U.S. churches — once deemed off-limits to immigration authorities due to their “sensitive” status within communities — now face the prospect of federal agents arresting migrants within their walls, under a new Trump administration policy.

The new approach, which President Trump spoke of in a December interview, also applies to schools. The administration said it will trust agents to “use common sense” when enforcing immigration laws.

It’s an abrupt about-face for federal policies that had hewn much closer to decades and centuries of tradition. Migrants have long found support systems in houses of worship, including some churches that 40 years ago became sanctuaries for people facing deportation.

In the 1800s, U.S. churches gave safe harbor to enslaved people; during the Vietnam War, they sheltered people resisting the military draft.

Just last week, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, Mariann Budde, implored newly inaugurated President Trump to “have mercy” on immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. and residents who “may not be citizens or have proper documentation.”

A similar pattern spans back to the early years of Christianity, of churches offering people refuge.

“Really this idea that we should show compassion and mercy to people who are vulnerable is so fundamental to any Christian, to our Christian values, to our Christian sacred texts — and really to all faith traditions,” the Rev. Noel Andersen, national field director for the refugee support organization Church World Service, tells NPR.

U.S. churches formed a sanctuary movement

The new U.S. policy countermands a 2011 Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo, which told agents and officers not to arrest people in “sensitive locations” such as churches, schools, hospitals and public demonstrations unless a clear danger or other exceptions existed.

The memo’s fate had been uncertain under the previous Trump administration. In Trump’s first term, churches granted sanctuary to immigrants in the U.S. illegally — including one woman who lived in an Ohio church for two years.

2017: Jeanette Vizguerra, who came to the U.S. without immigration documents, walks with two of her children as they seek sanctuary at First Unitarian Church in Denver, Colo. Vizguerra, who had been working in the U.S. for some 20 years, moved into a room in the basement of the church as she faced immediate deportation. Today, she continues working as an activist in the U.S.

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During a crackdown in former President Obama’s second term, churches openly challenged immigration laws and sought lawyers to aid migrants. That followed record numbers of deportations reported in 2011. And in 2014, a Mexican immigrant spent a month in a Tucson, Ariz., church, which granted his family sanctuary.

In the 1980s, that same Tucson church, Southside Presbyterian, had been at the heart of a network of churches giving sanctuary to migrants from Central America who were under threat of deportation.

“Cold War politics brought U.S. support to repressive and violent regimes in Central America,” Filiz Garip, a sociologist at Princeton University, tells NPR. She adds that because the U.S. didn’t welcome people fleeing those regimes, “churches [and] synagogues declared themselves to be a sanctuary to refugees.”

Pastor recalls sanctuary movement’s spark 

A pivotal moment came in July of 1980, when 13 Salvadorans died as a group of migrants entered the U.S. from Mexico. Southside Presbyterian’s minister, the Rev. John Fife, and other clergy were asked to help the survivors.

“For the first time I heard the extraordinary stories about the repression and the killings,” Fife told NPR in 2017. He and others helped the survivors find lawyers for asylum hearings.

“We’d take in people that had torture marks on their body, and doctors would testify, ‘Yeah, this guy’s been tortured in El Salvador,’ ” Fife said, “and the immigration judge would order him deported the next day.”

The Justice Department didn’t raid the churches helping migrants — but it mounted an undercover operation that resulted in felony charges.

“They infiltrated us with undercover agents pretending to be volunteers,” Fife said, adding that in court, a judge forbade the defendants from raising topics such as their religious faith, refugee laws, and conditions facing people in El Salvador and Guatemala.

2018: Members of the New Sanctuary Coalition hold a vigil and procession for Aura Hernandez, a mother from Guatemala taking sanctuary in a church in New York City. In 2022, Hernandez was granted status to stay in the U.S., putting her on a path to citizenship.

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Fife was convicted of conspiracy and transporting illegal aliens but was sentenced to parole rather than prison.

“Many people were able to apply for asylum eventually” in the years that followed, Andersen says, adding that policies such as the temporary protected status program that began in 1990 “were born out of the sanctuary movement.”

The TPS program allows people from countries designated as undergoing violent conflict, disasters, or other extreme conditions to gain work authorization and protection from deportation. In the first year of TPS, the U.S. granted the status to nationals of El Salvador; today, more than a dozen other countries are also on the list.

Churches often seen outside of official reach

The connection between religion and migration runs deep: Migrants from rural Mexico often ask their priests to bless their migration journeys, according to Garip. When they arrive in the U.S., she says, “the church is a key institution that makes newcomers feel welcome.”

Since Saint Toribio Romo was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2000, the Mexican priest has been widely recognized as the patron saint of immigrants.

And in the 1800s, churches served as vital links in the Underground Railroad that helped enslaved people elude authorities and migrate to free states. 

Such practices were built upon centuries-old ideas that held that churches were sacred and protected spaces — and that a “sanctuary” could refer to a physical meeting space, as well as to a concept of safety and refuge. And while “Sanctuary Cities” are a modern matter of contention, the Hebrew Bible lists six “Cities of Refuge” for people seeking refuge “and includes the ‘alien’ or ‘sojourner’ (gēr) among those who can seek refuge in the cities,” according to a paper by John R. Spencer of John Carroll University in Ohio.

Those cities helped spawn the broader idea of churches guaranteeing sanctuary, according to Rhonda Shapiro-Rieser of Smith College.

“Greek and Roman societies both held the concept of refuge and places of sanctuary,” she writes. “By the fourth century, the right to sanctuary was formalized among early Christians.” 

It wasn’t until the 20th Century, Shapiro-Rieser writes, that states moved to claim the authority to enter churches at will.