The second Trump administration has made a furious effort to carry out mass deportations, including the arrests, detention, and deportation of immigrants with legally recognized documents as well as U.S. citizens. Religion has figured prominently in public responses to the new ICE regime. While defenders of these practices in the Trump administration have appropriated Christian theology to defend their positions, religious communities are also responsible for some of the most vociferous opposition to these practices. In recognition of the 30th anniversary of the Hispanic Theological Initiative, this panel examines the religious and ethical responses to the Trump administration’s current immigration practices.
Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul have witnessed strong faith-led resistance to the current ICE regime invading their neighborhoods. But in cities like Dallas and Denver, faith leaders are already organizing themselves while working alongside grassroots movements to meet their current conditions regarding ICE facilities, companies that threaten the safety of immigrants and citizens alike, and threats of increased ICE presence throughout their states. Following two clergy-led immigrant support movements – CLEAR DFW and Colorado Clergy Alliance – this paper utilizes an ethnographic approach to examine how faith-based organizing in Dallas and Denver is adapting historic methods of organizing to meet the current crisis, connecting across state lines, and employing an “ethics of place” that centers immigrant communities with special attention to their physical locals of origin as well as the unique challenges of their current locations.
Religious and especially Catholic responses to the current violence against migrant lives in the United States are coming from many different fronts. From statements from different Catholic Bishops against the current deportation regime and the construction of new detention centers, to the Episcopal Bishops' "Whose Life Matters?" video, to Church World Service's ecumenical "Ash Wednesday Declaration", the growing chorus of church voices decidedly taking a public stance for migrant rights and dignity witnesses to the Biblical command to privilege and protect "the foreigner who resides with you" (Leviticus 19:34). Would the cause of migrant rights be better served by a univocal religious public witness? This presentation examines the concern over the efficacy of disparate religious voices in the public square surrounding migrant rights by considering another instance in which churches, especially the Catholic Church in the U.S., spoke unreservedly with one voice: the pro-life movement and the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The revocation of the “sensitive spaces” policy, which once shielded churches from immigration actions, has made them stages for security theater that uses spectacles of enforcement and illegality to cast “aliens” as figures of enmity. Yet this policy also amplifies religious actors’ ability to assert counter-narratives that recast migrants as subjects of moral concern. Drawing on Robert Cover’s narrative theory of law, I contend that when these counter-narratives are mobilized in the courts they make not only a symbolic, but a material difference. Such a difference can be seen in Evangelical Lutheran Church in America et al. v. Department of Homeland Security et al., where the plaintiffs’ rights of religious conscience, enacted through the provision of sanctuary, are externalized from the private sphere of belief and projected into public space as zones of exception that halt the advance of federal power and glimpse a world more compassionate than our own.