Religious groups demand to prevent Trump administrator from arresting migrants in places of worship

A coalition of 27 Christian and Jewish groups representing millions of Americans filed a lawsuit on Tuesday that defies an action of the Trump administration that allows Federal Immigration Control to make arrests in places of worship.

The Federal Demand, presented in the United States District Court in Washington, was presented in the name of a variety of religious groups, including the Episcopal Church, the Union for the reform of Judaism, the Mennonites and the Unit Universalists.

The demand defies an order by President Donald Trump that reversed a Biden administration policy that prohibits agents from arresting illegal migrants in sensitive places such as churches, schools and hospitals.

According to the lawsuit, Trump’s new policy has caused fear of raids, which has led to lower assistance to worship services and other church programs. Due to this impact on assistance, the demand argues that politics violates the religious freedom of the groups, particularly their ability to minister migrants, including those of the United States illegally.

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“We have immigrants, refugees, documented and undocumented people,” said Reverend Sean Rowe, the president of the Episcopal Church, Associated Press.

“We cannot freely worship if some of us are living with fear,” he added. “By joining this demand, we are looking for the ability to fully gather and practice our faith, follow Jesus’ order to love our neighbors like ourselves.”

TO similar demand It was presented on January 27 by five Quoke congregations to which the Cooperative Baptist community and a Sikh temple later joined. That case is currently pending in the United States District Court in Maryland.

The new lawsuit appoints the Department of National Security and its immigration application agencies as accused.

“We are protecting our schools, places of worship and Americans who attend, preventing criminal aliens and gang members from exploiting these places and taking security shelters there because these criminals knew that, under the previous administration, that the police could not Enter, “Assistant Secretary of DHS for public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

“The DHS directive gives our police the ability to do their job,” he said.

A memorandum presented on Friday by the Department of Justice, which opposes the argument in the Quaquera demand, could also be applied to the new demand.

The DOJ states that the application for the plaintiffs to block the new immigration application policy is based on the speculation of hypothetical future damage, which the department makes the courts put aside with the Quakers and issue a court order.

In the memorandum, the Department of Justice said that the application of immigration that affects the places of worship had been allowed for decades and that the new policy announced last month declared that field agents should use “common sense” and the “Discretion”, but now they could carry out immigration application operations in adoration houses without prior approval of a supervisor.

A part of that memorandum cannot be applied to the new lawsuit, since it argued that the Quakers and their companions are not based to seek a national order at the national level to protect all religious groups against the new policy.

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“Any relief in this case must adapt only to the appointed plaintiffs,” said the Memorandum of the Department of Justice, arguing that any court order should not be applied to other religious organizations.

The plaintiffs in the new demand represent a significantly higher number of US worshipers, including more than 1 million followers of reform Judaism, around 1.5 million episcopals, more than 1 million members of the Presbyterian Church (USA .) And the estimated 1.5 million active members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, among others.

“The mass scale of the demand will be difficult to ignore,” said the Institute of Constitutional Defense and Protection of the Law Center of the University of Georgetown, the lawyer of the Institute of Constitutional Defense and Protection of the Center for Law of the Law Center of the Law Center of the Law Center. of the University of Georgetown.

Corkran said that the plaintiffs joined the lawsuit “because their writing, teaching and traditions offer unfutable unanimity in their religious obligation to embrace and serve refugees, asylum and immigrant applicants in the middle without taking into account the documentation or the legal status “

Before Trump’s change For federal policy, Corkran said immigration agents generally needed a court order or other special authorization to carry out operations in places such as places of worship, schools and hospitals.

“It’s now anywhere, at any time,” he said. “Now they have a wide authority to go, they have made it very clear that they will get all undocumented people.”

The demand described how some of the operations of the plaintiffs can be affected. Some, including the Judaism of the Union for Reform and the Mennonites, said that many of their synagogues and churches house food banks at the scene, food programs, shelters for homeless people and other support services for illegal migrants that now They can be afraid to participate.

A plaintiff, the Latin Christian National Network, described fear among migrants following the new Trump administration policy.

“There is a deeply rooted fear and distrust of our government,” the President of the Network, the Reverend Carlos Malavé, a pastor of two churches in Virginia, told Associated Press. “People fear going to the store, avoid going to church … Churches are doing more and more online services because people fear the well -being of their families.”

A religious group that did not join the new demand is the United States Catholic Bishop Conference, which leads the largest denomination of the Nation, although it has criticized Trump’s mass deportation plan.

On Tuesday, Pope Francis criticized the immigration policies of the administration, saying that the forceful elimination of people due to their immigration state deprives them of their inherent dignity and what to do it, he argued, “will end badly.”

However, many conservative religious leaders and legal experts throughout the country do not share concerns about the application of immigration aimed at places of worship to arrest migrants.

“The places of worship are for worship and are not sanctuaries for illegal activities or to house the people involved in illegal activities,” he told The Associated Press, Mat Stover, founder of the Christian Conservative Organization Christian Liberty Counsel.

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

Associated Press contributed to this report.