This winter, ICE officials detained more than 100 immigrant workers in the Central Coast region of California, a disproportionate number of whom lived and worked in the farming community of Santa Maria.
The situation in Santa Maria in 2026 is not so different from the one Rev. Aaron Allen Heist encountered there in 1942, when the U.S. government forcibly removed Japanese Americans from their homes under the guise of military necessity.
But unlike today, where people in the Santa Maria Valley are speaking out and denouncing the deportation operations, Heist’s efforts to defend the Japanese American community were met not with his neighbors’ support and help, but with their anger and ignorance.
Heist, a Methodist minister from Middleville, Michigan, was a product of the Social Gospel movement, a religious revival that incorporated Christian theology with social reform and socialism. Throughout his life, he pursued a dual life as preacher and civil rights activist, championing social causes from workers’ rights to civil rights for Black Americans.
Heist moved to the Santa Maria Valley on the cusp of the U.S. entrance into World War II, after church leadership asked him to take on a vacancy at the local Union Methodist church. At first, his duties were relegated to regular activities such as his Sunday sermons, funeral services, and lectures. Occasionally, he preached at the nearby Japanese Union Church alongside Rev. Yasuo Oshita.
Then came the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Within days, agents from the Department of Justice arrested dozens of Japanese immigrants in Santa Maria on the suspicions of disloyalty to the U.S. One Nisei youth, Tetsuo Furukawa, recalled that the FBI questioned his father over a flickering lamppost near his house, accusing his father of using it to signal Japanese ships.
As tensions rose and government officials, like Santa Maria’s congressional representative Alfred Elliott, proposed herding Japanese Americans into camps, Heist joined other Christian ministers in calling locals to denounce the plans. He beseeched Santa Maria residents to avoid joining in the wartime racial hysteria: “We ask all Christians and free-born Americans to manifest towards our Japanese brethren all true Christian courtesy and friendliness during this tragic time.”
But most Santa Marians were unmoved. In the following months, locals started backing proposals to remove Japanese Americans from the coast. On February 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine destroyed an oil derrick off the coast of nearby Goleta—the only attack on the California coast during the war—stirring up anti-Japanese sentiment. In February of 1942, the FBI arrested Oshita, detaining him at Fort Missoula Internment Camp in Montana.