Pro-Trump extremist pastor decries immigration policies

[Thiệu Ngô]

Lance Wallnau warned that the Trump administration’s immigration agenda is hurting Latinos’ church attendance and might affect their voting choices.

By Ja'han Jones

One of the president’s most extreme and sycophantic followers is pleading for the Trump administration to show some political favoritism — if not a bit of mercy — in its mass incarceration and mass deportation agenda, showing that even some of the president’s closest allies are being turned off by his targeting of immigrants.

Lance Wallnau is a Christian nationalist pastor with ties to Donald Trump and JD Vance who backed the Jan. 6 insurrection and has said that “fighting with Trump is fighting with God.”

Late last week, Right Wing Watch reported on an episode of Wallnau’s podcast in which he said he’s been hearing from Latino preachers that their attendance numbers have dropped, as people are avoiding church out of fear they’ll be targeted by immigration officials. It’s a trend I covered in this recent report on some Christians’ consternation toward Trump’s immigration policies.

“Some of the best citizens you’ve got are living in fear of being deported,” Wallnau said before deploying anti-Islamic hate to put them in a positive light:

The MAGA base actually has the Hispanic pro-Trump population, the Christians. You got to do a carve-out somehow on those citizens that have been here for 10 years or more that are actually contributing, well assimilated, versus the ones that are coming in, like the Muslim traffic that wants to take over America and declare Sharia law. They you should not have! You ought to be creating some kind of a criteria for prioritizing criminals first.

Wallnau went on to emphasize his political concerns:

If these people that have been working-class people and they’re serving, they’ve got family here, and they’re in church — and frankly, if they’re Republican, conservative, I don’t want to drive them into anxiety attacks and not voting for Trump because they’re afraid they’re getting deported.

We need not mistake this for an impassioned plea for humanity when it seems much more like a dire political warning to Trump and the MAGA horde. While Trump saw a significant bump in Latino support last year relative to his previous presidential campaigns, recent polling and election results suggest that his destructive economic policies and his bigoted anti-immigration crusade have erased some of those positive vibes.

And all of this is key to the conversation about next year’s midterms, because Republicans are hoping that Latinos will help them retain control of the House next November. For example, the racist redistricting plan that Texas Republicans adopted at Trump’s urging includes districts that were drawn to boost the power of ostensibly conservative-leaning Latinos in regions that have recently voted for Republicans — but there’s no guarantee that things will play out as the GOP intended, especially if the Trump administration continues to target Latinos who might otherwise support him.