Churches file suit against Kristi Noem, DHS over ICE raids - The Newton Beacon

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Several Protestant denominations have sued the Department of Homeland Security, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Immigration & Customs Enforcement and related agencies over federal immigration raids occurring at churches. These churches allege that these raids violate their First Amendment rights to freedom of worship.

Judge F. Dennis Saylor, of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, issued a preliminary injunction on Feb. 13 against ICE conducting these raids at churches that are part of denominations involved in the party to the lawsuit.

In Newton, those churches are: First Baptist Church, Lincoln Park Baptist Church, Myrtle Baptist Church, the Union Church in Waban, and Lutheran Church of the Newtons.

ICE has been detaining people outside of churches across the country, which has led to people avoiding worship services out of fear of being detained. “In many places of faith across the United States, the open joy and spiritual restoration of communal worship has been replaced by isolation, concealment, and fear,” says the lawsuit. Detention of immigrants has ramped up significantly during the second Trump administration. This includes at worship services in a way that was not previously true. The new immigration policies are already having an effect on churches in the area; the lawsuit notes, for example, a Lutheran congregation in East Boston told its members to not come to a public prayer vigil for fear ICE would use it as a way to detain people.

Saylor wrote that while he agrees that illegal immigration is a problem in the United States, he does not think the current methods of immigration law enforcement have been merited.

“The prospect that a street-level law-enforcement agent—acting without a judicial warrant and with little or no supervisory control—could conduct a raid during a church service, or lie in wait to interrogate or seize congregants as they seek to enter a church, is profoundly troubling.

Indeed, according to the new policy, agents could conduct a raid, with weapons drawn, at any type of church proceeding—including a regular Sunday service, a wedding, a baptism, a christening, or a funeral—subject only to the exercise of their “discretion” and “common sense”,” wrote Saylor in the injunction. Saylor was nominated to the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts by Republican president George W. Bush.

“Absent Exigent Circumstances, Defendants shall not knowingly set up a checkpoint, roadblock, or other barrier in order to question, interrogate, or otherwise direct or undertake Immigration Enforcement Action against individuals who are on their way to or from a Protected Area,” says the injunction. A protected area here refers to one of the places of worship. The injunction says a person merely being here without paperwork does not constitute exigent circumstances. ICE may continue to detain people if they have a warrant to do so.

The lawsuit was brought by several synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the American Baptist Churches USA, the Alliance of Baptists, and the Metropolitan Community Churches. Lutheran Church of the Newtons is part of the New England synod of the ELCA, and the other four Newton churches are members of the American Baptist Church.