A new study finds the Trump administration’s plans to expel undocumented immigrants would potentially impact more than 1 in 20 US evangelicals.
During his final Bible study before the government forced him to leave the United States, pastor Eduardo Martorano asked his congregants to take care of his library.
The Venezuelan man had accumulated a formidable book collection during seminary in Michigan and his early days in ministry. He called it “a treasure.” He had moved all that paper and ink across the country when Iglesia La Vid, a small Spanish-language congregation in Laredo, Texas, invited him to serve as its pastor in 2021.
But on January 29, Martorano’s birthday, the pastor learned that the Trump administration had canceled Temporary Protected Status, or TPS—the immigration program that enabled him and his wife to live in the US and to lead a church—for nearly 350,000 Venezuelans. They had two months to self-remove, as immigration lawyers put it, or they could be deported.
The Martoranos and their four young children prepared a hasty move to Europe. They filled suitcases, spread out their possessions at a garage sale, and listed their car on Facebook. The pastor packed only ten books, many of them small volumes by 17th-century English theologians. The rest, including his beloved, 3,000-page copy of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics, he left behind.
The family’s flight portends what American churches stand to lose as the president’s efforts to execute “the largest deportation operation in American history” sweep up scores of Christians.
Roughly 1 in 12 Christians in the US are at risk of deportation or live with someone who is, according to a new study by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. More than 1 in 18 of the country’s evangelicals could be impacted by mass deportations.
Among the president’s many executive orders on the first day of his second term, he signed a border-security measure directing agencies to focus on “removing promptly all aliens who enter or remain in violation of Federal law.” The language echoed Trump’s earlier pledges to deport all undocumented immigrants.
Taken to its full extent, that would entail rounding up and shipping off an estimated 14 million people—a population the size of Pennsylvania. Experts say that’s unlikely without the billions of additional dollars congressional Republicans are trying to secure for further deportation efforts.
But if the administration succeeds, America will lose millions of Christians.
The Gordon-Conwell study, sponsored by the National Association of Evangelicals, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and World Relief, evaluated data from multiple sources including the American Community Survey and Pew Research Center. It found that, as of the end of 2024, more than 10 million US Christians were undocumented or otherwise had legal status the administration could revoke.
Indeed, the president has already ended special programs that allowed more than three-quarters of a million migrants to live and work legally in the US—including TPS for Venezuelans like Martorano and humanitarian parole for migrants from several other countries.
The world’s migrants are disproportionately Christian, and demographers say they are helping stanch secularization in countries like the US and Canada.
“What is in the report is common knowledge. Or at least should be,” Todd Johnson, codirector of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity and one of the report’s authors, told CT. But the “church and society need regular reminders of who immigrants really are.”
More than 75 percent of immigrants at risk of deportation in the US are Christians, according to the study. As authorities detain a growing number of immigrants who have no criminal records, immigrant church communities are feeling more of the pain.
Over the last two months, agents have arrested worship leaders and church planters. They have surprised undocumented immigrants leaving Sunday services.
Hispanic churches could be hit especially hard. Around 80 percent of unauthorized immigrants in the US are from Latin America. By some estimates, up to 1 in 4 Hispanic Protestant churches have pastors and members who could be deported.
“The administration’s mass deportation policies and congressional support of that would be in fact a church decline strategy,” said Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
But deportation isn’t the only way congregants disappear. The prospect of being detained is keeping worshipers at home and away from church. It is also pushing some immigrants to leave the country voluntarily.
The Trump administration has made a concerted effort to persuade millions of immigrants to self-remove. It has paid for TV and radio ads urging them to “leave now” or be captured. It has repurposed an app originally designed to facilitate legal entry into a tool for immigrants to notify the government that they are leaving.
In Martorano’s case, he didn’t want to remain in the country a day past April 2, the date his and his wife’s TPS expired. Even if they weren’t deported, overstaying would subject them to a ten-year bar from reentering the country.
But where to go?
Venezuela was “not an option,” Martorano said. Despite Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem’s assertion that “there are notable improvements” in Venezuela that allow nationals to go safely home, the administration’s own report describes the country as a crisis-stricken nation plagued by human rights abuses and “widespread poverty and food insecurity.”
Martorano’s mother, who still lives there, told him on the phone, “Son, please don’t return to Venezuela. Don’t come. Don’t.”
They considered living in Mexico near the border, where they could drive to their church in Laredo and keep close to the place where three of their four children were born. But the wait for a visa was too long.
They settled on Europe. Martorano, who is ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), said they’ll live in Italy for a year, then he hopes to apply for a religious-worker visa and return to pastor his church in person. (The pastorate, like many US industries, faces a labor shortage.)
But the government’s immigration policies have become unpredictable. Late Monday, days after Martorano and his family landed in Europe, a federal judge in San Francisco blocked the president from revoking deportation protections from Venezuelans. Meanwhile, Martorano is also applying for his US residency, but he’s heard that the administration is discreetly pausing some green card applications.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Martorano said in Spanish on a Zoom call from Madrid.
On paper, he is still the pastor of Iglesia La Vid—the church’s lone staff member. The 57-member congregation, almost entirely Mexican American, is financially supporting the Martoranos while they’re abroad. It helped pay for plane tickets and other moving expenses.
For now, La Vid plans to survive on a rotation of guest preachers until the family returns. The church has done it before: It lost its previous pastor to cancer, and members searched for two years before finally finding Martorano.
The Gordon-Conwell study warns that the administration’s immigration crackdown “may have devastating consequences for particular congregations. In some cases, if the pastor is deported, the congregation may be unable to find a new leader.”
The PCA has wrestled with how to support its churches that have undocumented members. In February, the denomination apologized after its refugee and immigrant ministry posted information advising migrants on their legal rights and how to protect themselves from immigration agents—a practice that has become common at immigrant congregations across the country.
On Martorano’s last Sunday at La Vid, he told attendees that God was the true pastor of this church. That he takes care of his sheep. That everything would be okay.
“They were very, very sad,” he said. “It’s a blow to the church.”
Martorano said he is not angry or bitter. He makes sense of their situation by leaning heavily into the Reformed church’s emphasis on God’s sovereignty. “It’s God who decides all things,” he said.
His perspective is born of his own story. Martorano came to faith in Venezuela at age 30, after seeing the movie Fireproof and succumbing to an inexplicable desire to read the Bible.
He was taken by surprise when Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids accepted him as a graduate student and offered him a full ride. And it was completely unexpected when Iglesia La Vid called him from Michigan to be its pastor three years ago.
Of course, it’s devastating to have to leave all your belongings and everything you’ve been building for nine years, Martorano said. But “when God sends afflictions, it’s so that we would desire the heavenly city, right?” he said. “So that we would not feel too comfortable in this world.”
The Christian life, Martorano said, is about redemption. He likes to tell people, “The gospel is good news that begins with bad news.”