Pastor Nathan Paulus reflects on a friendship that opened his eyes to the hidden struggles many immigrants face. Over time, a member of the cleaning staff where his church met trusted him with her story — the trauma of being brought to the United States against her will, the years of raising her children alone, and the constant fear and extortion she faced as an undocumented mother.

Watch the video to hear how her story reshaped Pastor Nathan’s understanding of immigration and why her story is so important for the Church today.

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This video is part of the “This Is My Immigrant Neighbor” series, which invites us to see immigration not as an issue, but as a human story.

Video Transcript:

My name is Nathan Paulus, and I’m a pastor of a church plant that’s now 10 years old. Our church is located in a shopping mall. I became friends with one of the cleaning staff. I could see that there was an unbearable weight on her, but she wasn’t willing to open up.

After about five or six months, she just said, “You’re the first person I’m ever telling this to, but I am a follower of Jesus and I am here undocumented.” She said, “I don’t know why I felt like I could tell you, but there’s this weight of just doing life alone, in secret, hidden, trying to raise my kids.”

Which began an amazing journey. We became great friends with her. One of the things — she came to our house for Thanksgiving that year, and she said it was the first time her family had ever shared a meal with someone other than an undocumented family in the United States in over 10 years.

She was brought here against her will at the age of 14. She was actually kidnapped from a small town by the cartel and smuggled here to be someone in the cartel’s wife. And so she said, “Growing up in Mexico, I knew there’s no escaping that, so you submit to it early.”

She said once he found out that he could expedite his citizenship process by marrying an American, he just left her and their four kids, and she’d been trying to do it on her own. And I gladly told her, “You’re always welcome at our church. This is your family. This is God’s family.”

And it unfazed her, and I was kind of surprised. I’m like, “Why aren’t you responding to that? Why don’t you know that this is a safe place?” And her comment is what really, I think as a pastor, stuck a dagger in my heart, because she said, “The most unsafe place for an immigrant in the United States is inside of an evangelical church.”

And my heart was crushed, which led me on a journey to more interactively and passionately discipling our church on what the Bible says about these things.

The big thing with her is extortion. One, there’s no path for her to correct that. She has been so far removed from her family in Mexico, it would be going to a new foreign land — and a dangerous one at that. And then no legal process for her to correct that, corroborate that story, do anything for her or her children.

And so that left her in a very difficult place: being on a cleaning staff and hearing that her pay would reduce each month but the hours remained the same, all with the leverage of “We can call ICE or we can turn you in.” That happening over and over again.

To needing to get a car repaired, and the place saying, “Well, you can either have sex with me and do sexual favors and get it for this price, or without a driver’s license — and we know that you’re undocumented — we can call ICE or turn you over to authorities.”

And so it’s perpetuating this state of fear. Quite honestly, as a follower of Jesus, one of the things that Jesus said probably more than anything else when he came across people was, “He was filled with compassion.”

To have God begin to break my heart for the things that broke his really began my journey to love my neighbor. I think God is abundantly clear in his Word when he says that we should treat the foreigner as the native-born among us. That itself I don’t think we’ve ever really wrestled with because we’ve never been a foreigner.

Those who have traveled a little bit more maybe have felt that for pockets of time, but to completely go and be uprooted — which Israel had felt, but we as a nation in America have not felt.

To really pray for our political leaders, to pray for our presidents and to pray for our governors and mayors and all the people who are having the conversations around this to have hearts of compassion — but even more importantly, progress.

I think we want a magic bullet to fix the solution, but my challenge is: Can we just take one step? And if we take a few steps here and there over the years, progress — we will see a great change.