Exclusive: The Churches Fighting Back Against ICE

A network of 5,000 churches is launching a rapid-response action plan to protect worshipers during ICE raids.

Pastor Doug Pagitt and congregation. (Photo credit: Courtesy Vote Common Good)

I HEAR IT ALL THE TIME: What Donald Trump is doing goes against Christian teachings, the Bible, what people of faith are taught, and yet they still back him. But The Bulwark has learned exclusively that a network of five thousand faith communities is now disseminating a blueprint for clergy and lay leaders who want to push back against what Trump and the agents of his newly emboldened ICE are doing to immigrants across the country.

This rapid-response action plan for churches and faith communities to protect people during ICE raids is the brainchild of evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt and his group Vote Common Good, which is not only providing these resources to the faith communities in his network, but also sending an open letter to the White House Faith Office calling for justice and compassion for immigrants, and slamming plans to open more detention centers like Florida’s Everglades detention facility. Thousands of faith leaders and congregations cosigned the letter.

“Faith traditions call us to welcome the stranger, protect the vulnerable, and love our neighbors,” the action plan begins. “In the face of renewed ICE enforcement actions and immigration raids, we must be ready to act swiftly, courageously, and in solidarity.”

One example of what’s in the rapid-response plan: guidance on how faith leaders can designate their churches as public sanctuary spaces, at a time when Trump has railed against sanctuary cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago but not criticized churches that provide sanctuary to immigrants.

In an interview, Pagitt said that since Trump was first elected, Pagitt has tried to encourage people to consider their moral and religious values when voting, even if that meant considering supporting a candidate or a party they had previously written off. “Immigration has been a real central point for us over the last eight years,” Pagitt said, calling it “one of the places religious voters differ with the rest of the MAGA movement most profoundly.” His audience is the faith-motivated voter, especially white evangelicals and white Catholics, repulsed by Trump.

“The thing we heard over and over [from congregants interested in politics] is they disagreed with Republicans’ emerging stance and Donald Trump’s opinion about immigrants,” he said, noting that it is common for evangelicals especially to have missionary connections to countries in Central America or Africa. He said that many of these parishioners also objected to Trump’s family separations and kids in cages during his first term.

Still, Trump won last November in large part thanks to evangelical voters, who largely remain MAGA stalwarts. And while many evangelicals share Trump’s general anti-immigrant animus, what’s driving some evangelicals and other religious voters away from Trump, Pagitt said, is the president’s overreach and his administration’s harshness toward productive, quiet, often churchgoing immigrants instead of the criminals he said he would prioritize.

The new action plan for faith communities is informed by Pagitt’s own experience as well as the realities of communicating in 2025. In 2018, when he was still working as a pastor in his native Minneapolis, he designated his church as a sanctuary space for immigrants and housed a person there for more than a year. To do so, he called on help from organizations that know the ins and outs of that work. “Most people don’t know what to do,” he said. “For church groups, it’s complicated and they get super nervous.”

Beyond also forming a rapid-response team of dedicated volunteers to monitor reports of raids, verify them, show up to raids as moral witnesses, and coordinate shelter, transportation, and legal aid for vulnerable immigrants, Pagitt realized Vote Common Good would need a robust mass-alert system because of ICE’s new, aggressive tactics of showing up unexpectedly at places that were previously off-limits.

That’s where WhatsApp comes in. A favorite of immigrant communities, including those from Latin America, the app allows information to travel freely and instantaneously. Pagitt is calling on churches to set up their own WhatsApp alert networks, allowing each community to decide who needs to be notified when. The goal is that when ICE conducts a raid, houses of worship can answer their congregants’ questions about their rights, where to go, where to drop off their kids.

“We’re all out here trying to put a trampoline together without instructions, we just see springs and poles,” Pagitt said. “But we’re trying to help people see what they can do to make a difference.”

(Photos: Courtesy Vote Common Good)

“Churches Are Not Off-Limits Anymore”

ANDRES RAMIREZ IS THE TYPE of hardscrabble political pro I’ve called for years when I wanted a tough, no-holds-barred quote.

A top Democratic strategist in Las Vegas for decades before he moved to Washington, D.C. with his family, he now finds himself, like many of us, struggling to make sense of American politics in 2025. He’s leaning into his faith and having more conversations with his neighbors and members of his church, all while helping immigrants connect with resources or process what is happening to their family members and friends.

He notes that faith leaders have always been an integral part of the immigration-reform coalition throughout the years, but that what has changed in 2025 is Trump’s willingness to go after churches and people on church grounds.

“Up until this term, churches and faith leaders were considered off-limits for ICE agents, so it was easier [for churches] to stand up and be pro-immigrant,” he said. “The fact that churches are not off-limits anymore and ICE can enter churches puts a whole other burden on this situation, which is why leaders who are stepping up in the face of this new threat should be commended.”

He praised the efforts by faith leaders like Pagitt to adapt in the face of new threats, and adopt tools and assets “to enable and empower our folks to be helpful without being as public, protesting and marching.”

Pagitt sees community-building as the best response to Trump’s campaign of shock and fear. His White House letter-writing campaign is an example of trying to show moral leadership during desperate times. The letter begins by saying “Trump’s internment camps are a moral stain on our nation” and notes that along with the reported human rights abuses in the Everglades detention facility, more such facilities are set to be built, including the new detention facility in Fort Bliss, dubbed by Sen. John Cornyn the “Lone Star Lockup,” slated to hold a thousand people.

Beyond the letters, Pagitt is looking to coordinate actions at new detention-center sites, including the one at Fort Bliss and others expected to be established in Michigan, Florida, Oregon, and Georgia.

“You can stay nonpartisan and say, ‘We don’t think a detention center is the right way for people to be treated,’” Pagitt said.

“The alternative to fear is information, resources, and support,” he said. “Our message is not ‘Don’t be afraid’—it’s ‘If you’re afraid, these are people to reach out to.’”

Like many MAGA critics, Pagitt has been disappointed to see the way church groups have been co-opted and bullied during Trump’s second term.

“Much to my sadness, we’ve seen faith communities quiver and shake and be afraid like universities and law firms and so many institutions,” he said. “We want to be on the other side of that and say to skeptical people of good conscience to not play the silent hypocrite card—that would be pretty good.”