The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, a Hispanic evangelical adviser to President Donald Trump, citing significant drops in church attendance in the face of immigration raids and mass deportations, is urging government leaders to recognize the “innocent people” who are being swept up in detention quotas.
Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and pastor of New Season Church in Sacramento, California, said in an interview Thursday (Oct. 16) that some churches in the NHCLC network are seeing Sunday attendance drop by 25% to 35% due to fear of immigration raids.
Other leaders of Latino and immigrant congregations throughout the U.S. have reported drops in Sunday attendance, especially in Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has launched major federal operations.
Rodriguez supports the deportation of criminals but claimed that ICE is forced into making arrests of criminals and non-criminals alike because leaders in blue states won’t grant ICE access to their incarcerated populations.
“Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, they reach 2,500 a day that are complete criminals, gang bangers, pedophiles, rapists, drug dealers et cetera,” Rodriguez said. “ If the blue states primarily don’t cooperate and give ICE access to their prisons and jails, then they have to find the other 500 because they have a quota of 3,000.” He added, “ Not that I’m affirming that, I’m not celebrating that.”
At the NHCLC’s annual summit on Tuesday (Oct. 14), the organization heard from Salazar, whose bill would increase enforcement resources at the U.S. borders while allowing unauthorized immigrants without criminal records who have been in the country more than five years to earn legal status if they pay taxes and $7,000 in restitution.
The bill would expedite the asylum process but would hold asylum seekers on “humanitarian campuses,” rather than releasing them into the U.S. while they wait for a court decision, as has been the practice for decades. It would pay for U.S. citizens to receive workforce training, funded by immigrants’ restitution payments. It would also make changes to immigration visas.
“There’s never been a more conservative proposal. None ever, ever, ever,” Rodriguez said. “This does not grant citizenship. This is the opposite of amnesty.” Instead, he said, it offered the chance for immigrants who have entered illegally to work legally. “You don’t have to live in fear,” he said. “ It gives people dignity, and that dignity status to me is beautiful. It’s because we’re all created in the image of God.”
