From Christianity Today:
On June 19, as Iran and Israel exchanged volleys of missiles and officials secretly finalized plans to dispatch American bombers to strike Iranian nuclear sites, pastor Ara Torosian published a letter to his church.
Torosian, an Iranian pastor at Cornerstone West Los Angeles, leads the church’s Farsi-speaking congregation. He came to the United States as a refugee 15 years ago after being imprisoned for his faith. He has always carried in his heart a prayer, Torosian wrote: “that Iran would be free.”
Now, explosions were rocking Tehran and other Iranian cities, wounding and killing children and grandparents, and Torosian was shouldering new burdens from halfway across the globe.
“There are people currently in Iran who were baptized in this very church and still listen to our sermons regularly. We are far from them,” Torosian wrote, urging Cornerstone’s English- and Spanish-speaking congregations to stand with and pray for the Persian worshipers. “We Farsi-speaking believers are living minute by minute with heavy hearts. We’re asking: Are our loved ones safe? Are they alive? What is happening to them?”
But five days later, the suffering of his loved ones came suddenly very close.
On Tuesday, the pastor recorded on his phone as masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested two of his church members on a Los Angeles sidewalk. The Iranian husband and wife had pending asylum cases, according to Torosian. They fled Iran for fear of persecution for being Christians and had been part of his congregation for about a year.
The detentions add to a growing number of church members and Christians seeking religious protection who get picked up by ICE. Often they have no apparent criminal history. In many instances, they were in the United States lawfully, complying with orders from immigration courts. ICE has traditionally not deported individuals with pending asylum petitions, who are allowed to work while their cases proceed.
Immigration arrests have shaken church communities across the country. In April, Kasper Eriksen, a Danish national and homeschooling father of four in Mississippi, was arrested at his final citizenship hearing after an apparent paperwork error. As of late May, he remained in ICE detention. “We have an army of prayer warriors fighting for us,” his wife Savannah, a US citizen, wrote in a fundraising appeal.
Watch the ICE arrest of two parishioners here.
