"Welcome the Foreigner": Two Churchgoers' 18-Hour Drive to Bring a Refugee Brother Home

When ICE arrested a legally resettled refugee on his way home from work, his church family refused to leave him behind.

It was supposed to be a quiet movie night.

Michael Forbes — a middle school teacher and churchgoer in the Twin Cities — was settled in with his wife and kids when his phone rang. His friend Tim Fletcher was on the line with urgent news: Aboradea, a young African refugee their church had been walking alongside for the past year, had never made it home from his night shift. His family was frantic. Calls to his phone were going straight to voicemail.

Forbes didn't hesitate. He and Fletcher drove straight to the family's home.

What followed over the next two weeks was an extraordinary story of Christian neighborliness — of a small church showing up in big ways for a family in crisis, and of two ordinary men driving 18 hours through the night to bring a brother home.

A Community Called to Care

Forbes and Fletcher had connected with Aboradea's family through Good Neighbor, a program run by Arrive Ministries, a local Christian resettlement organization in the Twin Cities. The program pairs church teams with newly arrived refugee families for a year, helping them find their footing in a new country. Since 2001, Good Neighbor teams have served more than 550 refugee families in the Twin Cities area.

The roots of this kind of ministry run deep. Christian communities linked to World Relief — a faith-based federal resettlement agency — have been walking alongside refugees since the days of the Vietnam War, well before the federal refugee program was officially established in 1980. The Good Neighbor model simply gives structure to what the church has always been called to do.

"God said, 'Welcome the foreigner,'" Fletcher said. "It doesn't mean Well, that would be kind of a good thing to do. You need to do it, and you may not know what it looks like. God equips people to do God's work when it's needed, and that can give you courage."

"He Had Everything"

That night, Forbes and Fletcher sat in the refugee family's living room and began making calls — to police stations, hospitals, car impound lots. They worked through the language barrier with the help of the family's children, who translated between them and the adults. As midnight approached and the search came up empty, Aboradea's father sat with tears running down his face.

The next morning, a family member received a call from Aboradea himself — calling from a federal immigration detention facility in St. Paul. He had been stopped by ICE agents on his way home from work. He showed them his refugee papers, his work permit, and documentation of his pending green card application. They handcuffed him anyway. He was not told why. He was not allowed to make a phone call.

"I wasn't afraid," Aboradea told reporters later. "I had everything."

Aboradea was one of the earliest refugees arrested under Operation PARRIS, part of the Trump administration's effort to detain refugees in Minnesota who had not yet received green cards — many because the government had paused green card processing for refugees. A federal judge later called the arrests a dramatic departure from more than four decades of US immigration practice, noting that the country had made a "solemn promise" to refugees who had waited years — often in overseas camps — to be legally vetted, invited, and welcomed to American soil.

The Body of Christ in Action

Forbes and Fletcher sprang into action. Through a connection at their church — First Presbyterian Church of White Bear Lake, a congregation of about 80 — they tracked down an immigration attorney whose father had once been in Fletcher's youth group. Fletcher retained him on the spot, setting aside the question of how they would cover the cost.

Meanwhile, they located Aboradea's abandoned car near a mechanic's shop, keys still inside along with the family's grocery benefits card. A fellow church member with a knack for getting into locked cars managed to retrieve it without damage.

For ten straight days, Fletcher and Forbes visited the family every day, helping the children keep up with schoolwork, navigating county offices to find emergency financial assistance, and organizing volunteers to support the family while their breadwinner remained detained.

Aboradea was transferred from the St. Paul facility to a detention center in El Paso, Texas — a facility with documented poor conditions where three detainees had died since December. He was then shackled hand and foot and placed on a 14-hour bus ride to Houston, with no stops along the way. He thought he was about to be deported.

All the while, he said, not a single official ever interviewed him — the stated purpose of his detention.

A Church Network That Spans the Country

When Aboradea was suddenly released in Houston — officials told him only that the facility needed more space — he was left standing outside with little more than a dying cellphone battery. Forbes had already been planning ahead. He had reached out to Pastor Chris Seay of Ecclesia Houston, a large nondenominational church, asking him to be on standby.

Seay was stuck in Houston rush-hour traffic when the call came. He sent an Uber, promising a generous tip. The driver found Aboradea and brought him safely to Seay's home. That evening, Seay ordered food from Aboradea's home country. Friends from the same region came over late into the night.

"It turned into a little party," Seay said.

When one of Aboradea's countrymen asked Seay why he had been arrested, Seay had no good answer. "I said, 'I don't understand either. It's so traumatic and so needless.'"

"If churches work together," Seay reflected, "we've got quite a network. We can get almost anything done."

18 Hours Home

Within hours of Aboradea's release, Forbes and Fletcher were on a flight to Houston. Since their lawyer advised that Aboradea could not fly, they booked a rental car and prepared for the long drive — from the bottom of the country to the top. They arrived in Houston near midnight, slept four hours, and were on the road by 4 a.m. The hotel desk attendant, hearing their story, had a bagged breakfast waiting for them at the door.

They rolled up to Seay's home at 5 a.m. Forbes threw his arms around Aboradea and lifted him off the ground.

Aboradea slept for most of the 18-hour drive. They hit an ice storm in Iowa. They arrived at his family's home at 1 a.m.

He hesitated getting out of the car, afraid ICE might come for him again in the night. His friends walked him in.

His family was waiting.

"They Did a Good Job"

The story doesn't end neatly. Aboradea still feels unsafe. His family has hung extra curtains for privacy. ICE agents have returned to the house. He lost a job opportunity because of his detention. He was never interviewed by officials during his 11 days in custody, despite the government's stated reason for arresting him.

But he has something many people in his situation don't: a community that refused to let him disappear.

"They came to visit my family every day when I was detained, also when I came back," Aboradea said of Forbes and Fletcher. "Every day they came here, they bring food, water, and everything. They did a good job."

Forbes and Fletcher don't see themselves as heroes. "We did the normal thing that someone would do for a neighbor in need," Forbes said. "What's not normal is what happened to them."

Fletcher wants to take the family fishing someday. Forbes says he wants to be there when they receive their citizenship.

How to Pray: Pray for Aboradea, his family, and all the refugees who have come to our country legally in search of a better life. Pray that God bless those who look out for their neighbor, whether they were born next door or across the ocean.