Amid ICE killings, churches defend immigrants

Key points:

• United Methodists are caring for frightened neighbors after federal immigration enforcement fatally shot two immigrants in less than a week.
• They also are looking for legal avenues to help Haitians and Syrians in their communities who have seen their legal protections stripped.
• Bishops and other church leaders are seeking an end to enforcement practices that they say terrorize communities.

United Methodists are stepping up efforts to support their immigrant neighbors in the face of a federal crackdown that has taken lives and left grieving families across the U.S.

“If it feels chaotic, if it feels like there is indiscriminate violence happening, that is exactly what we are seeing,” said the Rev. Eric Folkerth. He is the lead pastor of Kessler Park United Methodist Church in Dallas. He also is a volunteer with the interfaith Clergy League for Emergency Action and Response that provides accompaniment for immigrants who risk ICE arrest at court hearings and required check-ins.

“Our concern for a long time has been that this seems to be the point. There seems to be people in the federal government who want a destabilized, confusing situation.”

In less than a week, U.S. federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot and killed two fathers during traffic stops amid the early morning rush hour.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, was driving on his way to his construction job in Houston. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25, was riding alongside his wife and 3-year-old daughter in the coastal city of Biddeford, Maine. Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and father of three who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years, was working to gain legal status. The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition reports that Durán Guerrero, a delivery truck driver from Colombia, was working in the U.S. legally.

Neither man was armed, and neither was the target of enforcement operations.

Federal agents claimed that Salgado Araujo tried to ram the officers and that Durán Guerrero posed a threat to public safety. Agents were not wearing body cameras, and eyewitnesses dispute both accounts.

Following each man’s death, United Methodist Bishops Cynthia Fierro Harvey and Rubén Saenz Jr., in Texas, and Bishop Thomas J. Bickerton in New England released statements calling for full, fair and transparent investigations into what transpired. Bishop Dottie Escobedo-Frank, who leads the California-Pacific Conference, also released a statement joining her episcopal colleagues in calling for meaningful change in ICE enforcement practices and a restoration of due process.

For United Methodists in the Houston area, Salgado Araujo’s death hit close to home. His wife has been a regular participant at the women’s exercise class at Mission Milby, a United Methodist-supported nonprofit located about two miles from where Salgado Araujo was killed. The mission provides various social services in its largely immigrant East End neighborhood.

“The thing that we are trying to do the most is just to be supportive of many of the clients at Mission Milby who are scared and nervous about ICE being in the community,” said the Rev. Will Reed, the mission’s board chair and chief operating officer of the Texas Conference.

“We do have a policy at Mission Milby that if ICE does show up — unless they have a warrant asking for something specific —they can stay outside. … But it’s a real tense situation.”

The two men’s deaths come just as the Trump administration has made thousands more people vulnerable to ICE’s actions.

With the U.S. Supreme Court majority’s blessing, the Trump administration has stripped temporary protected status from some 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians. The decision amounts to removing legal protections from people who have committed no crime. And it puts them at risk of detention or deportation to countries that the U.S. government has deemed too dangerous to travel to for any reason.

The Florida Conference has about 3,000 Haitian church members. While many are citizens or legal residents, just about everyone knows someone affected by the removal of TPS.

“The Haitian community here is feeling a lot of anxiety and uncertainty right now, and I am sure these feelings are not just for those of us in Florida but across the country,” said Judith Pierre-Okerson, a native of Haiti who is now a deaconess and co-lay leader of the Florida Conference. Her home church is Miramar United Methodist in Miami.

At present, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed H.R. 1689, which would extend protected status to Haitians, but the bill remains stuck in the U.S. Senate.  

“The most helpful thing our United Methodist siblings can do is to advocate for policy change and support local organizations assisting affected families,” she said.

The Rev. We Hyun Chang, director of connectional ministries in the New England Conference that encompasses Maine, said what’s happening poses a challenge to both American ideals and Christian values.

“This is not just a tragic loss of life,” he said, “but also a fundamental threat to who and how we are, not only as a society but also as a faith community whose primary calling is to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

The United Methodist Church’s Social Principles — based on multiple Bible passages — have long called for just, humane and comprehensive immigration policies that keep families together and honor the dignity of every person.

“It is a time for the church to reflect on what kind of neighbors we have been to our immigrant neighbors and communities,” Chang said, “and to seek to become the very presence of Christ’s peace and justice with and among them.”

A national crisis

Across the U.S., United Methodists are seeking to be the kind of Christ-following neighbors that Chang describes.

With their faith partners, they are holding prayer vigils, comforting the bereaved, supporting families with loved ones in detention and accompanying immigrants through the legal process. They also are calling for an end to government actions that they say terrorize whole communities.

The Rev. Emily Chapman, senior pastor of St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Houston, is part of the faith-based Migration with Dignity Coalition. The group has been holding prayer vigils at the local detention center and advocating before Houston city leaders to support an independent investigation into Salgado Araujo’s death. Chapman and her ecumenical partners also have advocated for the city to stop cooperating with ICE on non-safety-related traffic stops.

“As it stood, if you got pulled over, the Houston police would wait for ICE for a really long time, even if you were pulled over for your inspection sticker being expired,” Chapman said. “So, it has been pretty horrendous.”

Initially, she said, Houston leaders agreed to limit ICE cooperation, but then the Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to withhold state public safety funds and they reversed course.

Houston, the fourth-largest city in the U.S., has largely seen economic prosperity — not to mention increased food and entertainment options — because of its growing immigrant population, Chapman added.

“Frankly, everything that’s fun and interesting about the city is because of immigrant communities,” she said. “An attack on our immigrant community makes no sense.”

But Chapman and other advocates also are dealing with an increasingly impervious ICE, which received a $75 billion budget boost from the U.S. Congress last year. ICE’s funding now exceeds the budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. The funds have allowed ICE to expand detention, hire thousands of agents and put them on the streets, often with little training and little restraint on violent tactics. The results have been deadly.

Since Trump retook office in January 2025, at least 10 people have died during federal immigration operations including U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

On July 14, the day after Guerrero’s death, Juan Jairo Coronilla Duran was killed by a truck in St. Augustine, Florida, as he was fleeing ICE agents. The Miami Herald reports that the 28-year-old Mexican man was in Florida on a valid tourist visa and had a flight booked on July 18 to return home.

More than 50 additional people have died in ICE detention since Trump returned to office. The often-overcrowded detention centers are also seeing disease outbreaks with little oversight. Currently, an ICE processing center in Aurora, Colorado, is blocking state health officials from investigating after reports of at least one detainee with tuberculosis. 

The data-collection website TRAC found that 70.6% of the more than 65,000 people in ICE detention nationwide as of July 11 had no criminal conviction.

Being in the U.S. without legal documentation is still a civil offense, and not a crime. A ProPublica investigation last year also found ICE has detained more than 170 U.S. citizens since Trump’s second term began.

Yet even as mass deportation efforts mount, Gallup polling shows 73% of Americans think immigration is a good thing for the U.S. Majorities of Americans also oppose deporting all immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally and would prefer increased pathways to U.S. citizenship.

“As people of conscience and faith, we affirm that every person bears the image of God and possesses inherent dignity, regardless of immigration status,” the United Methodist Immigration Task Force, chaired by retired Bishop Minerva Carcaño, said in a statement.

“No person should lose their life because they were driving to work, providing for their family, or living under the fear created by militarized immigration enforcement.”

Providing legal aid

One of the ways The United Methodist Church seeks to uphold human dignity is through its Immigration Law and Justice Network, which has branches across the U.S. that help immigrants trying to attain legal status and citizenship.

Attorneys at the network’s branches are looking for legal avenues to help Haitians and Syrians who have lost temporary protected status.

“Every now and then, we do have clients who are eligible to obtain their permanent residency through family members or maybe other forms of relief,” said Joy Green, an attorney and executive director of Justice for All Immigrants, the network’s branch in Houston and San Antonio. Her office shares a building with Mission Milby.

People who have lost TPS should reach out to one of the network’s offices or to another immigration attorney, she said.

At the same time, she acknowledged that many in her community are experiencing fear. Immigration cases long have faced bureaucratic hurdles and an overworked court system, but now Green is seeing challenges to legal immigration unlike any she has seen before in her 15-year legal practice.

“A good handful of clients,” she said, have experienced prolonged detention and possible deportation even though they are in the U.S. legally.  

“Their family members have reached out and said, ‘Hey, my loved one is detained, and we don’t know why. They have a work permit. They’re authorized to be here. What’s going on?’” she said. “The result is that we have seen an increase in the number of people who we need to help file what we call habeas petitions to try to get them released.”

The Rev. Emily Kvalheim, a United Methodist deacon and immigration attorney in Cleveland, Ohio, said that since January 2025, there have been at least 736 immigration policy changes — most of which have harmed noncitizens no matter their status.

She advises undocumented people to familiarize themselves with their constitutional rights and engage in emergency response planning with their families to prepare for the possibility of detention and deportation.

Helping people in detention

United Methodists can help by writing a letter of encouragement to people in detention, Kvalheim said. The Task Force on United Methodist Immigration Ministries of Ohio has organized a letter campaign for detained asylum seekers.

“You will help to reassure them that they are welcome in our community, their community stands in solidarity with them, and they are not alone during one of the worst times in their lives,” she said.

In the Greater New Jersey Conference, United Methodists have been working with interfaith partners to operate a hospitality tent for families visiting detained loved ones inside the Delaney Hall ICE Detention Facility in Newark. Among those providing care are members of Morristown and Morrow Memorial United Methodist churches.

Their services include providing clothes for family members turned away because of Delaney Hall’s strict dress code. The facility bans visitors from wearing sandals, Crocs, shorts, leggings and any clothes deemed “too provocative.”

Families are forced to wait outside, so volunteers try to provide comfort and welcome in any way they can. Since the fall, a couple from Morristown United Methodist Church has come faithfully every Tuesday to grill hot dogs on a small stove to share with anyone who is hungry. In winter, the couple also passes around hot cocoa.

Volunteers also try to help detainees inside the facility when permitted. One of the apparent goals of Delaney Hall is to get people to self-deport, said the Rev. Danny Yang, senior pastor of Morrow Memorial United Methodist Church. Lights are kept on at all hours. The detention cells are kept either too cold or too hot. And detainees have reported unsanitary conditions including spoiled and sickening food.

Yang, who is fluent in Mandarin, has provided interpretation for a detainee who is trying to return to China but barred from being released to buy her own plane ticket.

“She has to go through the proper channels, and that means that immigration has to work with China to arrange the transportation back,” Yang said. “That’s what she was waiting for, and who knows how long she’ll have to wait? So it’s sad. She had never committed a crime. She was just undocumented. But she was ready to go, and she can’t go, and she’s just stuck there.”

But while the situation is grim, the experience of the hospitality tent has shown people have found all kinds of little ways to help, said the Rev. Luana Cook Scott, Morristown’s senior pastor.

“You can feel like you can’t make a difference in this world right now,” she said. “But when people are waiting to get into the detention center, we can make it less painful and problematic because they have so many other hurdles they are trying to overcome. This is one way we can make a small difference in one person’s life at a time.”

Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.