The Dictatorship
Trump won’t block immigration arrests in houses of worship. Now these 27 religious groups are suing
More than two-dozen Christian and Jewish groups representing millions of Americans — ranging from the Episcopal Church and the Union for Reform Judaism to the Mennonites and Unitarian Universalists — filed a federal court lawsuit Tuesday challenging a Trump administration move giving immigration agents more leeway to make arrests at houses of worship.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, contends that the new policy is spreading fear of raids, thus lowering attendance at worship services and other valuable church programs. The result, says the suit, infringes on the groups’ religious freedom — namely their ability to minister to migrantsincluding those in the United States illegally.
“We have immigrants, refugees, people who are documented and undocumented,” said the Most Rev. Sean Rowe, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.
“We cannot worship freely if some of us are living in fear,” he told The Associated Press. “By joining this lawsuit, we’re seeking the ability to gather and fully practice our faith, to follow Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as ourselves.”
The new lawsuit echoes and expands on some of the arguments made in a similar lawsuit filed Jan. 27 by five Quaker congregations and later joined by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and a Sikh temple. It is currently pending in U.S. District Court in Maryland.
Names as defendants in the new lawsuit are the Department of Homeland Security and its immigration enforcement agencies. The DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, offered this response via email: “We are protecting our schools, places of worship, and Americans who attend, by preventing criminal aliens and gang members from exploiting these locations and take safe haven there because these criminals knew that under the previous Administration that law enforcement couldn’t go inside.”
“DHS’s directive gives our law enforcement the ability to do their jobs,” she added.
A memorandum filed Friday by the Department of Justice, opposing the thrust of the Quaker lawsuit, outlined further arguments that may also apply to the new lawsuit.
In essence, the memo contended that the plaintiffs’ request to block the new enforcement policy is based on speculation of hypothetical future harm — and thus is insufficient grounds for issuing an injunction.
The memo said that immigration enforcement affecting houses of worship had been permitted for decades, and the new policy announced in January simply said that field agents — using “common sense” and “discretion” — could now conduct such operations without pre-approval from a supervisor.
One part of that memo might not apply to the new lawsuit, as it argued the Quakers and their fellow plaintiffs have no basis for seeking a nationwide injunction against the revised enforcement policy.
“Any relief in this case should be tailored solely to the named plaintiffs,” said the DOJ memo, contending that any injunction should not apply to other religious organizations.
The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit represent a vastly larger swath of American worshippers — including more than 1 million followers of Reform Judaism, the estimated 1.5 million Episcopalians in 6,700 congregations nationwide, nearly 1.1 million members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and the estimated 1.5 million active members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church — one of the country’s oldest predominantly Black denominations.
Among the other plaintiffs are the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), with more than 3,000 congregations; the Church of the Brethren, with more than 780 congregations; the Convención Bautista Hispana de Texas, encompassing about 1,100 Hispanic Baptist churches; the Friends General Conference, an association of regional Quaker organizations; the Mennonite Church USA, with about 50,000 members; the Unitarian Universalist Association, with more than 1,000 congregations; the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, with more than 500 U.S. congregations; and regional branches of the United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ.
“The massive scale of the suit will be hard for them to ignore,” said Kelsi Corkran, a lawyer with the Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection who is lead counsel for the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs joined the suit, she said, “because their scripture, teaching, and traditions offer irrefutable unanimity on their religious obligation to embrace and serve the refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants in their midst without regard to documentation or legal status.”
Prior to the recent Trump administration change, Corkran said immigration agents generally needed a judicial warrant or other special authorization to conduct operations at houses of worship and other “sensitive locations” such as schools and hospitals.
“Now it’s go anywhere, any time,” she told the AP. “Now they have broad authority to swoop in — they’ve made it very clear they’ll get every undocumented person.”
She cited a recent incident in which a Honduran man was arrested outside his family’s Atlanta-area church while a service was being held inside.
The lawsuit includes details from some of the plaintiffs as to how their operations might be affected. The Union for Reform Judaism and the Mennonites, among others, said many of their synagogues and churches host on-site foodbanks, meal programs, homeless shelters and other support services for undocumented people who might now be fearful of participating.
One of the plaintiffs is the Latino Christian National Network, which seeks to bring together Latino leaders with different traditions and values to collaborate on pressing social issues. The network’s president is the Rev. Carlos Malavé, a pastor of two churches in Virginia, who described to the AP what network members are observing.
“There is deep-seated fear and distrust of our government,” he said. “People fear going to the store, they are avoiding going to church. … The churches are increasingly doing online services because people fear for the well-being of their families.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which leads the nation’s largest denomination, did not join the lawsuit, though it has criticized Trump’s migration crackdown. On Tuesday, Pope Francis issued a major rebuke of the deportation plan, warning that the forceful removal of people purely because of their illegal status deprives them of their inherent dignity and “will end badly.”
Many conservative faith leaders and legal experts across the U.S. do not share concerns about the new arrest policy.
“Places of worship are for worship and are not sanctuaries for illegal activity or for harboring people engaged in illegal activity,” said Mat Staver, founder of the conservative Christian legal organization Liberty Counsel.
“Fugitives or criminals are not immune from the law merely because they enter a place of worship,” he said via email. “This is not a matter of religious freedom. There is no right to openly violate the law and disobey law enforcement.”
Professor Cathleen Kaveny, who teaches in the theology department and law school at Boston College, questioned whether the plaintiffs would prevail with the religious freedom argument, but suggested the Trump administration might be unwise to disregard a traditional view of houses of worship as places of sanctuary for vulnerable people.
“These buildings are different — almost like embassies,” she said. “I think of churches as belonging to an eternal country.”
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court these days is generally in the business of helping executions go forward. But on Thursday night, the court did something notable: It told Alabama no.
Even then, the court wasn’t unanimous. Justices Clarence ThomasSamuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the refusal to let the nitrogen gas execution of Jeffery Lee proceed.
What prompted the rare rejection? In line with the typical shadow docket practice, the court didn’t explain itself. Nor did the dissenters, who merely noted their disagreement.
But a deeper look at the case helps us understand why a majority of the court was unwilling to help the state this time.
A Trump-appointed judge had permanently blocked Alabama from killing Lee using the nitrogen method, due to the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In her ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Emily Marks made it clear that she wasn’t stopping officials from executing Lee for the 1998 murders of Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson. Rather, she was only barring the nitrogen method while leaving the state free to use others, such as a firing squad.
Yet the state still pressed to execute Lee with nitrogen on Thursday. The next roadblock it hit was a divided appellate panel, which declined to lift Marks’ injunction. Trump-appointed Judge Robert Luck dissented, stressing the high bar the justices have set for Eighth Amendment claims and accusing Lee of delaying his claim until the last minute. Luck noted that Lee’s victims didn’t get to choose how they died.
The appellate dissent reflects the Supreme Court majority’s view on capital punishment. So, when Alabama filed an emergency application to the justices on Thursday, it felt like the setting of a familiar scene: A lower court halts an execution, only for the high court majority to let it move forward. We have seen this movie before.
Plus, the court previously permitted nitrogen gas executions in Alabama. In the case of Anthony Boyd last yearJustice Sonia Sotomayor lamented the majority’s refusal to extend him what she called “the barest form of mercy,” which she said would have been letting him die by firing squad, which “would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to 4 minutes.” She issued a similar dissent the year before in the case of Kenneth Smithwhich she concluded “with deep sadness, but commitment to the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.”
Lee’s case was different, as his lawyers and a key outside advocate explained to the justices. His lawyers said it was “unlike every previous method of execution challenge that this Court has considered.” They said that unlike prior cases where lower courts issued temporary stays for inmates, this one had a permanent injunction that followed “a full three-day bench trial on the merits — the first such trial anywhere on the constitutionality of nitrogen asphyxiation.”
That key outside advocate was Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck, a Supreme Court expert who filed an amicus brief. He said Alabama was trying to do something procedurally that it shouldn’t be allowed to do. “After all,” Vladeck wrote, “allowing Alabama to execute Mr. Lee through a grant of emergency relief would necessarily frustrate this Court’s ability to conduct plenary review of the district court’s final, permanent injunction.”
To be clear, the justices can still reverse Marks’ ruling in a future round of litigation. Or, as the judge noted, the state can execute him by other means. The question on Thursday night was whether the court would make the case moot by letting Alabama execute Lee before the state’s appeal could be fully vetted in an orderly fashion. With that in mind, it would almost be unremarkable that the court rejected the state’s emergency application, if it weren’t for the fact that the justices had previously intervened to help governments conduct executions over lower courts’ objections.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that three justices voted to let Lee’s execution go forward as planned, its unconstitutionality notwithstanding. Of course, while none of the justices explained their views, we can presume that the three dissenters are prepared to disagree with the lower courts’ constitutional analysis if and when the case comes back to the high court.
Next week, the justices are set to issue another round of opinions from cases argued this term, as we creep toward the end of June, when some of the court’s most contentious decisions have historically come.
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
Ex-reality TV star and MAGA-backed Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt angrily conceded the race Friday in a combative video in which he derided, and appeared to threaten, the women who finished ahead of him.
Nearly four days after The Associated Press projected Councilmember Nithya Raman will advance to the November general election to face incumbent Mayor Karen BassPratt announced that “the campaign portion of my mission to save Los Angeles is coming to a close, and I’m moving on to the next, more interesting phase.”
With 99% of ballots counted as of Friday, the AP put Pratt in third place, with just more than a quarter of the vote — 3.5 percentage points behind Raman and nearly 9 points behind Bass.
Pratt initially stood in second as returns came in on primary night, but his lead over Raman steadily narrowed as mail-in ballots were counted. By Sunday, she had overtaken him by less than 1 percentage point.
President Donald Trump and other MAGA supporters suggested Pratt’s apparent reversal of fortune proved fraud, but elections experts say it is California’s voting systemcoupled with the city’s small Republican voter base, that explain his third-place finish.
What, exactly, Pratt’s next chapter in civic life will consist of is unclear. But if his Friday announcement is any indication — he called Bass and Raman “dumb and dumber” and “corrupt communists” — it will include continued attacks on his former opponents. And contrary to Pratt’s pledge that he would leave the city if he lost, he suggested he will instead stay put in LA.
“A lot of dim-witted jerks thought I was in this for a grift, that I was going to roll up and leave town if I didn’t get into City Hall,” Pratt said in the video. “Hey, morons, I didn’t get in this for political power. I got in this to expose this corrupt machine, and nothing has changed.”
Addressing Bass and Raman, Pratt added: “I will be lighting you up every single day, and now I don’t have to worry about offending BLN viewers. I don’t have campaign laws hamstringing me now. It’s war.”
Filled with expletives and images of fires, violence and homeless encampments, Pratt’s video channels the same angry populism he ran on. His Republican supporters —including Benny JohnsonTrump administration official Richard Grenell and the chair of the LA County GOP — cheered his final message as a candidate.
Best known for his role as Heidi Montag’s bad boyfriend on MTV’s “The Hills,” Pratt launched his surprise mayoral campaign in January, a year after his family home burned down in the Pacific Palisades fire. While his platform initially focused heavily on what he and his supporters characterized as the failures that led to the damage caused by the fires, Pratt expanded his campaign to focus on forcing homeless people off the streets, cleaning up alleged “fraud” in the city’s finances and saving abused dogs on Skid Row.
With his massive online following and social media savvy, Pratt catapulted himself from long-shot candidate to one who earned Trump’s support and managed to outraise both Bass and Raman.
In the video, Pratt also said he possesses “some recordings of one of your exalted candidates doing and saying something that would make her resign in shame.”
A spokesperson for Raman’s campaign declined to comment to MS NOW on Pratt’s message. Spokespeople for the Bass campaign did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama on Friday pledged to move forward with negotiations on a controversial luxury coastal resort linked to Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushnerthat is set for construction on the country’s only island.
The deal has sparked protests in Albaniawith some calling for Rama’s resignation. But in an interview Friday with MS NOW, the prime minister waved off such criticism as “ideological bulls—.”
He told MS NOW that “negotiations” for the property were still ongoing and dismissed concerns of any conflict of interest, insisting talks began before President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year and that Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was not acting on behalf of the U.S. government.
“When Jared Kushner and Ivanka came here and we started work together, it was not clear if Trump would go to jail or go to the White House,” he said, appearing to refer to Donald Trump’s legal battles ahead of the 2024 election.
The project, backed by Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partnerswill cost an estimated $1.6 billion. It involves the construction of dozens of hotels, apartments and villas along the country’s western coast. A larger development is planned for the Narta Lagoon area, home to a wildlife reserve, and a smaller resort is set to be built on the uninhabited island of Sazan, a former communist-era military base.
Ivanka Trump said she and her husband first came across the location by accident while on a trip in 2021. “We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim,” she told podcaster David Senra last month. “Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”
In response to the construction, protests have broken out in the country’s capital, Tirana, where tens of thousands of residents have marched through the streets proclaiming, “Albania is not for sale.” Many demonstrators have carried cut-outs of flamingos, a species whose habitats they say will be destroyed if the project goes through.
Rama stressed that the deal included other parties besides Kushner’s firm. He said the “incredible team of investors” was “not coming to Albania to destroy” but “coming to build” and suggested his country was being used as a pawn to attack the Trump administration.
“Don’t come here to fight with Trump. It’s not your fight,” he said. “You want me to believe that suddenly the American media, the American influencers, the American world is caring about some flamingos in Albania?”
Earlier this month, Albania’s anti-corruption agency opened a probe into how the investment firm was granted the right to the land, which was previously designated a protected area.
Redi Muçi, a member of parliament from the left-wing party Lëvizja Bashkë (Movement Together), said the agreement between the Kushner-backed firm and the Albanian government “looks like political and financial corruption” because “there is no competition.”
“It’s very fashionable to use all these words,” Rama said when he was asked about accusations of widespread corruption in his country.
While the protests were sparked by the Kushner-backed project, they have expanded into broader anti-government demonstrations, with many calling for Rama’s resignation.
During his interview with MS NOW, the prime minister said he would not resign and suggested, without evidence, that a “majority” of the population “wants the project.” He also said an “investment of such magnitude in tourism” would bring “a lot of income for everyone” in the country.
Construction of the development could also complicate Albania’s effort to join the European Union. On Tuesday, EU spokesperson Guillaume Mercier reminded the country, which is one of the poorest in Europe, that its entry into the coalition depends on adherence to its laws, including those on the environment.
“Albania should refrain from action that could undermine the fulfillment of the closing benchmark, and we expect the Albanian authorities to act without delay,” spokesman Guillaume Mercier said.
Rama told MS NOW he was not concerned that the construction would impact his country’s chances of joining the EU.
In the U.S., news of the resort reignited ethical concerns around Kushner’s business dealings and possible conflicts of interest. While he holds no formal government role — and is frequently referred to as simply a “volunteer” by the Trump White House — Kushner has been a key figure in the administration’s foreign policy efforts, participating in negotiations between Israel and Hamasand more recently, in the Iran was.
He’s done so while attempting to raise billions of dollars from governments in the region for his private equity fund. After the first Trump administration ended, Kushner secured $2 billion in investment from the Saudi government, along with hundreds of millions more from other Gulf nations, including the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
Critics have suggested foreign leaders may be using the president’s son-in-law to curry favor with Trump. Kushner and the White House have previously claimed he is abiding by all applicable ethics laws.
Ines de La Cuetara is a London-based reporter for MS NOW.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
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