What churches need to know about immigration

Key points:

• United Methodist leaders are seeking to keep people informed as the U.S. government cracks down on immigration.
• While birthright citizenship is safe for now, United Methodist attorneys raised alarms during a webinar about recent travel bans as well as escalating raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
• As of June, the Cato Institute reported that 71% of ICE arrests and 67% of ICE detentions were of people who had no criminal record.
• This comes as recently passed legislation has just made ICE the highest-funded law enforcement agency, by far, in the federal government.

The U.S. government has devoted unprecedented resources to the deportation and detention of immigrants — all while working to strip legal status from more than a million people.

Such developments raise fears across the country, including among United Methodist immigrants and their church communities.

Guided by multiple Bible passages including Jesus’ call to welcome the stranger, United Methodist leaders have stepped up to keep people informed of what’s happening and where they might go for help.

The Council of Bishops and United Methodist agencies provided the most recent update in a July 17 webinar, presented in English with interpretation in eight languages. The webinar drew about 1,000 participants.

“Immigration is not just a political issue. It is a theological one,” the Rev. Giovanni Arroyo, the top executive of the United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race, told those gathered.

“It is not merely about policy; it’s about people,” he said. “Today, we gather to receive updates rooted in legal reality and grounded in our shared faith, and we gather in this space to learn, to question, to lament and to imagine a more just and compassionate future together.”

During the webinar, United Methodist attorneys gave an update on where things stand with birthright citizenship, travel bans and Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics. Throughout the webinar, Arroyo reminded participants that the gathering was intended to provide general legal information not personal legal advice.

Birthright citizenship

Birthright citizenship, the issue that prompted the webinar, is safe for now thanks to court actions this month.

William Powell, senior counsel with Georgetown University’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, gave an overview of what’s happened since an executive order by President Trump cast birthright citizenship in doubt.

The order, issued shortly after Trump’s second inauguration Jan. 20, denies automatic citizenship to babies born in the U.S. to parents either temporarily or illegally here.  

To Powell and multiple judges, this executive order is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution’s 14^th Amendment. Its first sentence states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

However, the U.S. Supreme Court majority in Trump v. CASA, Inc., released June 27, opted not to take up the merits of Trump’s order but instead limited the scope of lower-court judges’ injunctions against Trump’s actions. The ruling did open the door to class-action lawsuits, and that’s exactly what has happened since.

On July 10, a federal judge in New Hampshire certified babies as a class in a new lawsuit and blocked the birthright citizenship order nationwide. On July 16, a federal judge in Maryland said she would do the same if an appeals court gave the green light.

“So if you’re pregnant…  and your baby is born in the United States, they will be a citizen by birth and are guaranteed to be United States citizens,” said Powell, whose institute is representing parents in the Maryland case.

“That’s very important. And as we litigate the case going forward, our goal is to keep it so that no one ever is subject to that executive order.”

Powell is a member of Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington. His institute is also involved in other immigration-rights cases including the ongoing interfaith lawsuit, joined by United Methodists, that seeks to protect houses of worship from immigration-enforcement raids.

While confident courts will continue to uphold birthright citizenship, Powell added that parents still should get a Social Security card and passport for their newborns as soon as possible. Right now, a birth certificate is sufficient to prove someone born in the U.S. is a citizen, he explained, but without birthright citizenship that would change.

“If they get rid of birthright citizenship — even for some people — then for everybody, you’re going to have to show something else to prove it about either your parents’ citizenship or when you were born besides just the birth certificate,” he said. “That’s going to be complicated. ... Better to be safe than sorry.”

ICE tactics

Still, more worrying for many on the webinar were current tactics used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

The agency, founded in 2003, is receiving an unprecedented influx of money under the recently signed “Big Beautiful Bill” — making it by far the highest-funded federal law-enforcement agency. The law gives ICE $45 billion to expand its already sprawling detention system of adults and children over the next four years.

Even with those allocations just starting, ICE agents — often wearing masks or otherwise refusing to identify themselves — have already been ramping up raids in response to the quota of 3,000 arrests a day.

Alba Jaramillo and Melissa Bowe, attorneys and co-executive directors of the Immigration Law and Justice Network, spoke of what they have been seeing in their ministry. The United Methodist-supported network, with 19 sites nationwide, provides low-cost and no-cost legal services to immigrants and refugees working within the U.S. legal system.

“President Trump ran his campaign with a promise to deport what he called ‘the worst of the worst’ immigrants with a criminal history,” Jaramillo said. “But in fact, all immigrants and people of color alike are at risk of being targeted by ICE.”

She said that ICE agents have used such tactics as dressing up as electric workers to arrest families and pretending to be social workers to arrest migrant children. They have arrested asylum seekers at their court hearings and longtime U.S. residents showing up for work.

Jaramillo also pointed to a report by the libertarian-leaning CATO Institute, which found that as of June, 71% of ICE arrests and 67% of ICE detentions were of people who had no criminal convictions.

Alligator Alcatraz, the detention facility Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis built with emergency funds in the flood-prone Everglades, is already facing allegations of medical neglect and other inhumane conditions. Of the 700 people being detained, only about a third have a criminal record. Those detained include a 36-year-old, who has legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and for a time, a 15-year-old, even though the location is not intended for minors. Neither have criminal convictions.

At the same time, the Trump administration is working to make even more people’s status illegal by removing temporary protected status from some 1.2 million people fleeing wars, natural disasters and oppression.

Jaramillo said attorneys in the network are advising clients to request virtual hearings to avoid ICE encounters and to attend training to know their rights.

“The Constitution applies to everyone no matter their immigration status,” she said.

Travel bans

Bowe, Jaramillo’s colleague, noted that travel is now especially fraught. At this point, the Trump administration has suspended U.S. entry to citizens of 12 countries and issued partial bans on citizens of seven other nations, including Sierra Leone where The United Methodist Church has a sizable presence. 

But even for U.S. citizens, Bowe said, coming back to the U.S. or even traveling domestically has brought new challenges. Within 100 miles of the border and at airports, enforcement officers can question anyone whether they have lawful immigration status.  

“It’s not normal or right to be scared to travel,” Bowe said. “It’s not normal or right to have community disappeared in the street by unmarked agents. And it is not normal or right to ban travel like this.”

It should be noted that the immigration crackdown is unpopular. According to a CNN-SSRS poll released July 20, 55% say the Trump administration has “gone too far” in deporting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. The same July 10-13 poll found a 57% majority also oppose plans to build new detention facilities for undocumented immigrants.

The results follow other national polls indicating falling support for mass deportations as well as rising support for immigrants in general. Earlier this month, Gallup reported a record-high 79% of Americans consider immigration good for the country.

Bishop Robin Dease, who leads the North Georgia and South Georgia conferences, concluded the webinar by reminding those online that their voices matter.

“You’re standing up for fairness and inclusion, and that takes courage, and that takes heart,” she said. “So keep going because every conversation we spark, every policy we challenge, every person we educate, it all adds up.”

At a time when forces seem intent on extinguishing the beacon the U.S. long has provided for “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” retired Bishop Minerva Carcaño also reminded webinar participants that God’s light endures.

The chair of the Council of Bishops Immigration Task Force opened the webinar with a devotion based on Deuteronomy10:16-19. The passage reminds the Israelites that God loves the foreigner and that they, too, are “to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.”

The bishop admitted that many in the U.S. never expected to live in a country that increasingly feels more like autocracy than a democracy. However, she said, Scripture makes clear that autocrats are only temporary.

“There is only one God — God above all gods, Sovereign of sovereigns, our awesome God who stands and calls for justice,” Carcaño said.

“The God whom we serve requires that we — you and I — stand with him as a people of justice, a justice that just pours itself out like pure love upon every single one of us, but especially upon those who suffer most — the orphan, the widowed and the immigrant.”

Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.