ICE Detention
In this July 8, 2019, file photo, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detain a man during an operation in Escondido, Calif. The Trump Administration has rescinded ICE's practice of avoiding raids and arrests in churches, schools and hospitals. Four United Methodist units have joined a lawsuit challenging the rule. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Defending Immigration Justice on the Front Lines

Conferences, Churches Respond to Mass Deportation Threat

by

 A United Methodist Insight Exclusive | Feb. 26, 2025

United Methodists across the United States are actively engaged in efforts to protect and care for immigrants in the face of harsher U.S. immigration policies enacted by President Donald Trump and his new federal administration.

Many churches and UMC-related non-profit ministries have worked with migrants for decades. The new United Methodist Social Principles, which went into effect Jan. 1, call for members and churches to be in solidarity with migrants, refugees and immigrants: 

“We urge United Methodists to welcome migrants, refugees, and immigrants into their congregations and to commit themselves to providing concrete support, including help with navigating restrictive and often lengthy immigration policies and assistance with securing food, education, employment, and other kinds of support. We oppose all laws and policies that attempt to criminalize, dehumanize, or punish displaced individuals and families based on their status as migrants, immigrants, or refugees.” 

– United Methodist Social Principles, 2020/2024 Book of Discipline, "The Political Community," Paragraph 163.G

Church-wide Education and Advocacy

The denomination’s Council of Bishops and several key agencies — primarily the General Board of Church and Society and the General Commission on Religion and Race – have provided education to churches and vigorous advocacy to promote justice and mercy amid harsher enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.

Annual (regional) conferences and local churches are doing the same urgent work from the front lines. That’s where policies of the new U.S. presidential administration—including authorization for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to enter places of worship—is threatening ministries that serve immigrant and refugee populations.

Those ministries include worship, distribution of food and other necessities, English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, education and after-school programs, immigration legal aid, temporary shelter, discipleship classes, pastoral care, and more.

Most conferences now offer website access to denominational information about immigration justice and how to respond to new government enforcement tactics. And many have published and emailed letters from their bishops with appeals for active compassion that “welcomes the sojourner,” echoing both scripture and the United Methodist Social Principles.

Conference and church efforts to educate and advocate are increasing, especially since over 1,218 people attended a Feb 10 churchwide webinar titled, “Solidarity with the Sojourner: Understanding U.S. Immigration and Our Call to Respond.” Over 2,900 people registered and each received a link to the webinar’s YouTube recording, which has more than 900 views so far.

Church and Society and Religion and Race co-sponsored the webinar, along with the Bishops Immigration Task Force, El Plan for Hispanic/Latine Ministry and the Immigration Law and Justice Network. Support for it came from United Methodist Communications, United Women in Faith and the United Methodist Committee on Relief.

The South Central Jurisdiction College of Bishops also sponsored a webinar Jan. 25, titled “Beyond Borders: A Christian Response to Immigration Complexities.” (View that recording.) More than 800 participants attended that seminar, which included reports from seven church-related ministries aiding immigrants in south and central Texas.

Sharing Information, Support on the Front Lines

At the grassroots level, many conferences and churches across the denomination are sharing information and encouragement directly with anxious ministry leaders, many of whom have expressed concern about the safety and other needs of their clients, guests and staff. Their various modes of communication outreach include: 

  • Letters and videos from bishops to congregations.
  • Informative updates on protective measures via Zoom calls.
  • “Know your rights” training events.
  • Helpful printed and online resources.
  • Virtual and in-person prayer vigils.
  • Legislative organizing, including visits to state government leaders.

The Rev. Mark Salvacion, pastor of St. Luke UMC in Bryn Mawr, Pa., is building a coalition of UM clergy and laity in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference to help train vulnerable churches and communities, as immigration laws and policies are changing rapidly and spreading confusion. He helped launch and directed UM-supported Justice for Our Neighbors (JFON) of the Delaware Valley in 2020, providing immigrants with low-cost and no-cost legal aid across Eastern PA, Greater New Jersey and Peninsula-Delaware conferences.

JFON is now the Immigration Law and Justice Network (ILJN), which operates nationally across 19 conferences, although the Delaware Valley office closed in 2024. The ministry began as an outreach of the United Methodist Committee on Relief in 1999 and has since become an independent agency.

Salvacion, who is also an attorney, now heads Eastern Pennsylvania's Rapid Response Team, one of many connecting immigration justice advocates in conferences and churches around the denomination. Managed by the General Board Church and Society, the national team allows participants to share news, ideas, resources and mutual support for their efforts to educate, protect and defend undocumented people from arrest, deportation and family separation. Those efforts now may be riskier than ever.

Salvacion has helped the joint cabinet of the Eastern Pennsylvania and Greater New Jersey conferences to plan a strategy in answer to the new federal enforcement threats. Resident Bishop Cynthia Moore-Koikoi emailed a letter and video Feb. 19 to churches that serve vulnerable immigrant populations, providing the cabinet's new ICE Response Policy as an adaptable framework “that reflects our faith and values.” 

The mailing included flyers in English, Creole, Korean, and Spanish for posting as signs on church doors. They alert ICE that the church and its entire campus are private spaces, and that “all persons herein do not consent to the entry of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security into this Private Space without a valid Judicial Warrant.” A sample Judicial Warrant is also attached.

The bishop, who sent a "We Stand in Solidarity" video message Jan. 31 containing advice and resource links, now asks churches to designate point persons as informed primary contacts for visits by ICE agents and participating law enforcement officers. She urges them to ensure that their churches are prepared to respond appropriately to such visits, including assuring all persons of their constitutional right to not respond to questions without an attorney present.

The EPA and GNJ conferences will provide in March “training sessions for point persons and other church leaders to equip them with the necessary tools and knowledge for this critical work,” said the bishop.

“These changes in immigration policy have overturned decades of protections for vulnerable immigrant populations, many of whom attend our churches and sing in our choirs, and who reflect the great diversity of God’s creation,” said Salvacion. “Our bishop and cabinet acted promptly to protect all of our churches from harmful ICE enforcement activity.”

Immigration Justice Work is Personal

The West Ohio and East Ohio conferences are also collaborating in their response to the threat of harsh immigration law enforcement, thanks to the Rev. Emily Kvalheim, who organized the Task Force on United Methodist Immigration Ministries in Ohio in 2024. 

“I feel called to faith-based social justice ministry, including policy advocacy toward migrant justice,” said the deacon and legal aid immigration attorney in West Ohio.

Kvalheim co-chairs the task force with the Rev. Lizzy Ortiz of East Ohio. They meet monthly via Zoom and work together to distribute "Know Your Rights" materials to local churches and community members. Kvalheim said they encourage local churches to offer tangible support to asylum-seekers, "while educating churches and policymakers on what is happening at the border and in our local communities.” 

Kvalheim offers pro se (legal self-representation) refugee asylum clinics in Spanish for churches and partner organizations. She provides pro bono representation in humanitarian relief cases, including requests for asylum and for nonimmigrant visas that admit victims of serious crimes like human trafficking and domestic violence who cooperate with police and prosecutors. About half of her clients are children, many of them unaccompanied minors.

For Kvalheim, this work is personal, starting when she was a high school volunteer teaching ESL in a United Methodist church.

“One of my students and a member of that church was racially profiled and picked up by ICE, detained, and deported,” she recalls. “That was my introduction to the immigration system and the first time that I realized that our government does not just deport terrorists or people who are here to harm the US. It deports good people, too, whose only offense is trying to make a better life for their families."

Kvalheim continued, “We all felt so helpless and so heartbroken that our friend had been taken away from our church and community. I know my grief was nothing compared to his family's. But I think about that a lot. That experience made me want to find ways both to help people navigate the immigration system, and work to change the immigration system so that nobody else has to be torn apart from their family, their community, and their church.”

A Heightened Level of Caution

Immigration justice work is also personal for the Rev. Sara Giron-Ortiz, co-leader of the New York Annual Conference’s Immigration Taskforce, which for two years has been aiding churches with small grants to support their various immigrant and refugee hospitality ministries.

A church in Brooklyn picks up migrants from a hotel and provides lunch and other necessities, she reported, while another in Queens offers ESL classes and translation services. St. Paul and St. Andrew UMC in Manhattan hosts Miracle Mondays, a weekly resource fair to help immigrants and asylum seekers with medical exams, Medicaid applications, transportation assistance, SNAP benefits  to purchase food, and backpacks filled with welcoming resources. 

The NYAC task force also provides seminars and Know Your Rights classes on Zoom in Spanish and English, along with public advocacy, prayer vigils, annual conference resolutions, and trainings for churches providing sanctuary and accompaniment to asylum-seekers.

Giron-Ortiz hesitates to identify participating churches by name. “I don't want them to be a target of this (federal) administration,” she says, revealing a heightened level of caution expressed by many immigrant service providers and advocates.

“Personally, I pray for all the migrants I have met,” she said. “I have heard so many stories of how they struggle just to get to the US border. Some were robbed and detained by gangs. Others walked and went hungry; and if it wasn’t for some angels who gave them food and maybe a better pair of shoes, they would have died. I have gone with a migrant to court and seen the vast number of people just seeking a chance to live a better life.”

Few of her encounters now are in person, she says, because “most do not want to gather in places where ICE could simply round them up. They are afraid to go out, even to the supermarket.”

The New York and New England conferences, now aligned as the New Hope Episcopal Area, have both sponsored prayer vigils, resource-sharing and other joint actions. In a Jan. 25 pastoral letter, Bishop Thomas Bickerton urged churches to stand firm in their commitment to “embrace a posture of radical welcome and hospitality (and) provide a safe space of welcome to immigrants and the marginalized who are afraid, intimidated, and threatened.”

New England’s affiliate of the Immigration Law and Justice Network has provided free, expert, humanitarian-based legal aid for immigrants with limited means for 10 years. They received a federally funded subcontract in January 2024 for their new program, Pathway to Hope, that provides legal representation to unaccompanied minors seeking legal status.

“Our work helps families stay together, victims of violence escape further harm, asylum seekers find a safe haven, and unaccompanied minors begin a new, more promising future,” the program’s website states.  “The effects of legal status ripple out from our clients, who are often heads of household, to their children and eventually additional generations.”

“We and our clients are being affected by ICE's work,” said executive director Jenna Andelman.

In the Southeastern Jurisdiction, Hispanic leaders in Holston Conference say their immigrant neighbors are living in fear of deportation even if they have legal documents to live in the U.S. Some citizens are harassing immigrants because they resent them or mistake them for criminals, reported Annette Spence, editor of the conference newsletter The Call.

Equipping Churches to Offer Support, Sanctuary

In the Midwest, the Iowa Conference Immigrants and Refugees Advocacy team provides guidance and support to involved churches and partner groups, including a Iowa Conference: Immigrant & Refugee Ministries web page with plenty of news and resources.

“Our conference is committed to equipping churches to be places of welcome and support, ensuring that our immigrant and refugee neighbors are met with dignity, care, and justice,” said the Rev. Mark Johnson, noting Iowa’s “long history of welcoming immigrants and refugees.”

Iowa’s Board of Church and Society was focused on immigration justice at its 2025 Legislative Advocacy Day, Jan. 28, when members met at the state capitol in Des Moines.  “The rules and regulations that are being put out affect not only the immigrants but everyone around us—our neighbors, caretakers, teachers, community members, everybody,” said Sharon Smith from New Hope UMC in Des Moines. She chairs the board of African Immigration and Refuge Transition Services founded in 2016 to help immigrants and refugees from Africa living in Iowa.

In the West, the California-Pacific Conference is using creative methods for its work, out of necessity. Its Immigration Strategy Group set up an Amazon.com wish list to help donors join in its ongoing efforts to support asylum seekers. Items donated online are delivered to a church supply hub and distributed to support locations from there.

Although new federal policies allow ICE agents to enter places of worship to make arrests, Cal-Pac churches that offer refuge to asylum-seeking refugees will “continue to offer sanctuary spaces while we can,” according to the Rev. Denyse Barnes, Conference Director of Justice and Compassion. Meanwhile, their plans to provide secretive, short-term church shelters and transportation out-of-state could be somewhat reminiscent of the 19-century Underground Railroad that carried America’s escaping slaves to freedom. 

Moreover, since many undocumented migrants avoid needed medical treatment out of fear, the group plans to offer mobile medical services at churches whose locations “will be shared by word of mouth only.” And its “safety planning” sessions will help migrants prepare for arrest and deportation, including "go bags," power-of-attorney documents and emergency child care arrangements.

The California-Nevada Conference Immigration Task Force sponsors sanctuary workshops—with legal advice, testimonies and clinics—to help churches consider offering sanctuary to undocumented immigrants who come to them for help. Over a dozen churches have identified themselves as Sanctuary Churches.

The task force also focused on legislative advocacy for comprehensive immigration reform on Immigration Day, with visits to state lawmakers alongside other advocates. They want to defend state laws enacted over the past decade that have protected immigrants’ civil rights against undue arrest and detention and given them access to driver’s licenses. They are also pushing for passage of a federal Dream Act, which at last would give a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.

From Upper New York Conference Communications, February 12, 2025: 

United Methodists join suit against Trump policy

United Methodists have joined two dozen Christian and Jewish organizations in a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The suit challenges a Trump administration policy permitting Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to conduct raids in "sensitive locations," including houses of worship, schools and hospital. The plaintiffs argue that this policy infringes upon their religious freedom and hinders their mission to care for migrants.

Plaintiffs in the suit include the Western North Carolina, North Georgia and New York annual conferences. Western North Carolina published a lengthy article by Communications Director Aimee Yeager explaining its leaders' rationale for joining the lawsuit.

United Methodists of Upper New York are represented in the lawsuit as members of the New York State Council of Churches, a named plaintiff in the lawsuit.

"Bishop Héctor (Nunez-Burgo) directed me to work closely with the NYSCOC to offer our full support to this effort," said the Rev. Bill Gottschalk-Fielding, Assistant to the Bishop. He serves as the bishop's representative to the state council and is a member of its leadership team. Though the Upper New York Conference could not join as a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, several of the conference's congregations provided anonymous affidavits substantiating the harm caused by the executive order allowing ICE agents to enter church properties.

"I'm grateful to these congregations and deeply thankful for the way Peter Cook and the New York State Council of Churches have helped us take a stand for justice," said Gottschalk-Fielding. 

John W. Coleman is editor-at-large for United Methodist Insight. Please email Insight for permission to reproduce this content elsewhere.