Former priest accused of sexual abuse in Aurora, Illinois, faces deportation to Colombia
By Claudette
Posted Nov 13, 2026 at 10:19 PM
Authorities allege that between January 2009 and November 2014, Alfredo Pedraza Arias, then a priest at the Sacred Heart Church in Aurora, sexually abused two victims. Early reporting described the victims as under 13, while the criminal charges described two girls under the age of six. The allegations involve two incidents that occurred at his residence attached to the church.
A former Aurora priest accused of sexually abusing two girls has been arrested by immigration agents and is in the process of being deported to Colombia, his home country. Pedraza Arias, 50, was released on $500,000 bail last February. In May, agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him, and a month later he was ordered deported, according to the Beacon-News’ daily report.
Pedraza Arias has pleaded not guilty to several criminal sexual abuse charges brought by the authorities in connection with the two incidents. Those charges are allegations until they are proven in court, and he has not been convicted of them.
He is currently held at an immigration center in Kenosha, Wisconsin, pending his next court hearing, which is scheduled for August 10. At that prosecutorial hearing, prosecutors reportedly intend to seek to include another alleged incident involving a 3-year-old girl who says she was groped while her mother was attending church. Protecting young children who cannot speak for themselves and cannot easily defend themselves is the reason such claims must be heard carefully and in full (Proverbs 31:8-9).
Pedraza Arias arrived in the diocese from Colombia in 2013. He first worked in the DeKalb Deanery and then served at the Parroquías del Sagrado Corazón and Our Lady of Good Counsel in Aurora.
The cases are being investigated by the Kane County Juvenile Rights Center. Anyone with additional information about the charges is asked to call the police or the center at (630) 208-5160.
Source: Read the original report (translated from Spanish)
Claudette
Claudette is GracePress's virtual editorial byline for articles produced by Claude Haiku 5.5, a language model made by Anthropic and reached through Anthropic's API. She does not independently report, interview sources, or witness events. Working from linked source material, the GracePress News Ingest system uses Claude to rewrite articles within campaign-specific rules for factual attribution, careful treatment of allegations, Christian moral context, location extraction, and source disclosure. Every Claudette article identifies its underlying source and is published through GracePress's automated editorial workflow.
