“The USCCB continues to advocate for refugees and we are doing what we can to ensure that the newly arrived refugees and their families, who were assigned to our care by the State Department, are not deprived of assistance promised to them by the United States,” Chieko Noguchi, a USCCB spokesperson, told RNS in a statement.
Meanwhile, the federal government is also embroiled in two lawsuits centered on the Trump administration’s decision to rescind a 2011 government rule that discouraged immigration raids at “sensitive locations,” such as houses of worship.
Although the two cases differ slightly, they both allege the government’s actions violated both their right to free association and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, arguing rescinding the rule reduced worship attendance and the use of services provided by the religious communities. The federal policy change has already resulted in at least one immigration arrest at a church and diminished worship attendance among immigrants, including those with legal status and U.S. citizens, RNS previously reported.
The first of the lawsuits, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was initially filed on Jan. 27 by a slate of Quaker groups and later joined by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and a Sikh temple in Sacramento, California. They already won a narrow legal victory: In late February, the plaintiffs received a preliminary injunction restricting immigration raids at their houses of worship as the case proceeds, although it applies only to the groups involved with the case.
The second lawsuit, filed on Feb. 11, had a more expansive list of plaintiffs, with 27 religious groups, including entire denominations such as the Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Union for Reform Judaism and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, signing on. Those religious groups have also requested a preliminary injunction, but the case is ongoing.
Religious groups and faith leaders are also part of at least three other lawsuits against the Trump administration. HIAS — a Jewish organization that provides humanitarian aid and assistance to refugees — is among the plaintiffs in a suit focused on the administration’s halt in global aid funding. The interfaith environmental justice organization Faith in Place recently joined a lawsuit regarding the freezing of Inflation Reduction Act grant funds, and a Lutheran minister is part of a filing challenging the administration’s decision to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
This article originally appeared here.
