In the gym at Pasadena Covenant Church, local congregations met on a Saturday morning to discuss the spike of immigration arrests in their tight-knit community east of downtown Los Angeles.
Pink conchas, a Mexican sweet bread, piled up on a side table for snacks and coffee as an immigration lawyer from a Christian legal-services nonprofit answered questions from the room of about 120 people.
Attendees had seen masked immigration agents on the streets in Pasadena, California, arresting young people, older people, parents with children. So their questions were urgent and practical: If you’re in the car with your kids and you’re detained, how can you make sure your kids are cared for?
Federal authorities reported arresting more than 1,600 people in the LA area from June 6 to June 22, with some sent to a crowded basement detention facility in downtown LA. In several incidents, they made arrests on church grounds. The majority of people Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested in Southern California do not have a criminal history. Some had pending asylum cases or were US citizens, according to interviews with CT.
During the Saturday meeting, pastors’ phones lit up with texts from a neighbor: A few blocks away, ICE agents had just arrested a Latina woman on a walk with her two sons, one a teenager and one 20 years old.
Video footage showed plainclothes agents attempting to put her in an unmarked Honda Accord; her sons, startled, tried to block the arrest. She was later identified as Rosalina Luna Vargas, an employee at a local assisted-living facility.
The church gym was full of people who had prepared for a moment like this.
Pastor Mayra Macedo-Nolan interrupted the summit and shared what had happened. Pastor Marcos Canales, leader of La Fuente Ministries, a bilingual Nazarene church, prayed aloud.
“No mas,” he pleaded in Spanish. Then in English he said, “In the name of Jesus, who was executed without any just process, in that name we pray. Amen.”
Pasadena Covenant pastor Andrew Mark double-checked that the church’s security was in place. Macedo-Nolan began confirming details of what had happened and learned the woman was the family’s breadwinner. People began arranging carpools for anyone who felt scared to leave on their own with ICE in the neighborhood.
This rapid response is not unusual. Pasadena pastors have been showing up to sites of ICE arrests often within an hour. Alongside a local day-laborers organization called the Pasadena Community Job Center, they quickly assess who was arrested, what family members they leave behind, and what their needs might be—maybe food or an immigration lawyer.
They come together through the Clergy Community Coalition (CCC), a network of local churches established 20 years ago by Pastor Jean Burch. The coalition started small but now includes about 100 churches and nonprofits, ranging from Pentecostal to mainline.
Pasadena and nearby Altadena are places of close connection; chain stores are rare, and people recognize each other on the streets. Pasadena is also the home of Fuller Theological Seminary, and locals say the city has the highest number of nonprofits per capita in the country.
“It has a sense of place,” said John Jay Alvaro, pastor of First Baptist Church in Pasadena. “There’s also in Pasadena and Altadena a high trust for clergy.”
The pastors in the coalition, in turn, lean on Macedo-Nolan, a friendly but no-nonsense woman who knows everyone and knows how to navigate church politics and police departments. “When Mayra says to show up somewhere, we show up somewhere,” said Alvaro.
Macedo-Nolan, head of the CCC, was previously the board chair of the Christian Community Development Association and a pastor at Lake Avenue Church, an evangelical church in Pasadena.
Her phone is constantly buzzing; it’s been buzzing since the fires.
But right now, all the buzzing is about immigration. She said she wants local Christians to see what is happening and ask themselves, “Did I allow some reformation in my heart when this was happening in my community? Was I open to what God’s Spirit wanted to do in me?”
The churches have some deep theological differences, but their readiness to band together in the face of raids came from 20 years of relationships in the community.
Pasadena mayor Victor Gordo came to the church summit in the gym, and the CCC has long met with the local police chief and sheriffs. But closeness also emerged from recent hardships.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Macedo-Nolan from the CCC knew the job center had funding to distribute food but needed a commercial kitchen. Pasadena Covenant, right across the street from the day-laborer organization, has its own kitchen. She connected them, and they’ve been hosting a weekly food bank together ever since.
Pasadena Covenant holds the view of asset-based community development, which emphasizes looking for existing resources in the community for help.
“A local church should never think it is the net. It is part of the net,” said Steve Wong, the church’s senior pastor.
The relationship between churches and the job center deepened this year in the aftermath of the Eaton fire, which destroyed thousands of structures in Pasadena and nearby Altadena in January.
Need for food intensified after the fires, with thousands showing up to the job center food bank. Many in the immigrant community lost their homes, then they also lost jobs cleaning homes or tending to yards. Among the CCC, 8 church buildings burned down, along with 12 pastors’ homes, according to Canales. Eleven families at Pasadena Covenant lost their homes.
The fires exposed the community’s most desperate economic needs. When Pasadena Covenant received donations for wildfire recovery, it gave tens of thousands of dollars to families connected to the day laborers’ group.
The job center exists to connect residents and small businesses with reliable day laborers—bricklayers, roofers, cleaners—and ensures the workers are treated fairly. Many of the day laborers began going out in brigades to do fire cleanup, and the CCC fundraised for more protective gear to help them deal with toxic hazards in the debris.
And the job center began inviting pastors from the CCC to pray for the laborers each morning. Eventually they were doing daily “send out” prayers, said Wong. Canales did radio devotionals on the day laborers’ radio station in Spanish.
Several Black pastors also consistently came to the job center to pray workers out, including Anthony McFarland, who lost his home in the wildfires. He estimates the fires displaced 20 percent of his congregation.
“ICE is something you cannot control. Fire is something you cannot control,” McFarland said. “It hurts when you can’t make a significant difference. You can’t call the president and say, ‘It’s ruining families.’”
The fire cleanup meant “grief galvanized our relationship,” said Mark.
Mark grew up a missionary kid in Mexico City and switches in and out of English and Spanish. He’s been one of the clergy members leading packed vigils at the site of ICE arrests with the day-laborers group.
One recent afternoon on the porch at his home next to the church, he got a call from an unknown number: It was a family member of someone who had been detained. Mark talked through the situation in Spanish, and the caller asked him for a character reference letter for the court case.
Mark and fellow pastors from the coalition get such calls and texts constantly now. Hispanic Christians feel targeted, and they’re afraid to go to work or the grocery store. In June, six workers were arrested outside a local donut shop. Locals say the arrests are halting the fire cleanup.
Only 15 percent of Americans support deporting undocumented immigrants who have jobs, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
“The fear and intimidation are definitely working,” Mark said.
On Friday, a federal judge found evidence of racial profiling in the arrests of people from car washes and at Home Depots—stemming from a case involving three men arrested at a bus stop in Pasadena.
In a statement last month, ICE said agents in LA “are on the streets every day, prioritizing public safety by locating, arresting, and removing criminal alien offenders and immigration violators from our neighborhoods.”
Pastors see their role as ministering to families of the arrested, going to vigils, but also as deescalating tensions over immigration enforcement.
At protests, they line up between demonstrators and police. And at the summit in the church gym, they helped train congregants for tense situations. They want parishioners to know how to react to an arrest, and they want them to remember that ICE agents might not be prepared to deescalate these scenarios either.
Mark Chase, associate rector of All Saints Church in Pasadena, was standing nearby when an apparent ICE agent drove up in an unmarked vehicle and pulled a gun on a young man who was taking a photo of the car’s license plate (one way some in the community tried to identify ICE vehicles).
“We said, ‘No, no, no, don’t shoot!’” Chase recounted to CT. “He got out of his vehicle with such anger and vitriol. I thought he was going to shoot. He swept [the gun] around indiscriminately.”
The tension in the community has gotten to the clergy. Mark started feeling depressed. Macedo-Nolan has had trouble sleeping. Mid-interview with her at a church in Pasadena, a siren nearby blared and zoomed past. She stopped talking to wonder aloud if it was an ambulance, police, or ICE.
“Even though it seems like things are not okay, we’re working to make things okay,” said Mark. “But the days like yesterday, I start to question it. How long before things are okay?”
For those not directly affected by the ICE threats, it’s tempting to disconnect from what is happening.
“Honestly it makes me want to hide,” said Wong, the senior pastor of Pasadena Covenant. Then he thinks of his 100-year-old church’s own immigrant history: Swedish migrants fled repression or famine or just came for a new life. He himself is Chinese American and immigrated to Singapore before returning to the US.
Two days after the ICE arrest of the woman with teenage sons, Mark and other pastors showed up for a vigil at the intersection where she had been arrested.
The day-laborer group brought instruments and played upbeat music. About 200 neighbors showed up, including her family, in tears. The woman’s two sons spoke briefly. The pastors prayed in English and Spanish.
“I’m so grateful the faith-based community is here,” said Pablo Alvarado, one of the leaders of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network—of which the Pasadena Community Job Center is a part.
The next day, La Fuente Ministries had its bilingual Sunday service. The congregation sang loudly: “May his truth have power over lies. / May our hope have power over fear.”
Alvarado, the co-executive director of the job center, attended the service and stood up to share his story with the congregation. After growing up during the Salvadoran civil war, he came to the United States and began to advocate for day laborers.
Speaking in Spanish with Canales translating into English, Alvarado said that thanks to the church leaders like Macedo-Nolan and Canales, “Pasadena has given an example of what that looks like to be entangled.” Alvarado brought up the mother who had been arrested the day before. “Because we are entangled, we are going to continue the process of helping them.”
