Adopted 2025.8.10 in Meeting for Worship with Attention to Business
Millville Meeting with this statement expresses its support for the separate lawsuits that our umbrella organizations, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and Friends General Conference, along with other Quaker, Christian, Unitarian Universalist, Jewish, and Sikh organizations have undertaken against the federal government’s new policy under this Trump Administration regarding ICE raids at houses of worship and other “sensitive places” that undocumented immigrants have used until now to meet essential religious and secular needs.
We join with Bridget Moix, General Secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation in stating “that we could not be more proud to stand in solidarity with these Quaker meetings as they continue our long-standing witness to religious freedom, human, dignity, and the protection of the most vulnerable.”
Previous federal executive administrations have considered it just, humane, and prudent to avoid detaining immigrants as they sought religious services and met basic medical (often at their own cost), educational, and related human needs, with exceptions authorized only by higher DHS and ICE authorities. They did so in recognition of the reality that being in the country without authorization is a civil rather than a criminal infraction; that most of the undocumented immigrants, often accompanied by family members, work in jobs in agriculture, hospitality, construction, and food services that citizens and authorized immigrants lack the numbers or desire to fill; that the economy would suffer greatly without most of them; and that IRS has regularly facilitated their status as registered workers paying income and other taxes, even though they gain little benefit from the social security and medical programs these taxes support.
Enabling them to exercise religious liberty, to use educational and medical institutions, and to exercise their right to freedom of movement and assembly was simply recognizing that they are essential members of our society and should be treated with basic human dignity and decency even as they are denied most of the rights and benefits of citizens.
The Trump administration has allowed DHS and ICE officials at all levels of authority to use their discretion in deciding whether to authorize raids on “sensitive places” on the apparent assumption that all means of finding and detaining undocumented immigrants that are not counter-productive should be used. Moreover, in order to induce other unauthorized immigrants to leave and to dissuade others from coming, the Administration has intentionally labeled and treated those immigrants arrested as dangerous criminals who need to be handcuffed, jerked around and hauled away, and jailed in inadequate conditions or even sent to countries known to subject them to violence and torture. ICE agents have violated the undocumented immigrants’ fundamental dignity and rights as non-citizens in order to make them scapegoats whom the MAGA supporters can denounce as enemies against whom Americans must unite.
Our support for the lawsuits undertaken by fellow Friends and other religious bodies in support of freedom of assembly and religious liberty follows from Friends’ long history as pioneers in the struggle for religious freedom as well for welcoming and supporting refugees.
The Founding Fathers of our nation regarded religious liberty as so essential to the well-being of the new nation that they created the first nation without an established religion in recognition of the reality that, in the words of the Pennsylvania Constitution, religious liberty is an. “indefeasible right’ to “worship God according to the dictates of their conscience” so that “no human authority can, in any case whatsoever, contribute or interfere with the rights of conscience.”
The Trump administration’s threats to the fundamental human rights of freedom of assembly and religious liberty have had a dampening effect on attendance at some Quakers’ and other religious bodies’ worship services and social service programs. That infringes illegally on the religious lives of immigrants both documented and undocumented given the aggressive actions of the administration toward all kinds of non-citizens. It also negatively affects the Quaker experience of worship and service in two ways. It deprives those of us worshipping in expectant silence of the divinely-led ministry of some of the poor and oppressed whom our Scriptures and religious experience point to as sources of the wisdom and insight that come from suffering and oppression. Second, it harms illegally our ability to serve social and economic needs of immigrants—forms of witness and service that are among the primary ways in which we live out our religious lives as Friends.
The Religious Liberty Restoration Act of 1993 states clearly why the Trump Administration “sensitive places” policy does not pass Constitutional muster. It states that religious liberty may be restricted only for compelling government reasons and in the least restrictive manner. Given the roles that undocumented immigrants play in our society, and the lack of a legal path to their meeting our essential needs, the actions of only the most heinous criminals among the immigrants might make their arrest a compelling need, and such criminals are rarely found to frequent religious services. Second, there are many ways of apprehending such criminals that are available to federal authorities less restrictive of religious liberty and rights of assembly than disrupting religious services to apprehend them.
Many of the actions of the Trump administration constitute a threat not only to our and others’ religious rights and rights of assembly, but to many of our fundamental rights as Americans, and even to the American democratic order. We stand with our Quaker and other religious colleagues in requesting that the Court rule on behalf of our fundamental rights as Americans and humans made in the divine image.
