When federal agents took her husband away, Kenia Colindres was fasting. It helped her listen for God, which she had been doing ever since she came to America.
Fleeing gangs in 2022, Colindres tried to listen to God along the more than 2,000 miles her family traveled from the coast of Honduras to the edge of the United States. She tried to listen as she and her husband, Wilson Velásquez, crossed the border illegally with their three children, turning themselves in to US authorities and requesting asylum. She tried to listen as she watched uniformed men cinch GPS-tracking ankle bracelets to the heads of families: to young men, to mothers traveling alone with their children, and to her husband.
“I always looked for God,” Colindres said. “I couldn’t separate myself from him.”
Immigration officers advised Kenia and Wilson to get a lawyer, and they assigned the family a court date—years away—to present their asylum case to an immigration judge. With that settled, Kenia knew what God wanted them to do next: find a church.
They landed at a Pentecostal congregation in suburban Atlanta, where the family had moved in with relatives. As they knit themselves into the church community, Wilson applied for a work permit and got a job wrestling tires six days a week at a llantera—a tire shop—near their home. He came home exhausted but always made a point before bedtime to sit with his children, ages 7 to 13, and ask about their day. How was school? Were you good for your mom?
After a year at the church, Wilson and Kenia joined a promising young pastor and a team of congregants to plant a new congregation. Iglesia Fuente de Vida started meeting in an aging shopping plaza in Norcross, about an hour from their home. Outside of Wilson’s work and the children’s school, the church became the family’s world. Several days a week, they worshiped in a windowless room decorated with two bouquets of roses at the front. They helped on the music team.
Kenia felt Wilson was the kind of good man a church needs. She bragged about her husband: his attention to detail, the way he asked if she needed groceries, the way he picked the items up on his way home from work and stuck them in the fridge without being asked. She thought he had a gift for hearing from God and relaying prophetic wisdom.
Sundays, Wilson’s only day off, were their best days. “We woke up with joy,” Kenia said. They looked forward to eating at a restaurant after church, then escaping outdoors to a park.
Last Sunday, January 26, the kids poured milk over bowls of cereal while Kenia scrambled eggs for her husband and stirred his coffee. As was her custom, Kenia fasted for breakfast. “On Sundays I try to make sacrifices,” she said.
Her sacrifices were only beginning.
Media accounts largely agree about the day’s events: At roughly a quarter past noon, an usher standing in the church entrance saw a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents outside and locked the doors. Wilson was listening to the sermon when his phone rang with an unknown number. When he silenced it, his ankle bracelet—known in Spanish as a grillete, or shackle—began buzzing. His phone rang a second time, and Wilson rose, flustered, slipping out the back of the sanctuary. The usher met him and said there were agents in the parking lot, asking for Wilson by name.
Moments later, Kenia’s phone flashed with a message from her husband: Come outside.
Running into the daylight, Kenia found him handcuffed in the back of a law enforcement vehicle. “What’s happening to my husband?” she asked the agents. Her mind raced to make sense of the scene. Wilson had made all his required check-ins at an Atlanta ICE office. He had the government’s permission to work and had an appointment on a court docket. He was deported once nearly 20 years ago—a significant strike on an immigrant’s record—but otherwise had no criminal record.
The agents told Kenia they were looking for people with ankle bracelets, then they drove Wilson away.
Back inside, her pastor, Luis Ortiz, tried to reassure his congregation. He encouraged everyone to be calm, he told local media. “But I could see the fear and tears on their faces.”
After the service, Kenia lingered a while in a daze. When she finally went home later that afternoon, she closed herself in her room and prayed through sobs: “God, take control of my husband’s life.”
“It’s disrespectful, what they did,” Kenia told CT in Spanish. She doesn’t know why ICE would arrest her husband at church. “With the bracelet they could find him anywhere.”
Wilson’s arrest appears to be the first reported ICE raid at a church in President Donald Trump’s second term. It came five days after the administration revoked a policy that, for 13 years, had ordered ICE officers to avoid making arrests at houses of worship and other “sensitive locations,” including schools, hospitals, and parades.
News that some of the country’s safest spaces would no longer be safe for undocumented immigrants—or, in Wilson’s case, even for those who could produce a valid Social Security number—electrified fears of what might come next. School districts emailed staff with instructions about what to do if ICE came knocking. Pastors of churches with immigrant majorities phoned lawyers and one another: If they knew a parishioner was in the country illegally, could they be complicit in something? Could they keep running food pantries?
Beneath the questions runs a fundamental anxiety nagging at many pastors: Can churches with immigrants remain the kind of welcoming communities they once were?
Churches in the United States have a long history of entanglement with immigration enforcement. In the 1980s, hundreds of churches formed networks to protect migrants fleeing political violence in Central America. The Sanctuary Movement, as it called itself, drew the ire of the Reagan administration. Immigration authorities—then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS—never arrested migrants inside houses of worship. But they did send paid informants to spy on churches sheltering migrants.
The government arrested dozens of church leaders in Texas and Arizona, ultimately convicting eight of them for criminal harboring. The trials sparked protests outside INS offices across the country and made for bad optics. Since then, the Department of Justice has not prosecuted any churches for providing sanctuary.
Other buildings have seen less deference. Even after the Obama administration’s 2011 ICE memo formalized protections for sensitive locations, agents routinely made arrests near schools and even at school bus stops. During the first Trump administration, officers entered hospitals pursuing low-priority cases. In 2017, for example, Customs and Border Patrol officers arrested two undocumented parents at a Texas hospital while doctors were treating their infant son.
That we know of, ICE agents have never entered a church to make an arrest—but they’ve come close. In 2017, ICE arrested undocumented men leaving a church shelter in Alexandria, Virginia. That same year ICE agents, staked out in a church parking lot, spooked a congregation in Sacramento, California.
During the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, more than 1,000 churches—mostly mainline—pledged to join the New Sanctuary Movement, offering to shelter undocumented migrants from deportation. No one knows exactly how many immigrants took advantage of them, but stories abound. In 2019, ICE threatened some immigrants taking refuge in churches with fines of up to half a million dollars (it eventually backed off on the fines).
Not all Christians offering sanctuary are trying to shield people from ever being deported, said Alexia Salvatierra, a professor of missions and theology at Fuller Theological Seminary who cofounded the New Sanctuary Movement. She acknowledges—as many immigrant advocates acknowledge—that many undocumented immigrants have no legal right to residency. The New Sanctuary Movement, she said, aims to buy time for people being denied due process to resolve what may be legitimate claims. They might, for instance, have credible fears of political or religious persecution that would permit them to stay in the US. Or certain immigrants may have temporary permission to be in the country and simply need time for legislation to pass that would allow them to remain permanently. That’s the case for “Dreamers,” immigrants who were brought to the US as minors. Legislators have been trying to create a pathway for citizenship for them since 2001.
“There were certain people who had a deportation order, but there would be a legal remedy for them if they could get deferred deportation and fight their case over time,” Salvatierra said. “Some of those people, it made sense for them to live in churches or to live with families that were connected to the church to allow them the time to be able to fight through this broken system.”
Since Trump regained office, some pastors have spoken out and again offered up their buildings for sanctuary. It’s not clear whether ICE will enter churches. Earlier this week, lawyers representing a group of Quaker churches sued the Department of Homeland Security to protect houses of worship from immigration raids. The lawsuit emphasizes the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty: “Enforcement deters congregants from attending services, especially members of immigrant communities.”
A similar argument is now before the Supreme Court of Texas, where a Catholic nonprofit is fighting the state’s efforts to shut it down for providing food and shelter to undocumented migrants, which the charity says Christ commands his followers to do.
A win for the nonprofits in those cases could thicken the legal armor for immigrant congregations. Contrary to public perception, churches, in the cold logic of the law, offer less protection against arrest than a private residence.
“You have more constitutional rights at your house,” said Katie Taylor, an attorney at Neighbors Immigration Clinic, a church-affiliated legal group in Lexington, Kentucky. “If you’re at your house, you do not have to open the door for ICE [agents] unless they have a warrant from a judge for your arrest, which they pretty much never have.”
Thus, ICE agents generally target public locations—including restaurant dining rooms, lobbies, break rooms, and outdoor spaces—where they can operate without a warrant. In Chicago and other cities roiled by the Trump administration’s early deportation push, immigrant-frequented business districts have gone into hibernation.
“We’ve talked to congregations and pastors about things like, if you are open to the public, you can’t stop ICE from coming in,” Taylor said. She tells pastors to consider ways to make their churches more private, such as screening who comes and goes during gatherings. “This isn’t ideal for places of worship, but what does it look like if you lock your door and you buzz every person in through some kind of alarm system? Because then if ICE shows up, you don’t have to buzz them in.”
That’s what Wilson’s church did—it had a keypad door lock and someone standing watch. All that failed to prevent his arrest, but it at least prevented officers from grabbing him inside, surrounded by family and friends. Many churches are going further to make worship safer for undocumented parishioners, stripping service times from websites and signage.
“We’re recommending that people don’t publicize group gatherings” if they are a known immigrant congregation, Taylor said. She is skeptical that ICE will begin bursting into worship services, given public relations risks, but this week the administration ordered some ICE field offices to make at least 75 arrests a day. Taylor says they cannot achieve that by pursuing violent criminals alone, as Trump has said he would prioritize: “I’m not going to tell someone not to go to church. But if they’re worried about immigration status, if ICE does actually have to hit these quotas, we think they’re going to start targeting obviously Hispanic gatherings.”
Kenia is still going to church, though she balks when asked what time their services are now. She says the congregation is trusting in God and believes nothing more will happen to them. She is technically at risk of deportation herself, but immigration authorities in principle avoid deporting both parents at once and leaving children stranded.
“We’re under God’s covering,” she said. “We pray that the Lord has the last word and does his will, not our will.”
The night after Wilson’s arrest, Kenia was at home, answering questions in Spanish from two reporters. When one of them, independent journalist Mario Guevara, got up to leave, she offered him a stack of fresh tortillas and cheese that her mother had just made. Guevara was starving, but he demurred. He did not want to take bread from this woman who had just lost her breadwinner. Kenia insisted.
She spoke with her husband on Tuesday. He called her from the Stewart Detention Center, 160 miles south of her near Columbus, Georgia. He said ICE planned to deport him, and the family would need to find an attorney who could handle detention cases—an expensive specialty they had no idea how to afford. Wilson also said he planned to preach to fellow detainees the next day. God had told him to have faith and to persevere—and men around Wilson needed to know God like he knew God.
Kenia doesn’t know how, but she believes Wilson will come back to her. She believes, in the end, that all this will be a testimony to God’s goodness, and that because of it “a lot of people will come to the feet of Christ.”
Until then, she is just trying to listen for God. “He knows why things happen,” she said.
“I’m praying that God open doors and touch the hearts of these police. And for Trump—I bless him, right? I pray for him and as a church we bless him.”
Andy Olsen is senior features writer at Christianity Today.
