SACRAMENTO, CA — Rev. Dr. Samuel Rodriguez, President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), issues the following statement amid increased anxieties among immigrant communities in the U.S.:

“I have publicly praised the new administration for their important and historic efforts to advance an agenda of life and religious liberty, and their stand for persecuted Christians abroad. I will continue to work with the administration proudly and to advise them as I’m asked to do so.

“That being said, recent events have moved me to speak out in regard to the administration’s position on immigration enforcement. It is one thing to pledge to remove violent criminal aliens such as murderers, drug dealers and gang members, and quite another to deport a mother of U.S. citizens, and in the process tear apart an entire family. While I agree there must be consequences for breaking our immigration laws–and I even support securing the border–separating families is an afront to the sanctity of life, a value this administration has promised time-and-again to support and uphold. I cannot condone or defend the deportation of any parent of American citizens, when that individual clearly poses no immediate threat to the safety of our country. To do so would result in broken families, destroyed lives and an assault on our shared American values. In that spirit, I strongly urge the president to more clearly confine deportation to only violent criminal aliens.”

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Rev. Samuel Rodriguez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. He has been named by CNN and Fox News as “the leader of the Hispanic Evangelical movement” and TIME Magazine nominated him among the 100 most influential leaders in America.

NHCLC/CONEL is the world’s largest Hispanic Christian organization. It serves as a representative voice for the more than 100 million Hispanic Evangelicals assembled in over 40,000 U.S. churches and another 500,000 congregations spread throughout the Spanish-speaking diaspora.

Website | www.nhclc.org        Twitter | @nhclc