WASHINGTON—Joining the parade of lawsuits against white nationalist President Donald Trump, 27 progressive religious groups—including Mennonites, Episcopalians, Unitarians, and Reform Jews—marched into federal court in D.C. on February 11 to sue to stop Trump’s roundups, jailings, and deportations of millions of undocumented people.
And that’s not counting Pope Francis I, who in a long letter to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, blasted the government’s policies and actions as inhumane. He said they “ban the journey from slavery to freedom,” and worse. Francis reminded the bishops, and everyone else, that Jesus was a refugee, too.
Francis didn’t blast Trump by name but the Pontiff made it clear the whole Trump regime is to blame for the anti-immigrant policies, the roundups, and the deportations.
The Pope denounced “the major crisis of mass deportations” which dehumanized people on the basis of their migrant status. And he forecast dire consequences: “What is built based on force, and not on the equal dignity of every human being, will begin badly and will end badly,” Francis declared.
The lawsuit filed by the religious denominations, in U.S. District Court, marks a new turn in all the cases—almost 40 and counting—piling up against Trump, his minions, and his puppeteer, multibillionaire Elon Musk.
The other suits hit Trump, Musk, and the corporate class they represent on legal grounds and stress economic harms to specific groups, real people, or both. The religious groups’ suit carries the moral authority of their faiths. So does Francis’s letter.
The 27 groups, national, statewide, and local, explained they’re “unified on a fundamental belief: Every human being, regardless of birthplace, is a child of God worthy of dignity, care, and love.
“Welcoming the stranger, or immigrant, is thus a central precept of their faith practices. The Torah”—the Old Testament, as opposed to the Christian New Testament—”lays out this tenet 36 times, more than any other teaching: ‘The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens. You shall love them as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’
“In the Gospels, Jesus Christ not only echoes this command, but self-identifies with the stranger: ‘For I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink, I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.’
“Plaintiffs’ religious scripture, teaching, and traditions offer clear, repeated, and irrefutable unanimity on their obligation to embrace, serve, and defend the refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants in their midst without regard to documentation or legal status.”
Disregarded the law
Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents disregarded all of that when Trump turned them loose following his inauguration. Their tactics included a “Sunday immigration enforcement blitz” the suit said. During it, ICE arrested Honduran immigrant Wilson Valesquez, who wore a Department of Homeland Security monitoring bracelet, while awaiting his scheduled asylum hearing. He entered the U.S. in 2022.
Valesquez, his wife, and three children were attending Pentecostal church services in Georgia. ICE agents burst in through a locked door, interrupting the pastor’s sermon. “Although Velásquez had attended all his required check-ins at an Atlanta ICE office and had a court date scheduled to present his asylum case to a judge, ICE agents arrested him anyway,” the suit says.
“They were simply ‘looking for people with ankle bracelets,’” it adds. “Pastor Luis Ortiz tried to reassure his congregation, but he ‘could see the fear and tears on their faces.’”
Raids like that sent the religious groups into court. Arrests like that prompted the Pope’s denunciation, in his letter to the Catholic bishops. The bishops, too, strongly oppose Trump’s raids.
“The journey from slavery to freedom the People of Israel traveled, as narrated in the Book of Exodus, invites us to look at the reality of our time, so clearly marked by the phenomenon of migration,” Francis wrote. He called the current era “a decisive moment in history to reaffirm not only our faith in a God who is always close, incarnate, migrant and refugee but also the infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person.
“These words…are not an artificial construct. Even a cursory examination of the Church’s social doctrine emphatically shows Jesus Christ…did not live apart from the difficult experience of being expelled from his own land because of an imminent risk to his life and from the experience of having to take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own. The Son of God, in becoming man, also chose to live the drama of immigration.”
As a result, Francis said Christ “educates us in the permanent recognition of the dignity of every human being, without exception.” Human dignity, he added, comes first and “surpasses and sustains every other juridical consideration…Thus, all the Christian faithful and people of goodwill are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa.”
People of conscience must “make a critical judgment and express disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality,” Francis said.
He admitted the U.S. could make one exception and deport “those who committed violent or serious crimes” either here or in their homelands.
But “deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.
“This is not a minor issue: The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all, welcome, protect, promote and integrate the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable.”
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