Sam Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, delivered the benediction during the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., in 2012.

The last time a Republican president was pushing for an immigration overhaul, Sam Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, was summoned to the White House.

It was 2006, and George W. Bush administration officials gave him an assignment: Persuade white evangelical Christians to support a deal for undocumented immigrants to stay in the country. At the time, a majority of them saw immigrants as a threat to American values, according to polls.

Today, the situation could hardly be more different. Almost every evangelical leader supports a route to legalization for some immigrants, and many of them have joined Mr. Rodriguez in lobbying President Donald Trump on the issue.

Mr. Rodriguez’s path—from trying to persuade his fellow evangelical pastors to support immigration to lobbying alongside them in Washington—demonstrates the dramatic swing evangelicals have made on the issue. It is a shift that is now playing a crucial role as the White House and Congress attempt to hammer out an immigration deal.

Evangelical groups that stayed silent in 2006, like the National Association of Evangelicals, are now furiously lobbying on Capitol Hill, trying to get an immigration bill across the finish line.


Forty-three percent of white evangelicals said in 2017 that immigrants “strengthen our country,” up from 27% in 2011, according to the Pew Research Center. Six in 10 evangelicals support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, according to a 2015 study by LifeWay Research, which tracks trends among evangelicals.

White, black and Hispanic members of Mr. Trump’s evangelical advisory board have taken that message to the president, telling him about undocumented immigrants in their own congregations and pushing Mr. Trump to support a deal that would let people brought the U.S. Illegally as children, known as Dreamers, stay in the country.

They believe their efforts are at least partly responsible for Mr. Trump’s apparent willingness to support a deal that would allow Dreamers to stay in exchange for the expansion of a border wall.

“We heard President Trump come out and say, ‘I’m a dad and a grandfather and I want to help these children,’” said Tony Suarez, vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. “I believe that was a direct result of evangelicals in the White House.”


The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Trump’s recent comments about immigrants from Haiti and African countries have prompted some evangelicals to criticize him, exacerbating a divide over Mr. Trump that has roiled the church since his campaign. White evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for him, but support for Mr. Trump among evangelicals has waned during his presidency, according to a recent poll from Pew.

Still, evangelicals, who have deep ties to the Republican Party, are embracing a conservative version of an immigration overhaul.

A lower percentage of white evangelicals believe that immigrants strengthen American society than the American public at large, according to Pew. While most evangelicals support a path to legal status, according to the LifeWay study, nine in 10 want increased border security.


Unlike Catholic leaders, a number of evangelical advisers to Mr. Trump support a border wall, calling it an important piece of any deal that has a realistic change of passing.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition, founded by Ralph Reed, outlined a vision for an immigration overhaul in 2013 that includes an end to “chain migration”—the system under which immigrants are able to sponsor family members, including siblings and parents, to follow them to the U.S.

Mr. Trump has also advocated for an end to “chain migration,” and the principle is included in an immigration bill co-authored by Sen. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma who was a Baptist student minister before entering Congress. That bill includes protections for a small pool of Dreamers.

“I’m trying to convince the White House that they need to stop saying ‘end chain migration’ and instead say ‘prioritize entry for spouses and children,’” said Mr. Reed, an adviser to Mr. Trump. “Phrase it as a hard positive rather than a negative.”


Mr. Suarez and Mr. Rodriguez, who is the lead pastor of a Sacramento, Calif., church, said it took years to get evangelicals to this point.

Following the failure of the 2006 immigration effort, Mr. Rodriguez began a campaign to change white evangelical minds. He met with the pastors of megachurches, penned op-eds in Christian publications and gave speeches to the National Association of Evangelicals, one of the organizations that declined to endorse the 2006 bill.

It was a biblical issue, he told them—Jesus says to welcome the stranger—but also a pragmatic one: White churches are shrinking, and the future of almost every Christian group in the U.S. depends on Hispanic and immigrant communities.

“We met with the powerhouses of evangelicalism,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “The idea was we had to open up their eyes to the reality that the future of evangelicalism is at stake.”

By 2009, the National Association of Evangelicals had adopted a resolution calling for an immigration overhaul. The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, followed in 2011.

Much of the change “has to do with coming to realize the important role immigrants are playing in our churches,” said Galen Carey, vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals, who has spent much of last week on Capitol Hill, lobbying lawmakers.

Just a few years ago, Alan Cross, a Southern Baptist minister from Alabama, believed all unauthorized immigrants should have to leave the country. He said his opinion changed as he met more people living in the country illegally. He now works with a nonprofit pushing to revamp the immigration system.

“My faith pushed me in a direction where I felt like I needed to speak on their behalf and advocate for them,” Mr. Cross said.

Still, like most evangelicals, he also supports a “secure border” to slow the flow of illegal migrants into the country.

Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Suarez haven’t criticized some of the Trump administration’s decisions to end protections for other immigrant groups. They also support the border wall and other security measures, if it means a deal for the Dreamers.

“To lose some kind of legislation for Dreamers arguing about a wall is beyond me,” Mr. Suarez said. “Let’s not lose the battle on that hill. There are too many lives at stake.”

Write to Ian Lovett at Ian.Lovett@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Alan Cross doesn’t have a position on the total number of immigrants that should be allowed to enter the country, and wants only to reduce illegal border crossings. A Jan. 14 version of this article referred incompletely to Mr. Cross’s desire to slow “the flow of migrants into the country.” (March 6, 2018)