Quakers on Edge
May/June 2025What does immigration enforcement policy have to do with religious liberty?
A Special Liberty Report
Quakers in New England have enjoyed strong ties with Quakers in Cuba for decades, and a highlight of their friendship has been the exchange of delegations to each other’s yearly meetings.
New England Yearly Meeting, a regional body of Quakers with roots dating back to the seventeenth century, is sending representatives to Cuba for this year’s annual meeting, which will include worship, fellowship, and business.
But Cuba Yearly Meeting, which was founded in 1927 and is one of the oldest Quaker groups in Latin America, may not be reciprocating. Cuban delegates are having second thoughts after a recent change in U.S. immigration policy gave federal agents more leeway to make arrests in and around places of worship.
“We have heard from our Cuban visitors that they may not be able to visit at all,” said Noah Merrill, general secretary of New England Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. “They have raised questions about whether it is going to be safe.”
Among those in the delegation is a Cuban woman who had agreed to deliver the plenary address. Her absence, Merrill said, would deal a major loss to the meeting by depriving it of her unique spiritual insights.
Merrill declined to make the delegate available for an interview, citing fears that she and the other Cuban visitors might be denied entry into the United States.
“Unfortunately, I think asking her to comment on the current administration’s policies might place her further at risk, since she would then be easy to identify,” he said.
The stark reality that Quakers from a Communist country with a notoriously poor religious rights record are afraid to visit a democratic country that has traditionally prided itself for religious freedom is among growing signs that a U.S. crackdown on illegal immigration is having a chilling effect on religious expression and association.
Quakers Go to Court
Five Quaker groups, including New England Yearly Meeting, have sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over a decision to rescind a 2021 directive limiting federal agents from conducting immigration enforcement actions in sensitive areas such as churches, schools, and hospitals without a warrant. The new procedure, implemented on January 20, the first day of Donald Trump’s second term as president, instructs agents to instead use discretion and seek secondary supervisor approval before taking action.
The Quaker lawsuit, filed a week later, argues that the threat of immigration enforcement at or near places of worship infringes on their First Amendment right to free expressive association and contravenes the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act by imposing a substantial burden on their free exercise of religion.
“Allowing armed government agents wearing ICE-emblazoned jackets to park outside a religious service and monitor who enters or to interrupt the service and drag a congregant out during the middle of worship is anathema to Quaker religious exercise,” the complaint said. “The very threat of that enforcement deters congregants from attending services, especially members of immigrant communities.”
The lawsuit was later joined by two other plaintiffs, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and Sikh Temple Sacramento.
A federal judge has partially sided with the plaintiffs, issuing a narrow preliminary injunction on February 24 that blocks enforcement actions at their places of worship. The lawsuit had sought a wider ruling that would have covered all religious groups nationwide.
Department of Justice lawyers had opposed the preliminary injunction, describing it in court documents as “an injunction over a hypothetical dispute that might arise from hypothetical, future interactions and subsequently hypothetical harms.”
But in his decision, Maryland District judge Theodore Chuang found that fears over possible immigration enforcement actions were not hypothetical and had already resulted in decreased attendance, not only of undocumented immigrants but also of immigrants with legal status who were afraid of being mistaken for those living illegally in the country. He said the government’s policy likely violated plaintiffs’ rights under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
“A return to the status quo is therefore warranted until the exact contours of what is necessary to avoid unlawful infringement on religious exercise are determined later in this case,” Chuang wrote in a 59-page opinion.
God Can Speak Through Anyone
The Quakers have a 350-year history pockmarked by challenges to their religious freedom. A group founded in England, Quakers were persecuted and outlawed for their beliefs, including their rejection of elaborate ceremonies and priestly office in favor of a simple Christianity in which everyone has a direct connection to God. The first Quaker missionaries to New England also faced persecution until William Penn, a Quaker, founded Pennsylvania in 1681 and proclaimed religious liberty. The Quakers went on to play a key role in U.S. abolitionist and women’s rights movements. One of the more radical positions taken by early Quakers was that women could preach and that God could speak through them as well as men.
At the heart of the Quaker lawsuit is the belief that God can speak through anyone: men and women, old and young, rich and poor—and immigrants, regardless of their legal status.
“Equality comes up in this lawsuit,” said Christie Duncan-Tessmer, general secretary of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, which is among the plaintiffs. “All of us are equally able to speak, and we each have our own experience of God that can be quite different from another’s. So, when anyone speaks, it can bring an understanding of God that is bigger than any one of us can have otherwise.”
To commune with the divine, Quakers gather to worship in simple meetinghouses that resemble homes and often lack ornamentation, spires, and steeples. Benches or chairs are neatly arranged in a circle or square. The meeting begins when the first person enters the room. Others join quietly, taking seats in silence. Stillness is a key aspect of Quaker worship, a time that people center on the divine and wait to receive a divine message.
“We don’t have any clergy because we are all clergy, and God is available to all of us,” Duncan-Tessmer said by phone. “If anyone is moved to speak, they stand and speak and then sit down. There may be many messages or no messages on a Sunday morning.”
With the new immigration policy, she wondered if untold numbers of people had stopped coming to meetings over fears for their safety, thereby robbing Quaker communities of the opportunity to receive messages and harming an essential part of the Quaker worship experience.
The Quaker lawsuit raises similar concerns, saying, “Quaker religious practices depend on communal worship. And Quakers believe that the presence of worshippers from different backgrounds is integral to hearing messages from God.”
Duncan-Tessmer welcomed the court injunction, saying it “allows some of us to return to safely welcoming all seekers, as our constitution guarantees.”
“Our country is strengthened by people of faith who love their neighbors, no exceptions,” she said in a follow-up interview by email. “Philadelphia Yearly Meeting looks forward to the next step of removing the barrier of fear for all congregations.”
Quakers, who are known as pacifists, rarely go to court. The current lawsuit, representatives said, was filed only after the Department of Homeland Security declined their request to pause the change to immigration enforcement policy.
Other faith groups are also seeking court relief. On February 11 more than two dozen Christian and Jewish organizations representing millions of people separately filed a similar lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security.
Policy Seeks to Catch Criminals
Contacted by Liberty magazine, the Department of Homeland Security staunchly defended its policy change as a necessary measure to catch criminals.
“We are protecting our schools, places of worship, and Americans who attend by preventing criminal aliens and gang members from exploiting these locations and taking safe haven there because these criminals knew law enforcement couldn’t go inside under the previous administration,” a spokesperson said. “DHS’s directive gives our law enforcement the ability to do their jobs.”
Immigrants have hidden in churches to place themselves out of reach of federal agents and to avoid deportation. During the first Trump administration, more than a dozen migrants sought sanctuary inside Philadelphia churches, more than in any other U.S. city, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Those migrants included an undocumented worker supporting his family in Mexico and a married couple who were denied asylum after fleeing gang violence in Jamaica.
Enforcement agents could have made arrests at the time, but they refrained in line with a three-decade-old policy not to enforce immigration laws in sensitive locations except under exceptional circumstances, such as national security threats or dangerous criminals.
Later, in 2021, then-Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas added teeth to that policy by issuing a directive requiring agents to obtain a warrant to enter sensitive locations.
The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement rolled back the 2021 directive on January 20, with acting director Caleb Vitello saying in a memorandum that “it is not necessary” to “create bright line rules regarding where our immigration laws are permitted to be enforced.”
Judge Chuang’s subsequent preliminary injunction requires U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to return to adhering to the 2021 directive in its dealings with Quakers and the other plaintiffs, the Georgia-based Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which represents 1,800 congregations with 750,000 Baptists, and Sikh Temple Sacramento, with 30,000 members.
The Homeland Security spokesperson indicated, however, that the Quakers and members of other faith groups had no reason to fear the new policy.
“Our agents use discretion,” the spokesperson said in an emailed reply to questions. “Officers would need secondary supervisor approval before any action can be taken in locations such as a church or a school. We expect these to be extremely rare.”
Growing Fears and Religious Freedom
Fears have been high, however, over how federal agents might use their broader powers. With apprehension, Quakers have noted the arrest of a Honduras national, Wilson Rogelio Velásquez Cruz, as he attended a Pentecostal church with his wife and three children in Georgia. The family had crossed the Mexican border illegally two years earlier, but Velásquez Cruz had obtained a U.S. work permit and was regularly reporting to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while awaiting a court decision on his asylum appeal. The authorities have not publicly disclosed the specific reasons for his arrest, which took place on the Sunday after the Department of Homeland Security changed its policy.
Information is scarce about enforcement actions at sensitive locations such as churches, and U.S. law enforcement authorities have not released any statistics. Two requests to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for comment went unanswered.
But religious freedom advocates view even the few known cases as cause for concern.
“Put simply, DHS is treating houses of worship as criminal hideouts instead of sacred spaces. That should worry everyone,” said Bradley Girard, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, the legal nonprofit organization representing the Quakers and other plaintiffs.
“If the right to religious exercise means anything, surely it must mean that people have a right to gather in a house of worship and that if the government is going to impede that interest, it has to have a really good reason,” he told Liberty. “DHS’s position is that it is free to physically interrupt the sacred worship of hundreds of millions across this country to carry out the president’s policy agenda. Religious freedom must mean more than that.”
Andre Wang, a veteran immigration lawyer who specializes in religious liberty issues, cautioned that another factor many be stoking people’s anxiety: potential racial profiling, or the use of race or ethnicity to suspect someone of having committed an offense.
“The fear isn’t about immigration but about ethnicity, that ‘Just because I’m Hispanic, they’re going to come into my space,’ whether that be in church or school,” said Wang, who is not connected to the Quaker lawsuit. “I think that fear is across the spectrum of whether you’re legal or not. . . . Even people who are U.S. citizens are afraid and anxious.”
He said those fears have prompted churches of various denominations to close their doors and cancel activities, such as men’s spiritual retreats in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, where he serves as regional religious liberty director for the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Wang saw a direct link between fear and religious freedom. “Where people are acting out of fear, by definition their liberty is being deprived,” he said in an interview.
He said the impact of changing immigration policies on the broader issue of religious freedom should be a serious concern for Bible believers. Seventh-day Adventist eschatology holds that religious freedom will be squashed in the last days before Jesus returns to earth and that those final events are expected to unfold rapidly.
“Here we are, a month into this new administration, and things have happened so quickly,” Wang said. “Sometimes I think, Wow, if things can happen this quickly in a month, where are we going to be in another month, or six months, or a year?”
“We Don’t Feel That It’s Safe”
Merrill, general secretary of New England Yearly Meeting, confirmed that fears were widespread among Quaker immigrants.
“I haven’t communicated with anyone with an immigration background who isn’t worried, including people with green cards,” he said by phone. “They have asked about lawyers and how to keep safe. People are really scared. I don’t think people know quite what to do yet.”
He said an asylum seeker in her late 40s had stopped attending meetings in Vermont. In Indiana, a family has called off plans to join a Quaker congregation.
“They told the church, ‘We would like to come back, but we don’t feel that it’s safe for our children,’ ” Merrill said.
Particularly worrisome for him is if Cuban Quakers will feel safe enough to fly to New England for the annual gathering this summer. He had been looking forward to meeting the Cuban visitors and especially hearing from the woman scheduled to give the plenary address.
“We respect the importance of civil government and secular authorities,” he said. “But if our yearly meeting was prevented from receiving the teaching of this friend from Cuba who has been through such hardship there, it would be a real impoverishment of our global fellowship and the spiritual life of Quakers in this country.”