This is an opinion column.

“Jesus didn’t have a church.”

Isaac Cruz almost deported himself. Could have easily done so.

Sorry, deported is the wrong word here. An awful word it may come to be for many here now. Back then, in the early 1990s, the kid was just homesick.

Homesick for Mexico. For Mexico City and Colima where he and his four siblings were born. He was 12 or so. A smart kid. Children of immigrant Mexican families don’t typically speak English, so they’re usually held back a year by their new U.S. school, given more educational runway to catch up. Cruz was slotted for sixth grade. He was tested and enrolled in the seventh.

The border town of Roma, Texas, where his family settled was almost all Hispanic, many of them U.S.-born citizens. But the kid wasn’t comfortable and missed his cousins and friends in Mexico.

“Typical teenager,” he says now, “refusing everything your parents are telling you to do.”

Could have walked across the Texas border, hopped on a bus and paid the driver.

“In Mexico, if you have money, they’re not checking anything,” Cruz remembers. “I’m surprised that I did not get on that bus because it was so easy.

“But something kept me here. It was the good Lord. It was a blessing.”

It was the Lord who brought Cruz and his family to the U.S., to that border town in the early 1990s.

Saul Cruz was a Baptist preacher – a “church planter,” his son says. Saul, his wife Miriam and five children moved to a state on the Mexican Pacific coast, launched a church, then ventured into the deep southern regions of Mexico to Chiapas, bordering Guatemala. He seeded another church until an invitation came to plant a Hispanic ministry in a border town in Texas, near McAllen.

In Roma.

“Besides the ministry, he came mainly looking for the American dream like every Hispanic and Latino,” Cruz says. “We all want the American dream.”

Be noted that Cruz and his family came to the U.S. on a religious visa, which gave them legal status.

Today, Isaac Cruz, 45, is a U.S. citizen, a recently retired police officer in Pelham, and a licensed bilingual therapist in Birmingham. For years, Cruz worked both roles simultaneously, giving him unique — sometimes conflicting — insights on immigration as Alabama experienced significant growth in its Hispanic population. And on deportations, which the president-elect has promised to enact en masse in January.

“Mixed feelings,” Cruz said. “I never experienced the true feelings of an undocumented immigrant because I was blessed to come over here with a visa and a passport. It wasn’t until I worked for the police force that I started seeing it.

“I see both worlds. I saw the law enforcement side with people committing crimes, but I also saw the struggle of Hispanics coming here for a better opportunity and still have a lot of friends who are undocumented. I’ve had to arrest undocumented individuals. Once they get arrested, of course, I don’t have any say if they get deported. Once they go through the system, if immigration or ICE says they want them, they want them, and they’re gone.

“If you arrest anybody just for a public intoxication, a simple violation, they can get deported. That’s rough as a Latino. I’ve also seen the impact of a lot of individuals who commit heavy crimes like domestic violence where the wife or even the husband, they’re the victims. The victims are better because those individuals aren’t there anymore.

“So, a lot of my feelings are like: Man, I did my job, somebody committed a crime. But then I think about the family members — the kids, the wives that are gonna struggle without dad or even moms. As a counselor, if I get to see the family members, especially the kids, it hits something in the heart. Or when I hear the stories, even from adults — ‘Yeah, my mom got deported,’ or ‘My Dad got deported.’ Not that I feel guilty, but I feel like: Man, that must be hard.”

Cruz didn’t particularly want to be a cop, and he certainly wasn’t excited about moving to Alabama.

Saul and his wife had already moved to Boaz, Alabama, where he’d been invited to seed another church. By then, around 1999, Isaac was in college in Dallas and dating his future wife, who was pregnant with their daughter.

“One day, my Dad called and invited us to move,” Cruz recalls. “He says, ‘It’s so beautiful up here.’”

Having never heard of Boaz, Cruz pulled out a road atlas. “I couldn’t find Boaz. It wasn’t even big enough for a dot. Then Dad said, ‘Well, look up Birmingham and then Huntsville, and it’s gonna be in between.’ At first, we’re like, ‘Good for you guys.’ But me and my wife talked about it, we prayed about it and said, ‘You know what, let’s give it a try.’”

Six months was all they were going to give Boaz before considering whether to return to Texas. They liked it, though being Hispanic 20 years ago in Alabama — between Huntsville and Birmingham — was certainly different than being Hispanic in Texas. “Boaz, Albertville, Marshal County area, it was weird, it was different,” Cruz says. “A bunch of people — I don’t want to say they didn’t like us — but they just looked at us different.”

He’d never entertained working in law enforcement, but Cruz’s father had made a connection with the mayor of Boaz (“Dad’s ministry was the First Baptist Church and, you know, all the mayors, they have to go to a First Baptist Church.”). He offered Isaac a job in the police department because he was bilingual.

Years later, Cruz began working for a drug task force in Marshall County and aspired to become a DEA agent. “Man, I love working dope,” he recalled. “This is fun. You get to put bad guys behind bars, kick in doors and all that stuff all the cops want to do.”

The application process to become a federal law enforcement agent is long and painstaking, long enough for Cruz to pause and consider if the job aligned with his calling. “It takes forever,” Cruz says. “There’s a lot of paperwork, fingerprinting. So being a spiritual man, my family, my church, we started praying. I wanted to make sure it’s the right choice.”

Before completing the application, Cruz’s phone rang – random number from the 205 area code. “I thought, ‘Maybe they’re calling to go do some tests or whatever,” Cruz remembers.

Nope. It was a lieutenant from the Pelham Police Department: “Hey, we’re looking for a Hispanic officer. Somebody put your name in the hat, and they say you’re a great guy.”

“I saw that as another door from God,” Cruz says. “He didn’t want me working federally because DEA work is worldwide and I could have ended up in Mexico, Colombia, or even Canada or somewhere else. I was supposed to be here.”

Cruz worked as a jailer but soon was offered a promotion to officer. For that job, Cruz, still a legal resident, had to become a citizen. And he was still reluctant about the role. “I don’t really want to be a cop, so I said, ‘Thanks for the offer.’ They offered me two or three times. After talking to my wife and looking at how much more money I was gonna make — 25 cents an hour extra — I was sure, why not?”

Going into the citizenship test, Cruz was nervous. He’d studied the booklet while at the jail, preparing for “like 100 questions”. He sometimes ran questions by fellow officers. “About civics and politics,” he says, “ Half of them didn’t even know.”

On test day, Cruz says, “They asked me to read something in English, asked me about three questions — something about the flag, something about the stars or the stripes, something about government, and that was it.

“Later, taking the oath, I was thinking, ‘Man, this is it.’ And thanking the good Lord for our blessings, from when we came to the States to moving from Texas to Alabama, meeting my wife in Texas, and God doing different things for the family. Just taking that step was like, ‘Wow, this, this is it.’”

In Boaz and Pelham, Cruz was the first Latino police officer in the department. “I didn’t see a whole lot of discrimination, nothing like that, at least not in public. The guys that I worked for in both agencies were great. They could have been talking behind my back, but I never saw anything derogatory.”

Cruz had dropped out of college in Dallas to move to Alabama to join his father. After becoming an officer in Pelham, he pondered completing his degree. “In law enforcement, I have to deal a lot with individuals with emotional issues, and a lot of stuff that can be prevented,” he says. “The criminal justice system is like a cycle. I was putting the same people in jail, so I started thinking about going back to school and getting a psychology degree.”

He obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Montevallo and soon thereafter became a practicing counselor, catering primarily to Pelham’s growing Hispanic community.

Cruz was forthcoming with his clients. He didn’t exactly open with, “By the way, I’m a cop,” but if the session steered towards sensitive legal matters, he was forthcoming. Whether in uniform or not, trust — or the lack of it — was the most formidable barrier.

“When you connect with individuals, that’s everything,” he says. “When they saw the uniform, the trust, right away, was a barrier. But then as I talked to them, of course in Spanish, and they’d see I was brown, some started trusting me. In counseling, there’s also the trust and the stigma that it carries.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m white, brown, Black, there’s also going to be the stigma about counseling.”

Like his spirituality, Cruz doesn’t mention deportation during sessions unless clients want to talk about it. He’s well aware of the tension and uncertainty among many immigrants, but says, “Nobody mentioned any anxiety or depression over the election or any feelings about deportations,” he says. “I have friends who aren’t legal. They’re just waiting to see what’s gonna happen. One said, ‘I’m just here, whatever happens, happens, things happen for a reason. I’ve been here for several years and understand the process.’”

He hasn’t yet seen an uptick in clients but is comforted that now is the time and being a full-time counselor what he is called to do.

“I found my purpose, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be that I’m going to be inside a church,” he says. “I can still preach the gospel or talk to individuals about my faith outside of the church. I’ve seen it with someone in the back of a police car and in somebody’s house.

“It’s different in counseling, of course, I can’t be open about my views. But just sharing my narrative, my story, that’s what people see. Some ask: Why is it that you’re so different, so happy all the time? Man, if you see me at home sometimes, I’m not very happy. But just having that positive view of yourself, and instilling that in others is ministry.

“Jesus didn’t have a church. He ministered on the mountains and in the fields, and so that’s the example I share with people. There are a lot of different ways to minister, and God calls each of us to do it in our own way, based on the gifts He gives us.”

I was raised by good people who encouraged me to be a good man and surround myself with good people. If I did, they said, good things would happen. I am a member of the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame, an Edward R. Murrow Award winner, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.