Black and mainline Protestant clergy in Washington, DC, are demanding that immigration officials stop using their church parking lots.
“We want to remind those federal entities that the property of houses of worship is private and therefore should not be used without expressed permission from those worshipping entities,” the coalition wrote in a public letter signed by nearly two dozen religious and community leaders, including some who work with interfaith and social justice organizations.
Immigration arrests have spiked under President Donald Trump, who has made deportations and large-scale roundups a cornerstone of his second term. Shortly after he was inaugurated, Trump reversed a decades-long policy that prevented officials from carrying out enforcement in churches and other religious institutions. Christian and Jewish groups challenged the new policy in court, arguing it has led to more surveillance. But in April, a federal judge sided with the administration.
In their letter, the DC ministers say that if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers or other federal officials park on their property, it can make it look as if they support the Trump administration’s move to police the city as well as the “disappearance of our neighbors, family members, and friends.”
Patricia Fears, the pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church, a predominantly Black congregation in the northwest quadrant of Washington, told CT she has heard from roughly ten Black and Latino churches that said they’ve seen either ICE vehicles or unknown cars, some of which carried masked men, in their parking lots. ICE did not comment for this story.
Fears, who organized the letter with an interfaith organization, said officers weren’t arresting congregants but using the church lots to stage operations and detain people nearby. The presence of federal officers limits ministry. Some people, including undocumented immigrants, are staying away from the churches, she said.
“It really causes people not to come to a place where they should and could have peace,” Fears told CT. Over the weekend, she said, she was asked to go and pray privately with people whose loved ones were arrested, including some who went to work and never came back.
Graylan Hagler, who organized the letter with Fears and serves as a senior adviser to the progressive interfaith organization Fellowship of Reconciliation USA, said in an email that he began hearing reports from local clergy after Trump announced earlier this month that he would put National Guard troops in the district.
The ministers who signed the letter are also calling on other houses of worship not to allow federal law enforcement to use their property “for any means as long as Home-Rule,” which has given DC limited self-governance for decades, “is not respected.”
The Trump administration has argued a federal takeover of the city police department is necessary to quell high crime rates in DC. But critics, including many Democrats, note the district’s violent crime rate is at its lowest level in decades and have accused Trump of using racial tropes about urban crime to justify the takeover. Partisan bickering over DC’s crime data continued this week while the White House also released an executive order that would expand the National Guard’s role in law enforcement across the country.
