immigration violations, has led many immigrants to stay away from church because they no longer view it as a safe space, according to interviews with more than two dozen pastors and church leaders across the U.S. They said that the growing fear of deportation had driven down attendance and made it more difficult to retain ties with their congregants, hindering services from food to legal advice that immigrants count on the church to provide.
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have yet to raid a church, they detained a pastor in Maryland for allegedly overstaying his visa and have arrested people in church parking lots.
Any rise in ICE arrests inside churches or directly targeting congregants could be politically toxic, even among Trump’s conservative base, five former ICE officials told Reuters, though the decision to ease restrictions on churches has made it easier to pick up someone nearby.
In a statement to Reuters, a DHS spokesperson said ICE was not raiding churches, adding that agents would need supervisory approval and that any action inside a church would be rare. “If a dangerous illegal alien felon like a gang member, murderer, or pedophile were to flee into a church, there may be a situation where an arrest is made to protect public safety,” the spokesperson said.
Some churches with large immigrant congregations have marked certain areas as private, raising the bar for ICE entry as warrants are required for them to enter private spaces. Other steps include placing U.S. citizen congregants outside as lookouts and organizing “know your rights” training, eight of the pastors told Reuters.
In July, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles said it would begin taking hot meals and medicine to immigrants afraid to leave their homes, expanding a service originally designed for the elderly and other homebound congregants. The diocese in Orange County, California, recently said it would offer communion in homes.
Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, said he has been talking with pastors who are struggling to meet requests for help from their parishioners dealing with growing anxiety about being detained.
“It’s really requiring the church to do more work. It’s much more labor intensive. It’s much more emotionally and spiritually exhausting,” Salguero said. “This second administration has been much more aggressive and indiscriminate.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the Trump administration’s efforts to arrest and deport “dangerous criminal illegal aliens” had made the country safer “including churches and other religious community spaces.”
FAITH GROUPS SUE
In July, a coalition of Protestant denominations sued the government, arguing that Trump’s decision to strip churches’ protection from ICE raids violated the constitutional right to the free exercise of religion because the constant threat of arrest made immigrants fear going to church.
The government argues that the plaintiffs have not proven that the change in policy for sensitive locations, rather than heightened immigration enforcement overall, triggered the fall in attendance. The DHS spokesperson said any fear was being caused by “sanctuary politicians and the media” spreading falsehoods about ICE.
The case is pending in a Massachusetts federal court.
According to the lawsuit, attendance at an Episcopal church in Oregon’s Spanish service dropped to just 12 in June from the normal 40-50 after ICE detained a local business owner. In another example, the lawsuit said one Lutheran church in Texas saw attendance at its Vacation Bible School dwindle to just four children, from the usual 20 to 25.
Trump’s decision to make houses of worship a potential target has posed a challenge for the hundreds of churches that for years had offered their buildings as a safe haven for migrants fearing deportation.
Some churches that offered sanctuary in the past have stopped doing so publicly out of fear of drawing ICE’s attention, according to Alexia Salvatierra, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and a longtime leader in the sanctuary movement.
“Nobody can guarantee the church is a safe space,” she said, adding that a network of individuals were offering their homes to help fill the gaps left by the church. “It’s much safer to live with someone else.”
Progressive churches and those with large Hispanic congregations are taking the lead in advocating for migrants.
A coalition of churches and synagogues in Philadelphia has expanded a system for accompanying migrants to court, hoping the presence of religious leaders and volunteers will deter federal agents from detaining them. “It is an important piece of non-cooperation, of saying ‘this is not okay'” said Peter Pedemonti, co-director of the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia.
A Lutheran pastor in southern California who asked not to be identified said he is taking communion home to home, after Sunday attendance fell by two thirds.
The leaders of white evangelical churches, in contrast, have largely remained silent, afraid to stir up tensions among their members who form a critical part of Trump’s political base, said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at an evangelical humanitarian organization called World Relief.
Ken Peters, pastor of Patriot Church in Lenoir City, Tennessee, is one of the outspoken ones. He said all the evangelical leaders he knows are 100% behind Trump’s immigration agenda, citing concerns about an influx of drugs and child trafficking which he blames on loose regulation of the border.
“If you’re sneaking around here in our country illegally, technically that’s against the law, and we would consider that sin,” Peters said.
LOS ANGELES
Nowhere has the impact on churches been as profound as in Los Angeles, the target of aggressive immigration sweeps in recent months. Trump deployed National Guard troops to the city in June in response to street protests against ICE’s raids.
Reverend Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said the Los Angeles churches in his network have experienced a 35% drop in attendance on average. When ICE carries out a raid close to a church, the following Sunday drop has been as high as 70%, he said.
Before Trump’s second term, the Spanish-language Sunday service at Lincoln United Methodist on Chicago’s west side used to draw up to 80 participants, according to Emma Lozano, a longtime immigrant activist and a pastor at the church.
This past Sunday the second floor sanctuary of Lozano’s church was empty as she oversaw the weekly Spanish service for her online congregation of 18 parishioners. She stood on a darkened stage, with the church’s stained glass windows covered in black curtains to represent the wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, letting just cracks of light into the room.
Sitting at her dining room table, Aguirre watched solemnly on her cellphone, which was propped up on a paper towel holder. She lamented the fear she said Trump had spawned with his immigration crackdown, and said it was important to speak publicly in support of immigrants, despite her own status.
“I never imagined it would be so intense,” she said. “I never imagined he (Trump) would come so strongly, sweeping everything away.”
(reporting by Nathan Layne in Chicago; additional reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington, editing by Ross Colvin and Claudia Parsons)
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