FOND DU LAC, Wis. (RNS) — It's just after 8 p.m. on Saturday night, and it's time for the Rev. Esdras Paredes to give his sermon. But the pastor isn't there.
While the team at Ven y Descansarás (Come and You Will Find Rest) scrambles to fix Paredes'internet connection, people at the Pentecostal church in Fond du Lac, Wis., part of the Church of God denomination, are asked to get up and greet each other.
Their preacher is more than 2,000 miles away in Guatemala. Since August 2025, when Paredes was blocked from returning to the U.S., he has been preaching and teaching remotely up to three times a week. He leads Bible studies, moderates a men's WhatsApp group and keeps up with members' lives.
On nights like this one, the limits of leading his church remotely are evident.
"You don't realize that things can change so drastically," said Esdras' wife, the Rev. Wanda Paredes. "And when they do, you're in shock. Like, how is that even possible?"
Now, his family and the congregation, where attendance can be as high as 150 people, are running food fundraisers to pay his expenses and praying he can return — all while they grieve the absence of their spiritual leader.
RNS has identified at least 25 publicly reported cases of immigrant pastors separated from their congregations during Trump's second term. Most cases began with a detention. Esdras Paredes' did not. In the summer of 2025, he flew to Guatemala to visit his mother, who had been critically ill in the hospital, and on his then-lawyer's advice, to apply for an immigrant visa at the U.S. Embassy. Soon after, he was notified by the U.S. government he was ineligible to apply to return to the U.S. until 2035 because of a 1991 deportation order.
Esdras Paredes' immigration story began in Esquipulas, Guatemala, less than 10 miles from the Honduras border. He said his childhood was shaped by violence during Guatemala's civil war. His father, an Assemblies of God pastor, had received death threats as religion became a flashpoint in the war, and he urged Paredes and his older brother to seek asylum in the U.S. The teenagers crossed the border without authorization and immediately turned themselves in to immigration authorities, Paredes said.
That's where his memory and the immigration documents diverge.
His immigration case file, reviewed by RNS, shows that Paredes entered the U.S. in 1988 at age 15, left in 1989 and returned again in 1990. (Paredes said he only remembers entering once in those years.) The file also shows that in 1991, his asylum application was denied. Immigration agents placed him on a flight to Houston for deportation when Methodist Legal Ministries intervened. A staffer from the law firm wrote that Paredes was eligible for a new asylum hearing because of a government settlement reached after accusations of government discrimination against Guatemalans. He was never deported.
The file shows that Paredes did not show up for a 2004 appointment, and as a result was removed from the settlement class and then was vulnerable to deportation.
"I was never aware of a deportation order for me," said Paredes, who also said he didn't know about the 2004 appointment. "I got work permits. I have my Social Security number."
Perhaps the most consequential mistake was leaving the U.S. in 2025. By law, if an individual is in the U.S. unlawfully for one or more years and then departs voluntarily, that person is barred from returning to the country for 10 years.
Esdras Paredes "got bad (legal) advice," said David Koelsch, a former immigration judge who now is a practitioner-in-residence at the University of Maryland's law school. He reviewed Esdras Paredes' case file for RNS. "That just seems to me just an incredible tragedy — for him, for his family, for his flock — but also for us as a country. This is somebody we should want to be here in the United States."
After settling in the U.S., Esdras met the woman who would become his wife. Wanda, a Puerto Rican waitress who grew up in New Jersey, said she was immediately smitten. "I thought he was tall and handsome." She wasn't religious, but as she fell for Esdras, she says, she also "fell in love with Jesus."
The couple married, had children and after years of ministry became co-pastors of a church in Waukesha, Wis. In 2020, the Church of God denomination tapped the couple to take over a struggling church whose burned-out pastor was ready to leave. Membership had dwindled to just three families. When they arrived at Ven y Descansarás in Fond du Lac, they learned only one family would stick it out.
That family helped the Paredes rebuild. After his long shifts on a dairy farm, Isaac Morales and his wife, Gabriela, took Esdras to preach to their relatives and other people they knew. Over time, the congregation grew, and Esdras was able to give up his handyman work to focus on the congregation full time.
Many members spoke of how tight-knit the church community became. Esdras and Wanda both ministered throughout everyday life, from parent-teen squabbles to hospitalizations, from party planning to legal issues.
As Esdras Paredes sees it, the church is family. "If you have a problem, we all have a problem. If you have a sickness, we all have a sickness."
Pastor Esdras "is like my dad," said Francisco Martínez Javier, 38, who began attending the church four years ago after his 4-year-old son drowned and Martínez was struggling with drug addiction and gambling.
"I began to cry when (Esdras) began to preach the word of God," he said in Spanish. Since then, he said he has replaced his partying with the church. He said he now misses hugging Esdras.
"We're known as the huggy, huggy church," said Wanda.
One Friday night in August, more than a dozen members gathered in a garage to wipe down banana leaves, prepare masa in a blender, and cook large pots of pork. They worked past midnight in order to make 360 tamales to sell the next day — $20 for five.
"Since he gave his all when he was here, his people remember that. And now they're giving their all," said Wanda.
The next morning, the second youngest Paredes, who goes by Elias in Spanish and Jesse in English, drove around to factories delivering the orders.
Since his father became stranded in Guatemala, Elias, now 28, has tried to care for his parents, but there's only so much he can do. Because of how hard Esdras has worked, Elias said, "he deserves to be treated like royalty."
And there are times he hears his mother crying in the shower and feels "helpless."
"There's nothing I can do to fix that — the pain, the hurt she feels. All I can do is pray and hope that God restores, heals her heart, helps her to stay strong," he said.
Despite her heavy heart and pain from fibromyalgia and diabetes, Wanda said she's more determined than ever and now carries out much of Esdras' pastoral duties as well as her own. "I'm not a coward, and I'm not weak. I'm a warrior of the Lord," she said. Even if she has to go crawling, she said, "I will be there. I will die behind the pulpit."
In the last year, two members have been deported, and her son Elias lost his first serious girlfriend when she voluntarily returned to her home country, Nicaragua, due to an immigration issue. One member, Shelsy Suárez, was expecting her first child when her mother was detained and then deported.
A single detention impacts far more than one person, Elias noted. "This is something that is dividing families. It's not just one person. It's a network of people. It's not just one family that gets affected."
Many at Ven y Descansarás told RNS they are praying for a miracle. Members Carla Paz and Jalon Parker hoped that Esdras Paredes will be back to marry them in May. Kender Silva, a 22-year-old ranch hand, compared him to the Apostle Peter, who was miraculously released from jail.
The day after his congregation waited 40 minutes to hear Esdras Paredes preach, six more members were baptized. From his room in Guatemala, speaking on his cell phone, Esdras congratulated the baptismal candidates and prayed for them one by one, unable to see exactly where they were. With Wanda translating into Spanish by his side, Elias stepped into the role his father had filled a year earlier, dunking each person into the cold, green water.
"I should be the one doing that," Esdras said. "They're my sheep."
This story was produced through a collaboration between NPR and Religion News Service.
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