A federal judge said Friday that ICE’s policy of allowing arrests at churches tramples on religious rights, and he issued an order blocking arrests unless there is an immediate threat to public safety.
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, a George W. Bush appointee to the court in Massachusetts, said it was “profoundly troubling” to imagine a deportation officer conducting a “raid” during a church service, or waiting outside the church to accost a migrant entering or leaving.
“It is of course true that the presence of millions of illegal immigrants within the borders of the United States justifies a substantial government response. But the need to address that problem cannot override the fundamental liberties on which our nation was founded,” the judge wrote.
He said the policy violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, though he declined to rule on whether First Amendment rights were also implicated.
Judge Saylor said that if U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement is making an arrest pursuant to an administrative warrant, that is still allowed. His bar applies to “warrantless arrests, searches, interrogations, and related activities.”
The legal challenge was brought not by congregants but by associations of churches. They include several synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, several Quaker meetings, two Baptist Church associations and Metropolitan Community Churches, an LGBTQ-friendly association of houses of worship.
The judge’s ruling applies only to plaintiffs who showed their attendance had suffered out of fear of the ICE policy. That excluded the Quaker congregations.
At issue is a policy adopted early in the new Trump administration permitting arrests at so-called sensitive locations. It overturned a Biden policy that had restricted arrests at — and near — churches, schools, clinics, day cares, bus stops, community centers and other places where families and children might congregate.
Judge Saylor said he would not fully restore the Biden restrictions, saying the concept of what was “near” a church was too vague.
Instead, he issued concrete rules limiting arrests inside a church, Sunday school day care or church parking lot. He also restricted arrests within 100 feet of the entrance to a church and barred ICE from setting up checkpoints to catch people heading to or from church.
The Biden policy had allowed arrests with an ICE supervisor’s approval, or in exigent circumstances.
Judge Saylor kept the exigent circumstances exception in place but went further than the Biden policy by barring arrests even with supervisory approval.
“The court can conceive of no circumstance, outside of a true emergency, in which a law-enforcement operation to enforce the immigration laws inside a church would be justifiable under the First Amendment and RFRA,” the judge wrote.
RFRA was the same law used by a judge in Chicago earlier this month to order ICE to grant access to clergy to give out ashes on Ash Wednesday to migrants at an ICE processing facility in the city’s suburbs.
