Former Cult Member Says Leader Asked Her to Kidnap a Mexican Child Who'd Crossed U.S. Border

People/June 30, 2018

By Chris Harris

There she was, at the Mexican border, tiptoeing behind a young mother and her toddler daughter, about to fulfill a mission she believed had come directly from God. It was the late 1990s, and Julie Gudino was about to kidnap the little girl allegedly on the orders of General Deborah Green, one of the founders of New Mexico-based fringe group Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps.

Gudino was one of Green’s followers and a soldier in what Green had dubbed “God’s Army.” Gudino firmly believed Green was a prophet through which God spoke. She was dispatched to El Paso, Texas, a town where, she was told, day laborers crossed into the United States — sometimes with their children.

She alleges she was told to keep her eye out for children “on the street” in El Paso. Green allegedly reasoned that children “shouldn’t be on the street, so if we were to take them, we would be giving them a better life.”

Gudino says she was instructed to wait until dark and then to just “grab” a child. Gudino knew it was wrong but it did not stop her.

There was no way Gudino was disobeying an order from her maker.

“It was the end of the week and I happened to see a woman walking towards the bridge going back into Mexico; she had a baby in her hands and a child next to her,” Gudino recalls, saying she walked behind them slowly. “In the moment, I just became mechanical. I had a very cold, hard feeling to act out what [Green] had asked me to do.”

But then, just as she was about to grab the child, she stopped herself, she says.