Beloved Talbot County pastor picked up in dragnet of ICE arrests

A man called a pillar of his Eastern Shore community is in custody at a Baltimore detention facility after he was picked up by immigration agents while driving to work Monday.

Daniel Fuentes Espinal has been pastor of Iglesia del Nazareno in Easton since 2015 — he is also an undocumented immigrant who fled the violence in his native Honduras in 2001 and put down roots on the Eastern Shore where he has ministered and raised a family.

Fuentes Espinal has no criminal record and has been trying to get approval to become a U.S. citizen, said his daughter, Clarissa Fuentes Diaz.

The unpaid pastor works construction to support his family, Fuentes Diaz said Wednesday. She said her father was on a routine errand to the hardware store for building materials when he was arrested by unidentified agents Monday.

“I’ve heard stories about [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] at Lowe’s in the morning, picking up whoever seems to fit their narrative or racial profiling,” she said.

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Fuentes Diaz said she was 8 when the family fled Honduras in 2001 to escape violence in search of a better life. Her two younger siblings were born in the United States. And, after a 16-year wait, she was recently notified that she too would become a U.S. citizen.

“I was going to help my dad and mom get their papers straight,” she said, but that was before her father was arrested.

Fuentes Diaz says her father is a compassionate man of faith. His arrest has been devasting to the tight-knit community.

Len Foxwell, a longtime Easton resident and family friend, said the pastor led his congregation as a volunteer and regularly provided food, shelter, clothing and toys to those who needed help.

“He is known for his unconditional generosity to those who are the most vulnerable,” he said.

“It’s personal for me. Our sons were best friends,” Foxwell said, in the wake of his 18-year-old son’s death last month in a car accident. “Pastor [Fuentes] Espinal was at my son’s deathbed and spoke at his funeral.”

Immigrant arrests rise

Fuentes Espinal’s detention comes amid a sharp rise in immigration arrests, driven by President Donald Trump’s (R) campaign pledge to mount a massive deportation of immigrants in the U.S. That has led to ICE agents, often masked and militarized, arresting people at worksites, in courthouses and elsewhere, using tactics that Democrats on Capitol Hill criticized Wednesday as “cruel” and lawless.

The number of arrests by ICE in Maryland has more than doubled since the start of the year. The Deportation Data Project, a Berkeley, California, based research group, which has posted ICE detention documents back to September 2023, showed there were 384 immigration arrests in Maryland in the last four months of 2023, or about 3.1 per day. For all of 2024, there were 1,355 arrests in the state, a rate of about 3.7 per day.

But in the first six months of 2025, there were 1,769 Maryland apprehensions, or about 9.7 per day.

The data shows that 83% of those arrested in Maryland were men and 45% of all those detained had been convicted of a crime. Another 15% had criminal charges pending, according to ICE, while 40% had no criminal record.

The Fuentes Espinal family has reached out for help from to their representatives in Congress and to Gov. Wes Moore’s office. The case has brought support from groups as diverse as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which called the arrest “alarming.”

“Detaining a widely respected pastor who has been serving the Maryland community for 20 years while attempting to rectify his legal status sends a chilling message,” said CAIR Maryland Director Zainab Chaudhry in a prepared statement.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said his office has been in touch with the family and will continue to monitor the case.

“The Trump Administration clearly isn’t targeting the most dangerous criminals living the U.S. illegally — they are snatching up anyone they can find as they pursue their mass deportation agenda and terrorizing our communities in the process,” Van Hollen said in a prepared statement Wednesday.

The family heard Wednesday from Fuentes Espinal, who told them he had spoken with his lawyer and that a court date was set for Friday.

Multiple requests to ICE for comment via email have gone unanswered. The phone number given to the Fuentes Espinal family to track their loved one, is not in service.

Meanwhile the family waits.

Fuentes Diaz says it is her father’s unshakable faith that keeps them strong. When they talked to him shortly after the arrest, he told them to be strong, that they would be OK, Fuentes Diaz said.

“God is in control of my life, here, there anywhere,” she quoted him as saying. “I’m here doing God’s work, and I’ve been preaching to the six inmates with me in this cell. Maybe this is what I was to supposed to go through to come and shed light in someone else’s darkness.”