“Immigrants are not numbers, not statistics,” Pablo Juarez told Baptist scholars, historians and ministry educators gathered at Smoke Rise Baptist Church. “They are human beings that are running for their life, begging for some people to take care of them. And it’s a tragedy if we don’t do that.”
Juarez, pastor of First Baptist Church en Español in Kaufman, Texas, made that appeal during the opening plenary of the 2026 Joint Annual Conference of the Baptist History and Heritage Society, the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion and the Association of Ministry Guidance Professionals. The May 18-20 conference centered on the theme “The Church and Global Migration.”
In a conversation with Emily Prevost, professor at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, Juarez pressed participants to understand migration not as a distant political issue but as a pastoral and congregational reality already shaping churches across the country.
His message came from both personal experience and pastoral work. Born in Nicaragua, Juarez described growing up in poverty, being enrolled in the Sandinistas as a teenager, studying in Cuba and later living through war. When violence again threatened his family, his wife urged him to consider leaving.
“Leaving our home country is one of the most painful decisions we have to make.”
“Now we have our children, we need to do something,” he recalled her saying. “We need to leave.”
That decision, Juarez said, is often misunderstood by those who never have faced it.
“Leaving our home country is one of the most painful decisions we have to make,” he said. “Let me tell you, very painful leaving your fathers, your parents, leaving your siblings. And you don’t know that you going to see them again.”
“We don’t come here for fun,” he added. “Most people are running for their life and their children.”
After arriving in the United States, Juarez said, his family faced language barriers, insecurity and disorientation. The turning point came through a congregation that helped him discover belonging.
“The church helped me to feel valued, to feel accepted, to feel that I was somebody,” he said. “And that changed my life.”
Now, as a pastor, Juarez sees immigrant families facing new waves of fear, instability and separation. He described receiving an early morning call from a woman in his congregation.
“Pastor, can you come, please?” she told him. “My husband has been taken by ICE.”
The congregation, Juarez said, often encounters the limits of what it can do.
“One of the things we know (is) that we are powerless,” he said. “There is nothing we can do humanly speaking. And sadly, we know that there is nobody speaking for us.”
Yet those pressures also have changed the church.
“The church started getting more the togetherness and the fellowship and the compassion toward each other,” Juarez said. “That solidarity and the love and the compassion for each other, that’s something that been an awakening in my church.”
Juarez said his congregation has learned to respond with more than sympathy.
“Our church got united with the family, supporting the family,” he said. “Not just praying for them, but financially.”
And that response is central to Christian witness, he said. “We are not in a crusade converting people from one religion to another, but we are on a mission to show people how the love of Jesus looks like.”