Polls have shown a majority of people side with President Donald Trump on his strict immigration policy and plans to deport migrants — especially among his base.
But it turns out not all Trump supporters want to see all of the people in the U.S. without documents sent away.
Latinos who are Christians are welcome, according to Jim Garlow, the conservative former pastor of an evangelical megachurch.
Per the liberal Right Wing Watch, “Garlow brought on immigration attorney Esther Valdes Clayton to sound the alarm over the prospect that tens of thousands of Latino Christians could be forcibly deported from the United States because of the Trump administration’s policies.”
More from the report:
“I just want to reassure everybody … that Latinos love God,” she said. “We have the same God. We have a monotheistic religion. Our tradition, our values; 97% of Latinos go to church. We believe in a male and female. No transgender. Our language is gendered. Everything ends in an O and an A, meaning that everything is masculine and feminine, and we go to church regularly.”
“Right now, we’re experiencing a number of executive orders that are affecting the Latino church primarily,” Valdes Clayton continued. “Why? Because the bulk of a lot of the congregations are filled with people who enter here either unlawfully or legally and their permission to stay here is expired.”
Valdes Clayton warned that “approximately 10 million Christians may be subject to mass deportations,” which she said will have “huge ramifications” for churches all over the country.
As many as four in five immigrants at risk of deportation from the United States are Christian, according to a new report that calls on their fellow believers to consider the impact of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation policies.
The report says about 10 million Christians are vulnerable to deportation and 7 million U.S. citizens who are Christian live in households where someone is at risk of deportation.
The report, under the auspices of major Catholic and evangelical organizations, draws on a range of data, including percentages of religious affiliation in various migrant and national populations and on an advocacy group’s analysis of U.S. census data on migrants.
“Though we’re deeply concerned about fellow Christians, we’re not exclusively concerned with immigrants who happen to share our faith,” said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, an evangelical humanitarian organization that cosponsored the report.
Other groups that helped produce the report include the National Association of Evangelicals, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration and the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. While the report doesn’t advocate any political positions, it mainly seeks to raise awareness of the issue among Christians, and some of its sponsoring groups have individually advocated for reforms that would give some categories of immigrants a path to legal status.
Immigrants at risk of deportation range from those who crossed the border illegally to those who may have some sort of legal status that could be revoked. For example, the Trump administration has taken steps to end temporary protected status, held by many from Venezuela and Haiti, as well as humanitarian parole that had been granted for others from those troubled countries as well as Cuba and Nicaragua.
Trump enjoyed wide support from certain Christian blocs in all three of his campaigns. In 2024, he was supported by about 8 in 10 white evangelical Christian voters, about 6 in 10 white Catholics and just over half of Latino evangelicals, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters.
While the report doesn’t directly refer to that support, it says it seeks to raise awareness of the potential impact of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
