“This is really — I hope — going to be one of the greatest Easters ever,” President Donald Trump told faith leaders he invited to the White House last week, “because we have something going that I don’t think this country has seen in 100 years. And as we gather with family and friends, we’ll not forget the true source of our joy and our strength: America has put our trust in God.”

Will Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents be at your seder or Easter Sunday service?

While Trump and members of his conservative Christian circle are celebrating Easter, though, some immigrants may be afraid to gather with members of their faith.

It’s likely not a question you’ve ever had to ask before, but will Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents be at your seder or Easter Sunday service?

It’s possible after a federal judge sided with the Trump administration April 11 and gave permission to ICE to conduct enforcement operations at houses of worship. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich’s ruling lets the Trump administration disregard the Biden administration’s advice not to conduct immigration raids at places including houses of worship, schools and hospitals.

Twenty-seven Christian and Jewish groups had sued the Trump administrationclaiming that a Jan. 20 Department of Homeland Security policy letting ICE enter houses of worship violated their religious freedom under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Friedrich issued her ruling just in time for Holy Week and Passover. Having this ruling come at such an important religious moment for both groups is cruel.

What this means in practice is that ICE can come into the religious services or outside of houses of worship to take away any immigrant they deem out of compliance. It has already happened several times since Trump was inaugurated. The first recorded instance was ICE arresting a Honduran man at the church he helped plant in Georgia.

Any decline in immigrants’ church and synagogue attendance this week won’t be a surprise. Freidrich, however, dismissed plaintiffs’ reports of reduced attendance at their worship services. The judge said “such limited and conclusory assertions are not enough for the Court to conclude with ‘little doubt’ that the policy rescission has caused the widespread declines in attendance.” She said the plaintiffs didn’t present “any objective statistical evidence showing that religious attendance declines were a predictable effect of the rescission policy.”

The judge may not believe the plaintiffs’ claims, but there will no doubt be fewer immigrants comfortable with attending religious services this week and in the foreseeable future. “One Part of the Body,” a recent survey commissioned by several religious groups, estimates that at the end of 2024, 10 million Christians in the United States were vulnerable to deportation.

A recent survey estimates that at the end of 2024, 10 million Christians in the United States were vulnerable to deportation.

Imagine, then, the impact Trump’s deportation policies and Friedrich’s ruling will have. Immigrants will be even more on edge, and religious leaders not following the news may be left wondering why their sanctuaries are emptier than they usually are this religious season.

In America’s not-so-distant past, churches and religious edifices were reliable sanctuaries and refuge for immigrants. The Sanctuary Movementwas started in the 1980s by two Quakers and a Presbyterian minister in Arizona to help people fleeing political repression in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Catholic priests joined the movement on both sides of the border, defying the U.S. government’s refusal to give asylum to these political refugees.

The New Sanctuary Movementa 21st-century reboot, is a coalition of faith and community leaders. In New Haven, Yale divinity students have mobilized to help protect immigrants targeted by ICE. Pennsylvania faith leaders built an altar at Philadelphia’s ICE office to protest the administration’s policy allowing immigration arrests at churches.

Trump’s administration is also threateningto withhold federal money from sanctuary cities. Tom Homan, a Catholic, has promisedto increase the presence of federal agents in sanctuary cities to step up arrests. All this from an administration that claims to be very Christian.

There is an increasing rift between religious groups who are supporting immigrants and an administration that believes, wrongly, that it is upholding a Christian worldview. For immigrants, visa holders and green card holders who are fearful of being picked up by ICE, this is an uneasy Easter season. The message of Easter is resurrection, but what Trump is resurrecting is fear among those who never thought they’d be putting themselves at risk during worship.

A corrupt Republican president abuses his executive power to restrict free markets, placing legal constraints on free trade in goods and services, and then uses the granting of specific exceptions to shake down contributions from businessmen who are hurt by the restrictions. This political extortion is seen as such an abuse of office and betrayal of conservative economics principles that members of his own party band together to oppose him.

That corrupt Republican president? Richard Milhouse Nixon.

When President Nixon imposed his wage and price controls across the country, it wasn’t just economically destructive; it was also corrupt. As Ciara Torres-Spelliscy noted for the Brennan Center, by creating a blanket policy that crushed businessesNixon was soliciting connected business owners to petition him for exceptions in exchange for large donations to his campaign.

Nixon’s wage and price controls inspired David Nolan to gather a group of free market Republicans — all disgusted with Nixon’s schemes — in his Colorado living room. This is how the Libertarian Party was born.

President Donald Trump has in many ways followed Richard Nixon’s economic playbook, though instead of wage and price controls, he has chosen to impose arbitrary blanket tariffsviolating free market principles (and trade deals he negotiated) by putting import taxes on everything American businesses and consumers buy from other countries. Trump has a record of targeting media companies and law firms to extract personal benefits. Imposing tariffs gives him another tool in the box. He may not have used it yet, but he’s already made public statements about how countries can “come to the table” to negotiate an exception from these punitive tariffs. Some impacted businesses are going to ask for exceptions from import taxes and may assume their chances of success are far greater if they offer something of value to Trump’s interests.

Now would be a great time for the Libertarian Party, founded in opposition to Republican corruption, to oppose another president’s meddling with the markets, potentially for his own gain. Alas, the current iteration of the party is far more dedicated to fighting MAGA-friendly culture war battles than standing up for free market principles.

In the wake of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally and the neo-Nazi murder of counteractivist Heather Heyer, then-Libertarian Party executive director Wes Benedict publicly rejected the hateful and bigoted views of the alt-right groups who marched to chants of “Jews will not replace us.”

Now would be a great time for the Libertarian Party, founded in opposition to Republican corruption, to oppose another president’s meddling with the markets, potentially for his own gain.

However, as a reaction to that anti-bigotry stance, a group called the Mises Caucus was formed to try to steer the Libertarian Party toward a more MAGA-friendly platform that would welcome anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and antisemitic conservatives into a historically pro-freedom party. It took five years, but by the 2022 Libertarian National Conventionthe Mises Caucus was able to install an anti-vaccine activist and former paralegal, Angela McArdle, as Libertarian National Committee Chair and remove the anti-bigotry and pro-choice planks from the Libertarian platform.

With a majority of the national committee sympathetic to a far-right Republican distortion of libertarian principles, Trumpworld figures like Ric Grenell — who has served in both Trump administrations — started communicating directly with McArdle about ways that the Libertarian Party could assist Trump by delivering the Libertarian vote in what promised to be a very close election.

During the 2024 campaign, Angela McArdle seemed more interested in providing public support for fellow anti-vaccine activist Democratic (and later, independent) candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Republican candidate Donald Trump than she did for Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver. Both Kennedy and Trump were given prime-time speaking spots at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington, D.C., where Trump promised to pardon Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht — who was serving a life sentence in prison — if elected. McArdle used that promise as a fig leaf for her deliberate sabotage of the Libertarian Party’s candidate that contributed to his disappointing fourth-place finish behind Jill Stein of the Green Party and a collapse of the Libertarian Party’s finances. (Trump made good on that promise, pardoning Ulbricht a day after taking office.)

Facing multiple lawsuits and allegations of embezzlement by a former Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate, Angela McArdle resigned as LNC Chair in January 2025, replaced by Florida business owner Stephen Nekhaila, who defeated a Mises Caucus candidate for the job. (In response to questions about the accusations, McArdle told the libertarian-leaning Reason magazine that she was the victim of “aggressive cyberstalking” by her accusers, and added, “I will be working with new appointees in the Trump administration to find out if the FBI and State Dept have been involved in the attacks on the LP and me.”)

This rejection of the far-right elements in the Libertarian Party, combined with the urgency of President Trump’s tariff schemes, has created an opportunity for Americans —particularly those leaning Republican — who support free people and free markets to rejoin the Libertarian Party and join the opposition to the Trump administration.

Tariffs are taxes Americans pay. The libertarian position is that we should be fighting for zero tariffs, and we certainly shouldn’t let a president unilaterally usurp the constitutional authority of Congress to impose taxes.

There is no legitimate reason for Libertarians in the Trump administration’s orbit to be supporting these tariffs.

Republicans, particularly Trump’s senior trade adviser Peter Navarro, over the past several months have engaged in charm offensive on tariffs, trying to persuade the Libertarian voter that they should adopt the Republican position on the issue instead of the party’s formative view that tariffs harm the United States of America. Navarro has claimed to have proprietary data demonstrating the positive nature of, and even necessity of tariffs. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddowhowever, exposed this charm offensive as being built on a house of cards, as supported by at least one fictional expert, “Ron Vara,” that Navarro made up out of whole cloth.

There is no legitimate reason for Libertarians in the Trump administration’s orbit to be supporting these tariffs. Thankfully, Stephen Nekhaila, the new Chair of the Libertarian Party, has recommitted the party to the fight against Trump’s tariffs.

America needs a vocal Libertarian Party to stand up against a corrupt Republican president even more now than it did in 1971. It’s time for individual libertarians to break with the Republican Party as they did 50 years ago and express our shared condemnation of tariffs and price controls, in our voter registrations where possible, in the voting booth, and even, if possible, at protests with like-minded individuals.

Nicholas Sarwark

Nicholas Sarwark is an attorney and was Chair of the Libertarian National Committee from 2014 to 2020.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer rejected a request from Democrats to visit El Salvador’s notorious maximum security prison, where hundreds deported from the U.S. by the Trump administration are being held.

In a letter released Friday, Comer ridiculed a request from Reps. Robert Garcia of California and Maxwell Frost of Florida for a congressional delegation to conduct an oversight visit to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

The Kentucky Republican cited his Democratic colleagues’ “active hostility” to the committee’s investigations into former President Joe Biden’s border policies over the past two years and said it was “absurd” that they are now “seeking travel at Committee expense to meet with foreign gang members.”

The Trump administration has deported scores of people to El Salvador it’s accused of being gang members,flying them out of the country before giving them the opportunity to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act. But attorneys and family members for many of those removed from the U.S. have rejected allegations of any connection to gang activity and some have said that the men were targeted based on unreliable suspicions about tattoos and social media posts.

Garcia and Frost told Comer in their request earlier this week that they intended to visit CECOT to check in on several high-profile detainees — including legal U.S. resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Andry Hernández Romeroa gay makeup artist — whom the Trump administration deported without due process.

In his response, Comer referenced S. Chris Van Hollen’s Visit to El Salvador this week and echoed Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s narrative that Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration admitted to have mistakenly deported to CECOT last month, was being treated well. Comer also referred to Abrego Garcia, who has not been charged or convicted of any crime in the U.S., of being a “foreign MS-13 gang member.”

The Justice Department has pointed to records of Abrego Garcia’s 2019 arrest and Maryland police officers’ subsequent assessment of his alleged ties to the gang. His lawyers claimed that the police assessment “is based on hearsay relayed by a confidential source.” Abrego Garcia’s wife and attorneys have denied that he has any connection to the gang.

He has since been transferred from CECOT to a different detention facility, according to Van Hollen, D-Md., who met with him in person on Thursday.

House Democrats can still travel to El Salvador of their own volition, but a congressional delegation would allow them access to more resources on such a trip. Comer’s rejection, first reported by Axioscomes on the heels of House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green, R-Tenn., denying a request earlier this week from Illinois Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez for a congressional delegation to El Salvador.

Republicans, meanwhile, recently traveled to the Latin American country to visit CECOT on a delegation trip led by House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith.

Clarissa-je Lim

Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking/trending news blogger for BLN Digital. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.