Last week we saw President Trump rescind guidance related to “protected areas” in immigration enforcement — also known as the “sensitive site memo.” The Jan. 21 directive now permits ICE and other federal agents to enter houses of worship, schools and hospital at any time for the purposes of immigration enforcement.
In our 27 years of working with grassroots and immigrant faith leaders across NYC, the Interfaith Center of New York has found that there are plenty of areas of disagreement between faith traditions. However, one thing that New York City’s Catholics, Muslim, and Jewish communities do agree on is that revoking the protections that the “sensitive site memo ” is an attack on the bedrock American principle of religious freedom.
Mosques in the Bronx, mandirs in Queens and churches and synagogues in Manhattan share a commitment to religious liberty with a wide range of faith leaders and elected officials, both locally and nationally. The president’s new policy violates religious liberty by defining direct service as a non-essential to religious practice and by creating a chilling effect for worship in certain faith communities.
If a faith-based feeding program that included hungry people from every background were just a general expression of charity, then ICE’s practice of picking up people of different immigration status would not violate religious freedom.
However, a food program in the Sikh tradition is called “langar” and refers to a communal practice in the gurdwara (Sikh temple) where anyone who visits receives a free vegetarian meal, regardless of their religion, caste, gender, or social status. The making of food and sharing it without discrimination is core to the faith tradition.
Similarly, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration said it this way, “the charitable services we provide are fundamental to who we are as Christians.. . . . ‘For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being’ (Deus caritas est, no. 25)”
In an op-ed in America magazine, according to Cardinal Timothy Dolan, “people of faith — Jews, Christians, Muslims and others — also realize that we have a moral duty to welcome, clothe, feed and respect newcomers, no matter how they got here. And here in the United States, the government can’t punish us for that belief.”
The threat of ICE action in churches and the effect it has already had a chilling effect on worship in certain communities.
In early 2022, when buses from Texas first started arriving at Port Authority, I met an imam from the Bronx. At any given time that fall at the mosque there were between 80 and 120 men who had made the harrowing journey from Senegal or Guinea, or Sudan to Brazil and then through the southern border of the United States.
Like other West African imams in the Bronx, he is now concerned that the very same new arrivals who come to worship at the mosque every Friday — coming for prayer, familiar language, culture, and mail are now terrified that they will be picked up by ICE if they go to the mosque. “They are afraid to come,” the imam said.
The associate dean for the Jewish Theological Seminary put it this way. “As a Jewish person and a rabbi, it is impossible to observe and embody my faith while simultaneously watching as immigrants are demonized, threatened and deported. We came looking for a place to make a life, to contribute to society, to honor God by building a good and just world. We will not slam the door behind us.”
Trump’s order is not going to make us safer. A DHS spokesperson said that the order would empower CBP and ICE to enforce our immigration law and “catch criminal aliens — including murderers and rapists — who have illegally come into our country. Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.”
We know from the American Immigration Council and numerous other data research that in fact, immigrants — including undocumented migrants — are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born. This is true at the national, state, county and neighborhood levels and for both violent and non-violent crimes.
Surely there are better places to look for murderers and rapists than church soup kitchens and kindergarten classrooms. As someone who is justice-involved himself, our president should know this.
Breyer, an Episcopal priest, is director of the Interfaith Center of New York.
