A month earlier, according to the complaint, federal agents detained a man in the parking lot of a Disciples of Christ church in Downey, California, a scene that was filmed as the agents were confronted by a pastor. Asked about the incident by RNS in July, DHS officials responded with a statement that instead referred to a separate incident near a different church.
The complaint also describes officers detaining parishioners at two churches in the Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino, including a man who was doing landscaping for one of the churches.
San Bernardino Bishop Alberto Rojas has formally lifted the obligation to attend Mass for Catholics who are concerned about ICE raids, following a similar statement by the Diocese of Nashville issued in May that concluded, “no Catholic is obligated to attend Mass on Sunday if doing so puts their safety at risk.”
Monday’s filing also detailed incidents that occurred near churches, including at least one incident on a sidewalk outside a Catholic church in Downey the same day the video was made at the Disciples of Christ church. Arrests near a church, the suit said, can have a chilling effect on attendance. (The Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese has disputed that the person apprehended was connected to the church or the parish school, as was initially reported.)
The new complaint joins at least three other separate lawsuits filed by faith groups alone or with other plaintiffs on roughly the same grounds since Trump took office. The plaintiffs in the cases include a broad spectrum of religious organizations, from entire denominations, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Episcopal Church USA and the Union for Reform Judaism, to an individual Catholic parish and a Sikh temple in California.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which has several representatives in the new filing, was not a party in the previous sensitive location lawsuits, an omission that frustrated some members of the denomination. But the ELCA’s presiding bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, said in a video statement in February that the group’s absence was due to the belief that the denomination’s polity wouldn’t allow it to have standing as a collective and urged individual congregations and bodies to join if they could prove standing.
The administration is also facing at least two other lawsuits related to its almost complete ban on refugees and its cancellation of contracts with faith-based groups that resettle refugees for the federal government. One suit was filed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and another by a trio of religious organizations that work with refugees, HIAS, Church World Service and Lutheran Community Services Northwest.
Aleja Hertzler-McCain contributed to this report. This article originally appeared here.
 against Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem over the Trump administration’s decision to rescind a policy discouraging immigration raids at houses of worship.){kind=link}