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In his first week back in office, President Donald Trump withdrew the “sensitive locations” memo, a policy that had long limited immigration enforcement at houses of worship. What followed was a wave of litigation: faith communities across the country turned to religious liberty law to defend their congregations, their faith leaders, and the migrants they serve. These cases challenged not just the “sensitive locations” withdrawal, but numerous laws, policies, and practices that harm immigrants. That fight is now unfolding in dozens of courtrooms at once. To help the public follow it, the Law, Rights, and Religion Project (LRRP) and Religion News Service (RNS) have launched the Religion & Immigration Litigation Tracker. For each case, the tracker lays out who is suing, what they are arguing, and where the case stands, with links to the dockets and reporting. Cases include: Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends v. DHS, in which six Quaker meetings, a Sikh temple, and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship won a preliminary injunction shielding their congregations from immigration enforcement; Paxton v. Annunciation House, in which a Catholic-affiliated migrant shelter in El Paso invoked Texas’s religious freedom law to resist the state attorney general’s campaign against it; and Kordia v. Noem, in which a Muslim woman held in immigration detention raised religious freedom claims and was later released on bond.
Together, these cases test a question central to our work: whether religious liberty protects the people most exposed to state power.
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