When a group of religious-right activists and Christian nationalists were invited to the White House to pray over President Donald Trump at in the Oval Office last month, they also sat down for a meeting with faith adviser Paula White and members of the White House Faith Office.
Among the topics discussed at the meeting, according to former Trump administration official and an ardent Christian nationalist William Wolfe, was conservative Christians' desire to see Trump carry out mass deportations.
Trump-loving right-wing pastor Jim Garlow was among those, along with Wolfe, who were invited to meet Trump and attend the meeting with Trump's faith advisers, but he does not seem to share Wolfe's desire to see mass deportations, at least if they involve Christians.
On Sunday's episode of his "World Prayer Network" podcast, Garlow brought on immigration attorney Esther Valdes Clayton to sound the alarm over the prospect that tens of thousands of Latino Christians could be forcibly deported from the United States because of the Trump administration's policies.
Valdes Clayton opened her remarks by working to reassure Garlow's conservative audience that these Latinos share their values.
"I just want to reassure everybody ... that Latinos love God," she said. "We have the same God. We have a monotheistic religion. Our tradition, our values; 97% of Latinos go to church. We believe in a male and female. No transgender. Our language is gendered. Everything ends in an O and an A, meaning that everything is masculine and feminine, and we go to church regularly."
"Right now, we're experiencing a number of executive orders that are affecting the Latino church primarily," Valdes Clayton continued. "Why? Because the bulk of a lot of the congregations are filled with people who enter here either unlawfully or legally and their permission to stay here is expired."
Valdes Clayton warned that "approximately 10 million Christians may be subject to mass deportations," which she said will have "huge ramifications" for churches all over the country.
"Up to 32,000 [pastors] may be deported unless the Trump administration does something urgently," she added, explaining that these people came to the United States legally on religious worker visas but have been unable to apply for permanent residency because of backlogs in the immigration system.
As such, Valdes Clayton said, "their visa expires [and] they can no longer stay in the United States" because of Trump's executive orders.
"They have to abandon their congregation," she said. "They have to leave the ministries that they started. They, their wives, and their little ones, will have to leave and go back to their country of origin."
Valdes Clayton asked for Garlow's help in getting the Trump administration to "prioritize the pastors [and] help them extend the visas," which Garlow promised to do.
"These are Hispanics we want to be here," he said. "They're here legally, and we want to keep them here legally."
"I suspect Pastor Paula White is on top of all the issues at the White House Faith Office, but I want to be in touch with her," Garlow told Valdes Clayton. "She's very good on these issues and I suspect she knows all about this, but in case this is one that slipped through the cracks, I want to connect you directly."
Participants on the call then prayed that God will "cut through any of the bureaucratic red tape" and "straighten out this matter," so that "those whom you brought here, those of your Kingdom, [will be allowed] to remain."
"We need to get mostly to the Republican Party," Valdes Clayton declared. "All we're asking is: deport the chaff, keep the wheat, and to be able to have that discernment and that godly wisdom to keep what remains strong here in the United States, which is our men who are Christians, who are stabilizing our communities to make America better, and who support the president in deporting the criminals."
It should be noted that these same Trump supporters seem to have no qualms about the administration's current deportation program in which people who have committed no crime are being snatched off the streets and illegally disappeared into foreign prisons. It is only now that so many Christians could become victims of Trump's policy that his evangelical supporters are showing any concern.
