27 religious orgs sue Trump admin to prevent immigration arrests at places of worship

More than two dozen Christian and Jewish groups representing millions of Americans, including the Episcopal Church and the Union for Reform Judaism, as well as the Mennonites and Unitarian Universalists, filed a federal court lawsuit on Tuesday challenging a Trump administration decision to give immigration agents more leeway in making arrests at houses of worship.

The lawsuit, filed in US District Court in Washington, claims that the new policy instils fear of raids, resulting in fewer attendance at worship services and other important church programming. The suit claims that the result violates the groups' religious freedom, including their capacity to minister to migrants, especially those in the United States illegally.

“We have immigrants, refugees, people who are documented and undocumented,” said the Most Rev. Sean Rowe, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, AP reported.

“We cannot worship freely if some of us are living in fear,” he told The Associated Press. “By joining this lawsuit, we’re seeking the ability to gather and fully practice our faith, to follow Jesus’ command to love our neighbours as ourselves.”

The new lawsuit, which names the Department of Homeland Security and its immigration enforcement agencies as defendants, expands on arguments made in a similar lawsuit filed on Jan. 27 by five Quaker congregations and subsequently joined by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and a Sikh temple.

The case is currently pending in US District Court in Maryland. The Trump administration has not yet responded. However, the Department of Justice issued a memorandum on Friday contesting the thrust of the Quaker action, outlining grounds that may potentially apply to the new lawsuit.

In essence, the memo argued that the plaintiffs' motion to stop the new enforcement policy is based on speculation about hypothetical future harm, which is insufficient grounds for imposing an injunction.

According to the memo, immigration enforcement affecting houses of worship has been tolerated for decades, and the new policy published in January simply stated that field agents, using "common sense" and "discretion," could now undertake such operations without prior supervisor clearance.

One section of the memo may not apply to the present lawsuit, as it stated that the Quakers and other plaintiffs have no basis for seeking a nationwide injunction against the revised enforcement approach.

“Any relief in this case should be tailored solely to the named plaintiffs,” said the DOJ memo arguing that any injunction should not apply to other religious organisations.

The plaintiffs in the latest lawsuit represent a much larger proportion of American worshippers, including more than 1 million Reform Judaism followers, an estimated 1.5 million Episcopalians in 6,700 congregations across the country, nearly 1.1 million Presbyterian Church (USA) members, and an estimated 1.5 million active members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the nation's oldest predominantly Black denomination.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which has over 3,000 congregations; the Church of the Brethren, which has over 780 congregations; the Convención Bautista Hispana de Texas, which includes approximately 1,100 Hispanic Baptist churches; the Friends General Conference, which is an association of regional Quaker organisations; the Mennonite Church USA, which has approximately 50,000 members; the Unitarian Universalist Association, which has over 1,000 congregations; the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, which has more than 500 US congregations; and regional branches of the United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ are among the other plaintiffs.

“The massive scale of the suit will be hard for them to ignore,” said Kelsi Corkran, a lawyer with the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection who is lead counsel for the lawsuit.

Prior to the new Trump administration change, Corkran stated that immigration officials often need a judicial warrant or other specific authorisation to conduct operations at houses of worship and other "sensitive locations" like schools and hospitals.

“Now it’s go anywhere, any time,” she told the AP. “Now they have broad authority to swoop in — they’ve made it very clear they’ll get every undocumented person.”

She mentioned a recent example in which a Honduran guy was arrested outside his family's Atlanta-area church while a service was going on inside. The lawsuit includes information from some of the plaintiffs about how their operations may be affected.

According to the Union for Reform Judaism and Mennonites, among others, many of their synagogues and churches provide on-site food banks, meal programs, homeless shelters, and other support services to undocumented people who may be afraid to participate now.

One of the plaintiffs is the Latino Christian National Network, which aims to bring together Latino leaders with diverse traditions and values to work on important social issues. Rev. Carlos Malavé, a pastor of two churches in Virginia, serves as the network's president and has explained what members are seeing.

“There is deep-seated fear and distrust of our government,” he said. “People fear going to the store, they are avoiding going to church. … The churches are increasingly doing online services because people fear for the well-being of their families and children.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which oversees the country's largest denomination, did not join the case, although it criticized Trump's immigration crackdown.

On Tuesday, Pope Francis gave a strong criticism to the deportation plan, saying that forcibly removing people just because of their illegal status deprives them of their inherent dignity and "will end badly." Many conservative religious leaders and legal professionals in the United States do not share worries about the new arrest policy.

“Places of worship are for worship and are not sanctuaries for illegal activity or for harbouring people engaged in illegal activity,” said Mat Staver, founder of the conservative Christian legal organization Liberty Counsel.

“Fugitives or criminals are not immune from the law merely because they enter a place of worship,” he said via email. “This is not a matter of religious freedom. There is no right to openly violate the law and disobey law enforcement.”

Professor Cathleen Kaveny, who teaches in Boston College's theology department and law school, questioned whether the plaintiffs' religious freedom argument would be successful, but suggested that the Trump administration might be unwise to ignore a traditional view of houses of worship as places of sanctuary for vulnerable people.

“These buildings are different — almost like embassies,” she said. “I think of churches as belonging to an eternal country.”