(RNS) — On Good Friday (March 29) this year, Pastor Tony Suarez, founder of the evangelical Christian ministry Revival Makers, drove a stake into the ground in the middle of a tent in McAllen, Texas. “This entire southern border belongs to Jesus,” he declared to a crowd of mostly Latino Texans.
Suarez’s stop in McAllen was one of a series of tent revivals on the southern border that his ministry said have drawn more than 9,000 people. He doesn’t just preach: As vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, Suarez advocates with politicians for immigration reform that prioritizes border enforcement, assimilation and a non-amnesty path to legal status.
A member of Donald Trump’s informal evangelical advisory board since 2016, Suarez endorsed the former president in June as one of the campaign’s “Latino Americans for Trump.” Suarez has, however, at times expressed disappointment in the Republican party’s policies at the border. In this he is representative of Latino evangelical leaders who lack trust in either major political party’s action on the issue while pushing them for reform.
“We went to the border and we asked the Lord to intervene, to be in the midst of this, to give wisdom to legislators and to give patience to frustrated citizens,” Suarez told Religion News Service earlier this month. “In Genesis chapter 2, there was an angelic guard at the Garden of Eden. And so we prayed and asked the Lord to do something similar at the southern border.”
For Suarez and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the “free flow” of migrants crossing the border is an “unprecedented crisis” that led the NHCLC to launch its immigration reform campaign, “The Urgency of Now,” in March.
Even as illegal border crossings have dropped following Biden’s recent changes to asylum policy, Suarez said the border remains in crisis, “with no real resolution or end in sight,” calling Biden’s actions “politically motivated but really just empty words.”
“We are a nation of immigrants. We love immigrants and we support immigration reform, but we have to know who’s in the country,” Suarez said.
Since the last presidential election, nearly 4 million more Latinos are eligible to vote, putting the U.S.’s 36.2 million eligible Latino voters at about 14.7% of the electorate. As the Trump campaign has made reducing immigration a number one campaign issue, Latinos, especially those who call themselves evangelical, are far from a unified bloc.
In 2022, Pew Research Center found that 15% of Latinos are evangelical Protestants, half of whom are Republican or Republican-leaning, and 44% are Democrats or Democratic-leaning. That represents a much higher percentage of Republicans than among Latino Catholics.
Suarez said that immigration is just one of the issues the NHCLC’s 40,000 member churches are concerned about in this election, saying that Democrats’ “woke ideology” on marriage, life and gender are the “No. 1 issue.”
But the Rev. Gabriel Salguero, president and founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, said that surveys show economics, poverty and education are the most important issues for Latino evangelicals, prompting his coalition to emphasize the child tax credit, earned income tax credit and nutrition assistance programs like WIC and SNAP.
“Protecting the poor is an issue for the Gospel because Jesus told us that,” said Salguero, who is a pastor at The Gathering, an Assemblies of God church in Orlando, Florida. “Latino evangelicals are not one-issue voters, and we’re certainly not a monolith.”
