Hispanic evangelical leader and Trump booster Samuel Rodriguez delivered a nearly five-minute video message to White House Faith Director Paula White’s “Unleashed” conference in February without uttering a single word about the Latino families, communities, and churches that have been devastated by the Trump administration’s mass-deportation policies.
In his remarks to the “Unleashed” audience, Rodriguez gushed with praise for White, who has used her White House position in both Trump terms to maintain mutually supportive relationships between the administration and its evangelical base.
Rodriguez called White “a modern-day Esther” and a “gatekeeper” who “God has anointed to mobilize the church.”
“We love you. We honor you. We respect you. And we acknowledge the fact that you are God’s primary gatekeeper advancing life, religious liberty, biblical justice, no to socialism and Marxism, no to the cuckoo-for-cocoa-puff agenda coming after our children.”
“I love what’s taking place,” Rodriguez continued. “We are collectively shouting at every giant coming against our children. And we are saying this: ‘In the mighty name of Jesus, get your hands off our children.’”
One giant that has been putting its hands on children in a more-than-metaphorical way is the Department of Homeland Security. White’s National Faith Advisory Board has promoted ICE narratives about violence in Minneapolis and described ICE agents as “American heroes.”
Even though Rodriguez is keenly aware of the harm that brutal ICE raids have caused churches that NHCLC represents, he didn’t say a thing about that while praising White’s success at mobilizing the church to support Trump’s agenda. It’s enough to make one wonder whether Rodriguez has an awareness of how his trademark aphorisms—repeated in his “Unleashed video”—land in context:
- “Today’s complacency is tomorrow’s captivity.”
- “We are what we tolerate.”
- “Truth must never be sacrificed on the altar of political or cultural expediency.”
Rodriguez bragged that the Hispanic church is “emerging as a firewall against these crazy ideologies, against socialism and Marxism. Hispanics are voting more and more family values—faith, family, and freedom—than ever before in American history.” He celebrated that 46 percent of Latinos, and 54 percent of Latino males, voted for Trump in 2024, adding, “I have no doubt whatsoever that we’re gonna continue to see an increase because that’s who we are as a community.”
That confidence may not be so well-grounded. Polls suggest that much of the shift toward Trump among Latino voters in 2024 had to do with dissatisfaction with the economy. And Trump is rapidly losing Latino support based on the impact of his economic policies. A recent Pew poll found that 70 percent of Hispanic voters disapprove of Trump’s performance.
In spite of all the harm Trump’s team has caused, Rodriguez is working hard to keep Latino voters in the right-wing camp. The NHCLC has just launched a three-year voter mobilization partnership with the religious-right group Christians Engaged to encourage Latino Christians to follow a right-wing “biblical roadmap” to voting. In a podcast celebrating the launch, Rodriguez repeated his opposition to “anything that comes after our children” but made no mention of the Trump administration’s mass detention and deportation project.
Right Wing Watch has reported previously that Rodriguez has long been a vocal cheerleader for Donald Trump despite portraying himself as a defender of immigrant families. During the 2024 campaign, Rodriguez urged Latinos to vote for Trump, promising that Trump’s deportation efforts would target criminal “mucho malo hombres” and not hard-working and law-abiding people who have been in the country for years. Rodriguez continued making soothing assurances after Trump’s victory, pledging that he would complain vociferously if that isn’t what happened.
Obviously, Rodriguez was wrong about Trump’s intentions and the aggressive detention and deportation scheme being run by White House adviser Stephen Miller and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. When asked about the disconnect between those promises and his continuing support for the administration, Rodriguez has suggested that he’s making his case behind the scenes. He is publicly urging passage of the Dignity Act, which would allow some long-term undocumented immigrants to stay in the country legally while denying them a path to citizenship.
Last summer, Rodriguez spoke at a gathering hosted by the anti-immigration TPUSA. After TPUSA founder Charie Kirk was murdered shortly thereafter, Rodriguez suggested that Kirk could be considered America’s first evangelical “saint.” In nominating Kirk for unofficial sainthood, Rodriguez didn’t make any mention of Kirk’s hostile and uncompromising rhetoric on immigration, including his demand that “every single trespasser” be deported.
Rodriguez has also avoided any mention of the Trump administration’s immigration policy in some recent interviews, including one in which he denounced the Super Bowl halftime show and urged the NFL, “Stop trying to shove your woke cancel culture anti-Judeo-Christian value worldview full of relativism, decadence and perversion down our throats. Just stop trying to indoctrinate us.”
Rodriguez is associated with the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation, and his remarks at the “Unleashed” conference included a brief reference to the movement's End Times theology that Christ’s second coming will not be to rescue a defeated church, but to rule with a triumphant one. It’s a narrative that encourages believers to take “dominion” over the government and other “mountains” of influence in society and “occupy” them until Christ’s return. “While all of us know that Jesus Christ is coming back, while we are waiting for him to come down, he is waiting for us to stand up,” Rodriguez said. “He is waiting for his church to rise up.”