Photo credit: WMDT
A Baltimore pastor was arrested by immigration agents while on his way to work on Monday.
According to Maryland Matters, Daniel Fuentes Espinal who has been the pastor lof Iglesia del Nazareno in Easton since 2015 is an undocumented immigrant. He fled the violence in his country, Honduras, in 2001 and settled in the Eastern Shore where he ministered and raised a family.
He doesn’t have a criminal record and has been trying to get approval t5o become an American citizen, according to his daughter.
Fuentes Espinal, his daughter, said, on Wednesday that he was on a routine errand to a hardware store when he was arrested by unidentified agents.
The pastor’s detention comes in the wake of a sharp rise in immigration arrests. It has led to ICE agents, often masked and militarized, arresting people at workplaces, in courthouses and elsewhere. They use tactics that Democrats on Capitol Hill criticized on Wednesday as “cruel” and lawless.
The Fuentes Espinal family has reached out for help from their representatives in Congress and to Gov. Wes Moore’s office. The case has also brought support from groups as diverse as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which called the arrest “alarming.”
