Pastor held by immigration authorities in unlawful detention for 100+ days
A Danish pastor has been detained by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for over 100 days without bail and without apparent reason.
Pastor Torben Søndergaard, a Lutheran-turned-Evangelical Christian, is the founder of a popular ministry called The Last Reformation. In 2019, Søndergaard fled Denmark, an officially Lutheran country, to seek asylum in the United States after becoming the target of a concerted harassment campaign by the Danish government and media, whom he alleges destroyed his reputation.
Upon his arrival, Søndergaard immediately applied for asylum and set up his residence in California while he grew his ministry.
The pastor received no word about his application until a letter from the Department of Homeland Security summoned him to a meeting in Orlando, Florida on June 30th. At the meeting, Søndergaard says he was accused by agents of smuggling arms into the U.S. from Mexico.
“You’re not going home today, we’re detaining you,” an agent said, according to the pastor. The next thing he knew, Søndergaard found himself up against a wall and placed in handcuffs.
“I’ve never even crossed the border from United States to Mexico and my passport shows the proof of that,” he says in a released audio recording. The one time he was in Mexico was to launch a small missionary training school in Rosarito.
After being handcuffed, Søndergaard was taken to ICE’s Baker County Detention Center in North Florida, where he was locked alone in an 8x13-foot cell. He remains there to this day, having been allegedly denied bail without cause.
“I’m still locked up away from my family and the life out there I love,” he said emotionally. “And I still don’t know why I’m here.”
A search for Søndergaard on ICE’s Online Detainee Locator System yields no results, and ICE did not immediately respond to America’s Frontline News’ request for comment.
“Torben is no stranger to persecution, as he was forced to flee his home country of Denmark after legislation was to be passed forbidding pastors to pray for children and people with disabilities,” reads the description of a fundraising campaign created by Lene Søndergaard, Torben’s wife. “Torben was the target of a smear campaign and made the difficult decision to flee his home country for America.”
According to CBN News, Søndergaard was investigated in 2016 by six Danish agencies for a litany of accusations before the government was forced to admit there had been no wrongdoing.
But Søndergaard was then visited by two undercover reporters, one of whom pretended to be mentally ill and the other who professed to be interested in joining the pastor's center and getting baptized. Søndergaard obliged, only to find himself and his ministry later demonized on national television in a documentary called "God's Best Children” which painted him as a dangerous radical.
That started a hailstorm from which Søndergaard could not recover. He was forced to close down his center. During their last three weeks in Denmark, he and his family did not leave their home.
When they finally entered the United States and applied for asylum, Søndergaard testified in a sworn affidavit that returning to Denmark would mean imprisonment and he would lose custody of his child.
"I also have a message to people in America, that we need to be prepared. We need to be alert," Torben said, "to say that this would never happen in America. That is a lie. I have said the same [about] Denmark."
“This is going to come to America."
