The migrants’ church: The only refuge for a Texas community stalked by ICE

The church of Pastor Dianne García in San Antonio, Texas, has lost 32 of its active volunteers since President Donald Trump returned to the White House: they were detained by immigration agents and almost all deported. Among her congregation, which she estimates includes about 500 migrant families, she says one in four has had someone who has been detained or expelled from the United States. As a result, roughly 50 children in her community are living without one of their parents. The numbers are not just in her head. She has been recording every detention and deportation on Excel spreadsheets to understand the scale of the assistance needed.

“There are many more families in crisis here in the city because of what ICE is doing. Some tell me, ‘It’s like they’re hunting us like animals in the streets,’” the pastor says from her church, which she has named “the migrants’ church.”

García, an American whose mother was born in Ecuador, founded this Mennonite religious community in 2023 with four women who had just arrived in the United States with their families from Venezuela, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The help they provided at the time was aimed at easing migrants’ initial stay in the country, among other things by connecting them with the network of shelters set up by the city itself.

But in the last year and a half, García says, the government’s aggressive campaign of mass arrests has pushed migrants through several stages: fear of remaining in the country; the stripping away of temporary immigration benefits and the creation of economic pressure that makes it impossible to pay rent or buy food for their children; and mass detentions and family separations.

“They know what they’re doing. It’s their strategy to make the community suffer,” the pastor says. “I had never seen anything like it.”

That, she explains, led many migrants in San Antonio to avoid seeking help from authorities for months: “They were wandering the city or locked in their homes not knowing what to do.” In April, she decided to ask a group of people to look for these migrants on the streets and give them the church’s information. She began receiving call after call from affected families, one after another, and then calls from people detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) centers asking for help.

Since then the church has provided members of its community with religious support, funds to pay rent or buy food, and a place to stay temporarily where they feel safe.

EL PAÍS asked ICE for the daily average of detentions in several Texas cities, including San Antonio. The agency replied to the email with information that was not the requested data. An analysis by The New York Times placed this predominantly Hispanic city in March 2026 as the second-highest in the state for migrant detentions per day (71), after Dallas (85).

According to ICE data provided to the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley, the federal agency detained nearly 50,000 people in July alone. That is the highest monthly detention total since Trump began his second presidency. And the pressure reflected in the numbers is evident in San Antonio’s migrant families.

“We haven’t been able to be happy”

Jennifer’s daughters play in the migrants’ church kitchen: the eight-year-old watches videos on a cellphone, slumped in a chair; the younger two, five and three, flutter in the hallway between the refrigerator and the door. They do not attend school. The only person who goes out every day is her husband, and he does so in fear.

“He always tells me, ‘Here are my savings, in case they arrest me.’ He says that if that happens, he’ll immediately sign the papers to be deported. And we’ll follow him. We talk about the same thing every day,” says this 28-year-old Venezuelan woman, who preferred to use only her first name out of fear. Two days before the interview with EL PAÍS they had their latest scare: a police officer stopped the car in which her husband was riding with some coworkers because the driver set off without everyone wearing seat belts. Trembling, Jennifer called Pastor Dianne García. A little later she calmed down because they were released.

At least six police departments that patrol the city of San Antonio have accepted some form of cooperation with immigration agents, known as 287(g), according to ICE records. That allows them to perform some federal functions to assist in detaining migrants. More departments may join: in early August, the Trump administration announced it would distribute up to $3 billion to states and local governments that ally with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

For Jennifer, living in the United States has gone from “a dream to an American nightmare.” They entered the United States in October 2024 under humanitarian parole (CHNV), which former president Joe Biden had granted a year earlier to migrants from four nationalities, including Venezuela. But in March 2025, the Trump administration announced the expiration of that status — which had given them two years of lawful stay while they sought another legal pathway — for all beneficiaries. “That’s when we began to destabilize a lot, both economically and emotionally,” Jennifer says.

Then, in May, for three consecutive days ICE knocked on the door of the apartment they rented. “They covered the peephole with a finger, and one agent pointed at the door and another at the window, as if they were looking for a fugitive,” she recalls. She believes the person in charge of the rentals gave the agency the addresses of people without immigration status, because other neighbors suffered the same thing. One of her friends was detained in the raids.

Jennifer says that on one of those days, the knocks on her door were so hard that she hid under the bed with her youngest daughter, barely a baby. “The scene was terrifying. I was traumatized.”

After that, the family left the apartment and went for a while to a sparsely populated farming town an hour from San Antonio. Her husband had found a job: “We live in hiding, not because we have anything to hide from the law, but out of fear.”

When they returned to the city, they decided to stay temporarily at Dianne García’s church. They already knew her; the pastor had helped them in the past “without looking at whether we were Venezuelan or Colombian.” “It’s where I feel safe. It’s a support network, it’s my refuge and where my family is. We all consider each other family and support one another.”

She regrets that, amid the fear and persecution they have lived with for years, her daughters have grown up unable to study regularly, unable to run and play in the street with neighbors, or enjoy a summer camp like other children. Instead, they stay inside: “We haven’t been able to be happy.”

Collective trauma

The pastor believes God called her to found the church so she could help at this moment: “We are here because God knew the community would need this support. The worst thing is to go through something like this alone, and I know many families are alone.” Like Jennifer’s, and also like another Venezuelan: Yelin, 32, who also chose to use only her first name.

Although they have a pending asylum case, her husband was detained in November and held in an ICE center for eight months. She had to handle rent, food and the household expenses alone; work and raise her three daughters, aged eight, 10 and 14. From working only three days a week as a waitress — so she could care for the girls — she had to work every day: “My God, we had so many bills to pay. I thought, ‘what am I going to do alone?’ I felt everything was falling apart.” She also sold the car they owned to cover immediate expenses.

One afternoon, when she arrived at her daughters’ school to pick them up, they were terrified and crying: “They told me: ‘Mom, the teacher said that if you are late again, she will call immigration,’” Yelin says from the church. From that day on, the girls were afraid to go to school and worried that their mother might be late picking them up: “There were many terrifying moments — times when, if I was gone for just five or six minutes, the girls would already be calling for me, scared.”

At that time, Yelin says the church helped pay attorneys’ fees to free her husband: “Everyone contributed; it was an expense I couldn’t cover. We have met many good people.” ICE released him in July. He still has trouble sleeping at night: he wakes up terrified thinking the agents have come back for him.

Like Jennifer’s family, Yelin’s does not feel free. The mother feels the experiences they have had in the United States have changed them all. The eldest daughter, for example, was forced to grow up suddenly during the months her father was detained to take care of her younger sisters while Yelin worked. Now she seems rebellious. The youngest often comforts her mother when she locks herself in the bathroom to cry: “She was aware of everything and would say to me, ‘Let’s not be sad, Mommy. If you cry, we’ll be sad too.’ They had never been separated from their father for so long.”

Living with migrants and their stories, Pastor Dianne García believes the Trump administration has created a collective trauma “that will last generations,” one that affects migrants but also everyone living in the United States. The suffering, she says, has ruined marriages, increased stress, and raised cases of abuse because people no longer trust authorities. She sees children crying, misbehaving at school, or children who are very withdrawn — children who used to play but now just sit in one spot, in silence.

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