On the wall of Pastor Tina Schlabach’s home, a watercolor painting catches the eye. The portrait shows a smiling boy with large black eyes, dark hair and cinnamon-toned skin. It is difficult to look away from this child.
“His name is Ángel,” Tina says, staring at the painting and speaking in her straightforward, measured voice.
Her daughter Miranda painted it.
“She captured his smile,” Tina says.
They met on one of the days Border Patrol was releasing migrants at the Tucson Greyhound bus station. Among them was Ángel and his family.
It was 2014, during the Obama administration, when hundreds of Central American people without legal status were arriving at the station after being detained and processed by immigration authorities.
This story was co-published in partnership with CALÓ News, a nonprofit, community-centered newsroom uplifting Latinos in Arizona and California, and supported by Reporting on Religion, a program of 100 Days in Appalachia and the Rural Digital Resilience Project with support from the Henry Luce Foundation.
At the bus station, Tina and members of Shalom Mennonite Fellowship, and people from other churches and humanitarian organizations were waiting for them. There, they welcomed families with food, diapers, money and other items they needed to continue their journey to reunite with relatives in other states.
“I went to the Greyhound station every Wednesday,” Tina says, wearing a shirt with a phrase that sums up her convictions: “All the Walls Must Fall.”
Her church had become a refuge, where families could seek help after being released from immigration custody.
More than a decade later, some Arizona churches remain a safe place for immigrants. But in the face of the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, the role for faith congregations has expanded. In addition to providing religious services and resources for families like Ángel’s , they have become trusted spaces where families seek legal guidance, shelter, mental health support and protection from fear.
Raids, detentions and deportations have now entered the daily lives of immigrant families. In Arizona, the number of people arrested in street-level operations in neighborhoods or workplaces, known as non-custodial arrests, has seen explosive growth.
Those types of arrests were uncommon, with just 18 recorded in October 2024. Following Trump’s inauguration, that number spiked, reaching a peak of 425 in August 2025 alone, according to ICE records obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by CALÓ News and Arizona Luminaria. Non-custodial arrests for fiscal year 2025, showed a nearly seven-fold increase compared with the previous fiscal year — rising from 314 to 1,963.
Tina is now 66 years old. She is a retired Mennonite pastor, but she has not stopped fighting. Today, she leads efforts to help migrant women through Casa Cardo, a program that provides housing to mothers experiencing immigration-related trauma.
Ángel’s smile remains on the wall of her dining room. Tina also remains, as she did then, by the side of immigrants who are afraid.
“That’s how he was smiling the day we found him,” Tina says, remembering Ángel. “He was a very sweet boy.”
“He is very sweet,” she quickly clarifies. Ángel is still living in Tucson. He’s now a teenager in high school. He is happy, has a loving family and is devoted to his faith, Tina says.
Ángel is still living in Tucson. He’s now a teenager in high school. He is happy and has a loving family that is very involved in their church, Tina says.
A found refuge after living in fear
The young mother left Honduras eight months pregnant and with her 2-year-old son. She says she crossed the river between Guatemala and México on an improvised raft made of tires and a board. Then she crossed the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on an inflatable mattress.
“The truth is, I was very afraid,” she says in Spanish on a recent September day. Arizona Luminaria and CALÓ News are not publishing the mother’s name because she fears for her safety.
She arrived in Arizona in December 2023, traveling through Texas and Virginia, after a friend had told her about a Mennonite congregation in Tucson that could help. Shalom Mennonite Fellowship offered her a small apartment, where she could live with her children. Tina was among those who supported the mother in her new hometown. That support offered the immigrant family a new start in Arizona.
The fear remains, however. Now, what worries her most — in a political climate with ICE operations largely targeting Latino immigrants, including citizens — is a possible deportation that would separate her from her 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter.
“I’m afraid I won’t make it and won’t see the children again,” she says, while in the background, her kids are laughing as they play at a party.
Her circumstances keep her alert. She takes her son to school, picks him up and looks for work cautiously. To avoid traveling alone by bus, a White church member who is a U.S. citizen often drives her.
The concerns that limit the mother’s ability to travel freely mirror the reality migrants face across the country. Forty-one percent said they were worried about themselves or a family member being detained or deported, spiking from 26% in 2023, according to a 2025 KFF/New York Times survey of 1,805 immigrants.
For immigrants surveyed overall, 30% said they or a family member have avoided traveling outside of their home since January 2025 — when Trump took office for his second term. That rate rises to 74% for likely undocumented immigrants.
To avoid drawing attention, people reported not traveling for critical needs that include medical care, as well as not going to work, taking their children to school or going to community events or attending church services.
Not being able to leave her home peacefully, struggling to obtain state health insurance for her newborn daughter and experiencing labor exploitation by an employer left the Tucson mother emotionally broken.
She says the church’s help changed her life. Having legal guidance to navigate her asylum case, apply for benefits for her daughter and receive the keys to a small apartment meant fulfilling something she had prayed months for.
“An incredible joy,” she says. “Days, nights praying, asking God.”
Strength in church unity
If the church can support some immigrants, it can also be a place to confront fear, says Pastor Pedro Ramos-Goycolea. From his home parish, Shalom Mennonite Fellowship in Tucson, he is convinced that there is a kinder way.
The public exposure of detentions and expanded immigration operations have created a “campaign of terror,” he says. In response, the church has another role: “To counter that terror with a narrative of hope and resilience.”
“Sometimes that phrase ‘the people united’ sounds trite, but when we come together across cultures and within the diversity of churches, you can see the strength,” the pastor says.
He has witnessed it.
Earlier this year, a immigration attorney from outside Arizona asked members of the clergy to appear in Tucson Immigration Court after the government requested that a case be closed and that a mother and her three children be sent to a country they had no ties to. They sat quietly in the courtroom, dressed in religious attire.
The court, he says, decided to let the case continue.
“The judge gave her the opportunity to appeal and thus stop the deportation at that moment,” he says.
Shalom provides shelter, mental health support, legal assistance, volunteers to visit detainees at Eloy Detention Center and brings water to the desert — all while the church serves as a meeting point for organizations advocating for migrant rights.
A Lifeway Research survey published by Christianity Today in 2024 found that 75% of pastors of Hispanic Protestant churches had helped immigrants. Among the main forms of support were providing information, transportation help with legal and immigration matters.
In Tucson, churches of different denominations, through a local migrant rights group, created a support network known as the Good Neighbor Interfaith Coalition. They hold vigils outside ICE offices and in neighborhoods where arrests have taken place.
Life after Eloy
César Quispe Vega emigrated from Peru to Arizona in 2023, fleeing an economic and political crisis. He says he crossed the border with the help of a coyote, turned himself in to border authorities and requested asylum. He was sent to the Eloy Detention Center for nearly two years.
Being detained felt all too familiar. In the early 1990s, during the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori, César was arrested amid political violence. He was tortured in custody, and spent five years in prison.
He thought that terror was behind him. But in Arizona, he “had to go through the experience of being imprisoned again without having committed a crime,” says César, 61, speaking in Spanish
His asylum case caught the attention of the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, which offered him free legal representation. He won his case and regained his freedom.
Once in Tucson, he was connected with members of Southside Presbyterian Church, who offered him assistance.
They prepared a small room for him with a bed, television, microwave and mini refrigerator. “It was a thousand times better than being in a cell,” he says. For a month, members of the congregation took turns providing him with transportation, helping him with his documents and accompanying him to receive legal advice.
“I experienced firsthand the ‘love thy neighbor’ principle of the Christian community,” he says.
After years of persecution and imprisonment in Peru and the U.S., this experience of faith and fellowship changed the way he saw life. “It made me see the world with more hope, because I know there are still good people who care about others, about injustices against immigrants,” he says, in a gentle voice, pausing between words.
When the system leaves a void
Fear of being detained, deported or separated is changing family dynamics. An estimated 33% of Latino voters surveyed in Arizona said they were afraid to report crimes or interact with police, according to a 2025 UnidosUS poll of 3,000 registered voters Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia and Texas.
About 34% of Arizona Latino voters said they feared attending asylum hearings or immigration appointments.
Carla Parola, a licensed professional counselor specializing in immigration-related mental health, stresses that isolation can deepen the anxiety and sense of instability many migrants already experience.
When they also feel they cannot trust institutions, she says, the perception that “nothing is safe” increases. In that context, people need a community that can become a “secure base” from which to regain stability and resilience, she adds.
A church can offer something many migrants lose when they leave their place of origin: a network of care, she says.
“They can build strong ties, people in leadership whom they can trust,” Parola says. But she clarified that when people seek emotional support, guidance or resources at a church, it can reveal the cracks in a system that is not responding to a community’s needs.
Arizona-based immigration attorney Hugo Larios says the fear that exists among immigrant families also makes them more vulnerable to seeking help in places that do not always offer professional advice.
Many people cannot afford to hire an attorney and end up turning to free services, including those offered by churches.
“They are pushed to seek this kind of help, which many times is not the best,” he says. He recognizes the value of those services but warns that churches are not law offices.
Larios says he’s seeing fraud become more sophisticated, with scammers posing as attorneys, immigration agents and federal agents, and even contacting relatives of detained people to demand money in exchange for a supposed release.
“How do I know if they’re licensed?” Larios asks. “Don’t be taken in by fancy offices, laminated business cards or shiny folders. Talk to the attorney and, most importantly, ask for their license number, an ID provided by the state that confirms they are legally certified to practice law.”
“I feel at peace, I feel safe”
Recently, a false report of a raid at the factory where Lorena Juárez works in Goodyear, spread fear among workers.
“Many got scared and ran out,” says Lorena, originally from Toluca, México.
It is not the first time she has faced the fear of raids. During Trump’s first administration, she says, her mobile-home neighborhood in Avondale was among the Arizona communities targeted in ICE operations. Suddenly, neighbors disappeared — some detained; others simply no longer there, she remembers.
Lorena has spent years living under pressure and emotional stress.
The mother of four and grandmother of four says there is something that remains when everything else seems uncertain — her faith in God and the protection she finds in prayer.
“I feel good attending Mass, listening to the word of God. I feel that I have peace, that I have an open door,” she says with quiet confidence.
Her husband, Ignacio, works in a warehouse that manufactures mobile homes. Now, like so many immigrant parents, they both go to work every day, afraid of what might happen.
“We are terrified that they will deport us and what might happen to our children,” she says.
Every Sunday, Lorena goes to Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission in Phoenix. There, in a small building shielded by a cross, she finds something increasingly difficult to secure outside: “I feel at peace. I feel safe.”
“They know we love them”
About 250 miles from Tucson, toward the western end of Arizona’s border with Mexico, lies Yuma. Both cities are part of an extensive border region, but their realities and communities are different.
At Gila Mountain United Methodist Church, Pastor Edgar Vergara Millán accompanies a community that experiences the consequences of immigration policies firsthand.
“Most of the population is Hispanic and Mexican American, and our ministries serve that community,” Vergara says. It’s early October and he’s seated in the church’s spacious fellowship hall, his hands clasped as he speaks of a community that, like him, shares the experience of being Latino.
Around him, people gather over coffee, fruit and sweet pastries.
When SNAP/Nutrition Assist benefits were paused, they sought to respond to the crisis. “That is how the food justice ministry was born,” he says.
Each month, Vergara says the church’s Community Food Pantry provides a box of food to about 50 families — more than 90% are Latino and immigrant.
Sandra Torchia — a lay leader with a steady smile — is always willing to help. She walks through the pantry and points out products that fill its shelves: beans, rice, canned goods, shelf-stable milk, peanut butter and more.
“It is so bleak,” she says with a touch of sadness. “Where is our country now when it comes to love for other people? Jesus teaches us to love everyone and especially strangers.”
At 82, with the energy of someone who still has much to do, Torchia continues helping migrants. “They know that we love them and that they can find refuge here.”
To support the immigrant community, the Methodist church has an Immigrant Solidarity Fund, part of the Desert Southwest Conference, to respond to immigrant communities’ needs. Vergara chairs the newly-established Asylum, Refuge and Immigration Committee.
“The purpose is to provide support to individuals and families who are suffering because of the political-social atmosphere, systemic persecution and the terrorizing of immigrant communities for political purposes,” he says.
The pastor knows the border’s reality. He was born in San Luis Río Colorado, Sonora, sister city to San Luis, Arizona. He grew up on both sides of the line that separates the U.S. and México, and studied in Yuma. He became a psychologist and left the borderlands to earn a master’s degree of Divinity in North Carolina.
His path led him back to Yuma, where he now serves as senior pastor in the city where he grew up.
“It is worth making the effort to build community, bring people together and raise awareness that, as human beings, we have much more in common than what divides us,” he says of faith, service and fellowship.
After the religious service, after blessing the bread and wine, the 46-year-old pastor raises his hands in prayer and speaks to God.
“Please, show us your glory.”
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