THOMAS LARSON

(San Diego Reader August 21, 2025)

Our Lady of Guadalupe has been known, for decades, as San Diego’s immigrant church. These days if you walk to the bustling neighborhood chapel—its walls of sun-addled white stucco, its doorways outlined in florid blue vines, its unmissable dignity beside the I-5—you pass vendors with pots of tamales and cobbed corn alongside Guadalupe-imaged candles, parishioners milling about just out of Mass or waiting for the next one, a few older men alert by the front entrance, closed but not locked. Through that door you are welcomed: alabanzas, or Mexican folk songs, lather the air; people beam with Sunday forgiveness; the weathered pews sag with accumulated warmth. When the priest trails in for Mass, decked with alb and green-sashed chasuble, he brings solemnity to his conclave of migrants, sheltered by their faith-based anonymity—about your status, no one cares, not even if you speak just a bit of English, your skin is brown, and your hands are callused from agricultural toil.

Except Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who may have its parishioners in its sights.

In the summer of 2025, President Trump’s circus of intimidation, racial profiling, and WWE-style takedowns are sweeping the nation, and it’s wise—if not imperative—as Father Scott Santarosa, Our Lady’s chief pastor, tells me for the church to be extra prepared. Even at Sunday Mass. Which means to inform, to organize, and to fortify the staff and parishioners with resources if ICE agents target any of their gatherings.

I sought out Father Scott after June 20^th, International Refugee Day, when members of the Catholic diocese and other faith leaders and organizations bore witness to the plight of migrants, occupied the carpeted corridors outside immigration courtrooms on the fourth floor of the Edward Schwartz Federal Building. The headline that day shouted that when men and women with collars massed and engaged with ICE agents who, facing the assembled—some in their collars, others wearing crucifixes—“scattered,” who knows if they were intimidated or shamed.

Father Scott is a Jesuit, young, vibrant, philosophically turned, and comfortable with stressing Christ’s teaching in any situation. He’s Our Lady’s pastor since 2022. Before, he served at the Dolores Mission in LA’s Boyle Heights; he requested a new assignment to a “low-income, Spanish-speaking parish” in San Diego, where, he’s happily ensconced: “I love it.”

For context, Father Scott described the anxiety, palpable among his flock, of whom there are some undocumented. The church’s response to their potential arrest and removal is, “We see you in your fear, that alienation, from your lives. You can’t live one thing outside the church and live something else inside the church.” During Mass, he says, “you can offer [the fear] to God and move on—in some way.”

In July, San Bernardino’s Bishop Alberto Rojas waived the obligation to attend Mass to parishioners who felt their appearance was dangerous. A similar edict has not been levied by the local diocese. Were it to happen—Father Scott’s feelings are mixed. It’s great, he says, to have their fear of assembly recognized as a reality. But “it’s a terrific loss because now more than ever they need to come to Mass.”

If ICE questions a parishioner or church official, they hand the agent the wallet-sized “red card.” On one side it states, “I don’t have to speak to you, show you papers, give you permission to search my home or my belongings—based on my Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights.” The other side, in Spanish, details the rights of citizens, green-card and visa holders, asylum seekers, the temporarily protected, and arrivals who are due a status hearing. The red cards are produced by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

In addition, helpful options are available from the San Diego County Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. If a family member is detained, the county office provides resources for child care, kids’ safe transportation to school and home, food supplements, and strategies to secure cars, pets, property, bank accounts, healthcare files, and power of attorney.

Widespread fears have meant young adults are caretaking their frightened parents and extended families. Father Scott says parishioners have said some quit going to the grocery store, buying gas, shopping for clothes, congregating in a bar or backyard, though Our Lady remains an exception. Many are holed up waiting for this ICE swarm to pass.

He says he’s even “weaving the message” into his homilies. One is to bring the kids to the front and ask them to play a game, “Who is my neighbor?” A relative? Yes. A longtime friend? Yes. A person who’s just moved in? Yes. (These, he says, may be undocumented.) He instructs the kids that “some people believe this person is not your neighbor,” and they want them gone. But, remember, “Jesus is calling us to be a neighbor to everybody, to see everyone with love and compassion.”

With the Trump administration challenging state sanctuary laws (San Diego County is one of four in America so designated), which under President Biden protected people in hospital, schools, and churches, Father Scott understands the chessboard nature of ICE raids and is a few steps ahead, anticipating their arrival.

During Mass, the front doors are locked. A paid staff person is stationed by a side door. If agents descend, the watchman closes the side door and the side gate, and he calls Father Scott and the sacristan to await orders.

Does he believe sanctuary law will protect the “strangers” among his members? If a church directs its moral courage to minister to the alien, the outsider, the vulnerable, can we expect Californian and, for that matter, the nation to act the same?

Father Scott pauses spins in a half-circle in his chair, vigorously rubs his short-cropped black hair. He says the church’s moral foundation is no different than the foundations of our civil, criminal, and regulatory laws. After all, he says, this country is built on “Judeo-Christian values, that is, the common good.” That good is common to church and state and does not overrule institutional separation. “I don’t think it’s honest to do that kind of splitting.”

Does he think of the church’s support of migrants as resistance?

He illustrates the point with a religious example. Recently, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, he led a procession through the barrio, a yearly event. “There’s no protection outside as you have in the church,” he says. “Let’s say ICE shows up and surrounds 400 people. They can see it’s a National Eucharistic Pilgrimage. It’s a practice of faith.” Such a public gathering is “a conservative and traditional Catholic thing’ that he believes will warn ICE agents, “Here is a border they cannot cross.” His resolve, in this instance, remains untested.

Perhaps because of Our Lady’s calling to recognize the threat to the migrant community, the air of its resistance aroused the San Diego Catholic diocese—and thus, the June 20^th action echoed throughout the county. Soon—spearheaded again by the newly installed Catholic Bishop, Michael Pham—the diocese kicked off a “new court-accompaniment ministry,” with “training sessions” at the San Diego Catholic Pastoral Center, inviting the laity from Episcopalian, Lutheran, Jewish, Nazarene, and Islamic traditions, non-faith-based activists, and members of the San Diego Organizing Project to “walk with the vulnerable.” I attended the kick-off and a session, but before that, I asked two local religious leaders what in their faiths compelled them to “welcome the stranger.”

*

Iman Taha Hassane heads the Islamic Cultural Center in Clairemont. At his desk in the domed-and-spired mosque, which houses a school and prayer hall, Iman Taha wears a summery guayabera and a white-knitted kufi. He tells me that a majority of the county’s 100,000 Muslims (of which 20 percent are Arabs) have concentrated neighborhoods, fleeing unending Middle East conflicts: the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Gulf and Iraq Wars, civil strife in Somalia and Syria, the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, and ethnic battles in Mauritania, Senegal, and Sudan. Such welcomings of Islamic immigrants in America proves this country can be bighearted to defenseless foreigners.

If ICE seeks to detain Muslim women, via raids or in courtroom hallways, they are easily profiled—her hijab, Burqa, abaya, and other modest garments cover her body’s suggestive outlines. Men also dress with loose-fitting clothes like the thobe or long robe to deemphasize their shape. Such traditions are core to the Qur’an, which instructs the faithful that they can “move over the earth” and, given entry, integrate themselves and their religion into other, often more open, societies.

The Qur’an, he says, “tells stories of the prophets—from Noah, Abraham, Jesus, Moses, David, Solomon, and the last, Muhammad. Nearly all of the them migrated during their lives. Why? Because of religious persecution, themselves or their disciples. God,” he continues, “said the earth belongs to everyone.” It is a principle that “wherever you are, if you are not able to survive, go and look for another place where you can find food, safety, where you can prosper. And, when others show you kindness, show kindness to them.”

Kathleen Owen, a retired Unitarian Universalist clergywoman, tells me that as a court witness, she caught the stench of a Catch-22: Some migrants show up for hearings because they believe their asylum case is not illegal but constitutionally legitimate; they trust they won’t be detained. Yet out of fear of being deported, many don’t appear. Thus, if they miss their date, they’re subject to arrest and automatic exile. As for the Unitarian’s commitment to the “other,” she says in an email: “Influenced by the world’s sacred scriptures, nature, and our experience of humanity, Unitarian Universalists draw from our heritages of freedom, reason, hope and courage, building on the foundation of Love. Love is at the center of our shared values and it is living our values that call us to aid the stranger.”

At the end of the training session in the diocese basement (some 50 volunteers query about parking, recording ICE arrests, and the “purposeful complexity of immigration law”), I ask Bishop Pham, a refugee from Vietnam, whose life echoes the story in Exodus.

“I was eight years old when the North Vietnamese took over the South. For a couple of years, we had only one meal a day—we had to eat barley. It was hard to chew. If I stayed in Vietnam, I would not have had the type of education I got here.” He says that though the Catholic church was shuttered, people sought permission to celebrate Christmas” and often received it or did so clandestinely. The North Vietnamese “wanted us to follow them. They were afraid if the churches were open, it would mean the rise of protest,” that is, an opposition to an atheistic communism.

He overflows with gratitude for America. “All the opportunities to grow and express myself are here. The things that you have provided for us [Vietnamese] as a country,” and I sense a quiver in his voice’s memory, near tears, overwhelmed by his journey from engineer to seminary to priest and Bishop. Diversity and harmony are key words for Pham. America, he insists, is “a witness to the world that we can come together.” As for his installation, it was “God’s gift to me for growing up here in San Diego for 40 years.”

I can’t help but ponder how the Judeo-Christian command to greet and aid the stranger has flipped. President Trump always uses the phrase, “our country.” MAGA nation has internalized it. Newcomers are seen as strangers, one of them, not one of us.

*

On the fourth floor of the Schwartz Building, the corridor along which eight immigration courtrooms and their judges hold hearings blazes with fluorescence lighting, the soul-killing shine of corporate banality in the TV series Severance. It seems such sterility is designed to crush the spirit. In the waiting room, a monitor lists the day’s cases: for example, USA v. Marco Sanchez Avila, 8:30 a.m. Migrants and ICE and spiritual support groups elevator up. Tension soon vibrates the long hallway. Unless it’s your court date or you get in as an observer, you haunt the hallway with the agents, the day I go, a dozen.

ICE agents who cordon the hallway are like the sage-grouse who inflates its chest to show dominance. In their park-ranger green, the agents bulge with wraparound bulletproof vests, belts adorned with key sets, Tasers, spray vials, hidden zip ties, notebooks, other leatherette pouches. Polished badges clink from neck chains. All sport tight ball caps; the women, in a pod of three, clip their hair back. Each is group-ID-ed by POLICE ICE, bolded white on their vests. Dominant is the black neck gaiter, shades of Antifa. So fully swathed, only their Target tennis shoes and eyes, hyper-wary and piercing, reveal any personhood. One agent, gloved, hatted, gaitered, shows no skin and appears coffined, a kind of black-robed ghost.

The source of the tension is twofold. One is the agents’ intimidating presence and the other is Detention Resistance, an “Abolitionist Collective,” a dozen protestors who prefer anonymity and who since 2018 have documented ICE’s alleged rough treatment of the arrestees who, they maintain, “have been criminalized by the state.” On view are dueling counter insurgencies—one paid, their identities hidden, the other unpaid, their T-shirts emblazoned with lefty battle cries—and, I should note, are both separate from the Faith force, which tally 20 leaders and volunteers. In any event, everyone waits until decision time: first, a courtroom door opens, client and lawyer emerge, smiling. The man is temporarily safe, case continued.

Hope buoys, and the vigil restarts. Nothing happens, quiet chatter, nothing happens, nodding off, nothing happens, slump and sigh, then BOOM! The door of Amelia Anderson’s courtroom pops open and ICE swarms. So, too, do the Resistance folks. I learn later that a hallway ICE designee carries a list with photos of the day’s defendants and is “tipped off” by the government attorney to arrest the person. The judge has dismissed his case (a plea for asylum at the border or right now at the hearing), which means his claim to remain in the U.S. will be heard again but, the court fearing his flight, needs to be detained. The target is a dark-skinned, twentyish man who is taken aback by the sudden melee.

This is Mustafa Malik, an Afghani, who is accompanied by his attorney, Maria Chavez, of PANA, Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans. The organization represents underrepresented Muslim refugees. Like a media scrum for a celebrity convict, the agents and the resistors jostle down the hallway. Shouts of “be gentle,” “we’re filming you,” “stop pushing” firework the air. Turning into the small elevator bay, one of two doors open and ICE boards only Mustafa. The resistors explode. “Hey, he has a right to counsel. Let her go with him.” The doors shut. “That’s a power trip,” a woman hollers. “ICE’s tactic is to separate people from their attorneys. Instill fear.” Another cites the ubiquity: “This is not only happening in San Diego, but all over the country.” A minute later, Chavez who’s escorted many detainees to the basement (one man’s arm was nearly broken “in retaliation for her advocacy,” an activist tells me) rides down another elevator and spends the next 3 hours with Mustafa in his holding cell prior to ICE’s busing him to Otay Mesa Detention Center.

*

In the aftermath, confusion reigns. Why has he been detained? No one knows. Frustrated supporters return to as we were, volunteers’ powerlessness deflating all. Twenty minutes later, a Portuguese man went in for his hearing while his lawyer tries to Zoom-in from Orlando, Florida. The judge disallows the proceeding to go on (she needs prior notice) and sets another date. The government attorney wants to “dismiss the case without prejudice.” The judge iterates her continuance. Moments later in the hallway, he’s frog-marched to the elevator. Another canned sardine for overstuffed Otay Mesa (13 detainees occupy cells with 8 beds) to await a follow-up hearing. The Portuguese may get a “credible fear” interview—his plea, “Don’t send me home; I’ll be tortured and killed”—but such cases these days are rarely successful.

As the Faith group assembles in the lobby for a debrief, I think about a volunteer, Susan, whose spiritual care captured the purpose of the mission. In the courtroom, she consoled a woman, the wife of a man facing removal for overstaying his visa. Susan had never met the woman and did not speak Spanish, but her handholding and hugs assuaged her fear and loosened tears of joy: His case was continued. Another Faith participant says he put a hand on a detainee and whispered in his ear, “God go with you.” This I sense is ironic testimony to the man’s exercise of his religious persuasion as well as marks the public’s helplessness in the face of the federal grip. To end the day, Father Scott addresses a prayer to God: “All things work through your way to glory, somehow, though it might not be clear how.”

Outside, the Detention Resistance members voice their exasperation, a daily unthawing of ICE’s strongarming. One wiry-haired young man who’s done jail time for their cause and “fought Nazis in the street” says ICE’s mandate feels like “some real scary fascist shit.” Another says it’s heartening to see potential deportees assent to voluntary removal instead of going to the border holding tank, then, perhaps, to a gulag in El Salvador. “It’s a form,” she says, “of ‘You can’t fire me; I quit.’” In a sense, voluntary removal was the de facto request half the migrants chose today. They didn’t bother to show.

Before leaving, I ask Maria Chavez about Mustafa’s case. He opted for voluntary departure but must be “processed” at Otay Mesa, a scary thought, she says. Though he was born in Afghanistan, he received permanent residency as a guest worker in Italy before coming to America. Chavez avows to get him behind the welcoming shield of the Italians, not under the beheading swords of the Taliban.

Either way, justice or death, his case and its complications point to an inconvenient and rarely acknowledged justification for these “criminal removal” operations.

*

According to ICE’s own data, only 10 percent of the 1350 migrants held at Otay Mesa, run by CoreCivic, a private prison company, have been convicted of a crime or a misdemeanor. What’s more, of that 90 percent, 84 percent have no ICE threat-level classification. Apparently, they need to be sequestered, or so they say. Sure, there are flight risks but with more and more ICE raids, migrants are sitting ducks in every labor camp or local restaurant. My sense is it’s only partly about deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller calling the lettuce picker, a “rapist or a murderer.”

By a perverse financial leverage, with Congress abetting the prison industry with billions for ICE, detention and deportation are now nearly fully privatized. As of mid-August, new agents can receive a $50,000 signing bonus. Consequently, CoreCivic, whose stock price has been flat since 2000, may be a good bet as they fill triple deck bunk beds with meatpackers for a hearing or a plane elsewhere. CoreCivic operates 43 prisons in the U.S; its total revenue in 2024 was $2 billion. The cost of an adult detainee at Otay Mesa is $157 per day; with 1350 detainees, that’s more than $211,000 per day—$6.3 million per month. All taxpayer funded.

Faith and resistance, prayers in the hallways, militants in the streets, face a nationwide monolith. Migrant expulsion has already triangulated the courts, funds from a Republican-controlled Congress, and a partnership between law enforcement and capitalism. Authoritarianism requires a Deep State bulldozer to succeed. So far the unholy alliance is working.