09/23/2026
BREAKING🚨 Thirty-one children in one Maryland town now have a 62-year-old priest legally lined up to raise them the day ICE takes their parents.
Vidal Rivas has served at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Hyattsville for nearly two decades, and earlier this year the paperwork stopped being hypothetical. A single mother going through the asylum process was detained at an appointment with immigration authorities. Her son was 4. Her daughter was 18 months old. They moved in with Rivas and his wife.
Rivas' wife slept beside the children to soothe them. When she got sick, Rivas took over the childcare himself.
The mother spent four months in ICE detention. When she came back, her kids did not recognize her at first.
"We didn't expect that because she was doing things right," Rivas said.
Parents of 29 more children have since named him as their standby guardian. Two more families are arranging it now.
Under Maryland law, a parent can designate a standby guardian in case immigration authorities arrest them, and that person automatically becomes the child's legal guardian for six months, extendable by a judge.
Lawmakers passed it during Trump's first term specifically so detained parents' kids would not be dumped into foster care.
Nearly all the parents signing these papers are Salvadoran, like Rivas. Roughly 170,000 Salvadorans hold Temporary Protected Status, and in early September, hours before their designation was set to expire, DHS put out a short notice saying they would keep protection and work authorization for now, with an announcement on the program's future to come "at the appropriate time." Salvadorans in Hyattsville started losing jobs amid the confusion.
"Many people have left the church for other cities, and some have returned to their country," Rivas said. "People are in fear and become insecure."
Rivas grew up during El Salvador's civil war, when he says the military treated clergy who defended human rights as communists. He was detained, beaten and hospitalized.
If he takes in more children, he plans to open a bank account in the church's name to cover childcare costs. He calls it a moral obligation.
"I'm going to keep doing it as much as I can," he said.
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