Fourth Circuit upholds injunction barring immigration arrests at some houses of worship

Filed 1w ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Merry Go

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Cbl62 (talk) · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

The Fourth Circuit upheld an injunction blocking DHS's 2025 policy giving agents discretion to conduct immigration enforcement at houses of worship, siding with Quaker, Sikh and Cooperative Baptist groups. The ruling forces DHS back to the 2021 Biden-era policy requiring agency approval before enforcement near churches, except in narrow emergencies.

Judge Barbara Keenan found the groups showed a predictable decline in immigrant attendance following the 2025 memo from then-acting DHS Secretary Benjamine Huffman, rejecting the government's argument that Trump's broader immigration crackdown, not this specific policy, caused the drop. The government had argued the plaintiffs lacked standing and that reinstating the old policy wouldn't fix anything since enforcement inside churches would still be technically possible.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

The government's argument boiled down to insisting that scaring immigrants out of pews is just an 'incidental' side effect of neutral policy, which is the kind of sentence that only sounds reasonable in a legal brief. The court wasn't buying it, and neither should anyone who has ever read the word 'discretion' in a DHS memo.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Merry Go · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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