The church doors are locked and there’s a sign on the pastor’s door: Oficina Privada Pastora. That’s Spanish for Pastor’s Private Office.
“Otherwise, ICE agents can walk right in,” said Rev. Luz Campos, pastor of El Redentor, a United Methodist congregation in Parkway Village.
In recent months, members of her congregation have been stopped, arrested, detained and deported by federal agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Toddlers and school-age children have been left behind in cars, apartments, classrooms. ICE agents often hang out in the church’s parking lot.
“Any moment you can be stopped, and they can take you,” said Campos, a U.S. citizen who immigrated from Guatemala 14 years ago to work for the church. “People who have been here 10, 20 years. They work. They pay taxes. They have children here. They have lives here. What did they do wrong?”
When he was re-elected, President Trump promised to launch “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.”
Trump ended other “humanitarian parole” programs and “temporary protected status” grants. That left more than two million noncitizens suddenly unprotected from deportation and subject to arrest, detention and “expedited removal.”
Any noncitizen who could be deported is considered a fugitive. ICE agents can stop and detain anyone suspected of being a noncitizen.
The Supreme Court is allowing immigration agents to identify suspects by race, ethnicity and language. So, ICE agents are targeting particular neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and churches. Immigration attorneys have advised pastors and principals to lock their outside doors and post privacy signs on their own office doors.
“They are rounding up as many immigrants as they can, regardless of legal status,” said Casey Bryant, a local immigration attorney and executive director of Advocates for Immigrants Rights. “They are taking parents away from small children, husbands and fathers away from their families without due process.”
The Trump administration claims its mass detention and mass deportation campaigns are targeting “the worst of the worst.” But more than 70 percent of ICE detainees had no criminal convictions, according to TRAC, a data research organization at Syracuse University.
Unauthorized entry into the U.S. is a misdemeanor, not a felony. Being in the U.S. without authorization is a civil offense, not a criminal one.
Campos’s congregation is filled with people like her — indigenous immigrants and refugees from Guatemala. Some have legal status. Many are in legal limbo, having entered the U.S. under different policies enforced in different ways by different presidents.
All are from North America.
“My people are from this continent,” Campos said. “This is America. We are Americans. We did not come from Mars or Venus. We were here before many others came.”
In the 1950s, the CIA helped Guatemala’s military overthrow a democratically elected president to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company. The repressive new regime banned political parties and labor unions and incited a civil war that lasted 36 years.
The U.S.-backed Guatemalan army and private “death squads” hired by wealthy landowners focused their wrath on indigenous peoples.
They systematically razed hundreds of villages, destroyed crops and livestock, poisoned water supplies, and massacred or “disappeared” tens of thousands of civilians. More than 100,000 indigenous women were raped.
More than a million Guatemalans fled their homes and 200,000 left the country as economic, political or environmental refugees.
Guatemala still ranks as one of the most dangerous places in the world for women and children.
“The people who leave Guatemala leave to protect their children or themselves,” Campos said. “They come here out of necessity. They come here to seek refuge.”
Campos was appointed the pastor of “El Redentor” Mission in 2014. That was the same year Central Americans trying to cross the southern border outnumbered Mexicans for the first time.
“The last few years have witnessed the arrival of thousands of Central Americans fleeing violence in their home countries and seeking asylum in the U.S. Many mothers, families, and unaccompanied minors have arrived along the southern border, turned themselves into the Border Patrol, and have asked for protection,” the American Immigration Council reported in 2017.
The Obama administration deported more than 3 million noncitizens. But it also allowed thousands of children and other family members in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to reunite with parents in the U.S. It was called the Central American Minors program.
That’s how many of the members of El Redentor came to the U.S.
In 2018, the Trump administration closed the program.
In 2021, the Biden administration reopened the program.
In 2025, the Trump administration closed the program.
Since January, ICE agents have arrested and detained more than 200,000 “illegal immigrants” nationwide, and deported nearly 140,000 “illegal immigrants”, according to the White House. More than 65,000 immigrants are in real or makeshift federal detention centers — an all-time high.
Meanwhile, the Board of Immigration Appeals, a part of the executive branch, has ruled that immigration judges, who also work for the executive branch, have no authority to release people detained under ICE’s new policies.
But at least 225 federal judicial branch judges have ruled in more than 700 cases that the administration’s immigration enforcement policies likely violate the law and the Constitution. Those judges were appointed by all modern presidents, including 23 by Trump, according to a Politico analysis of thousands of recent cases.
Only eight judges nationwide, including six appointed by Trump, have ruled in favor of the administration’s new mass detention policy, according to the Politico analysis.
“The Court is unable to remain current on all new case authority supporting the Court’s conclusion, given the continued onslaught of litigation being generated by (the administration’s) widespread illegal detention practices,” U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder, a California-based appointee of Bill Clinton, wrote in a Nov. 21 ruling.
Campos is proud that her denomination has taken a stand against mass detention and mass deportation.
Earlier this year, the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church issued a pastoral letter “Addressing the Plight of Migrants, Immigrants and Refugees” in the U.S.
“At no time has the church in the U.S. had a greater opportunity to welcome Jesus among us as he journeys with migrants, immigrants, and refugees than today. We your bishops are clear that the situation these beloved of God face as the Trump Administration comes to power threatens their humanity, livelihood, and basic human rights.”
The Methodist bishops called for churches to offer immigrants “assistance with securing food, housing, education, employment and other kinds of support.” Christians should oppose “all laws and policies that attempt to criminalize, dehumanize or punish displaced individuals and families based on their status as migrants, immigrants or refugees,” the bishops said, while “decrying attempts to detain displaced people and hold them in inhumane and unsanitary conditions” and “challenging policies that call for the separation of families, especially parents and minor children.”
Leaders of the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops, and the National Association of Evangelicals have made similar statements.
Last month, hundreds of church leaders in Tennessee signed The Tennessee Evangelical Statement on Refugees & Immigration.
“While immigration is certainly an important political issue, for us it is first and foremost a biblical issue with significant ramifications for the mission of the church in our state and around the world,” the statement begins.
Fifteen Memphis area church leaders signed the statement, including Rev. Dr. George Robertson, senior pastor of Second Presbyterian Church; Rev. Dr. Rufus Jones, senior pastor of Hope Presbyterian Church; and Rev. Dr. Stephen Cook, senior pastor of Second Baptist Church.
“When Jesus said, ‘So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 7:12),’ he was quoting from the oldest body of laws among humanity for how to treat immigrants,” Robertson said. “The original includes this line, ‘The foreigner living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God’ (Leviticus 19:33-34).
El Redentor, Spanish for The Redeemer, was founded in 2011. It began as a simple weekly meeting in the Memphis area homes of some Maya/Mam indigenous. Mam is the language spoken by some Mayan people.
“Whites typically misunderstand the Maya/Mam to be ‘Hispanic /Latino,'” explained Rev. Dr. Goyo De la Cruz, Campos’s husband. “However, they do not speak English or Spanish, nor do they have ancestors in Italy, Portugal, France, or Spain. Instead, the native language of these people is Mam, and their cultural heritage is Mayan.”
De la Cruz, a United Methodist missionary who has served various congregations in the area, helped the Maya/Mam community find space in Asbury United Methodist Church in Parkway Village in 2011.
Since then, El Redentor congregation has become the center of the Maya/Mam community in the region. Twice a year the congregation hosts a “mobile consulate” for the Consulate of Guatemala in Atlanta.
Campos and her fellow travelers find comfort in their community. She spends most of her time comforting children who have lost their parents, mothers who have lost their husbands, families who are afraid to leave their homes.
She keeps the church doors locked, but her arms and the Psalms wide open.
“The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,” it says in Psalm 24.
“In you, Lord, I have taken refuge; let me never be put to shame; deliver me in your righteousness,” it says in Psalm 31.
“The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit,” it says in Psalm 34.
“We do all we can to support our people, but God does more,” Campos said. “We still have hope. God is with us. God is crying with us.”
