A lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s policy of allowing immigration enforcement agents to act in spaces like schools and houses of worship was filed in Oregon on Monday, seeking to settle a legal debate over whether those areas should be off-limits.
The suit, brought by Justice Action Center and Innovation Law Lab, follows efforts by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to step up deportations, which have so far fallen short of President Trump’s goals.
Immigration agents, aided by state and local law enforcement, carried out mass arrests over the weekend that ensnared nearly 800 people in Florida. A growing number of children, including some who were citizens as young as 2, have been removed. It was unclear where the hundreds in Florida were arrested over the four-day operation, though such efforts in communities require substantial planning.
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to restore a policy set during the Biden administration that generally prohibits immigration agents from carrying out operations that disrupt civic spaces, particularly ones where adults and children congregate together. The suit also asks the court to nullify a memo from Mr. Trump’s first week in office overturning that policy, arguing that it violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of assembly.
The case brings together a diverse coalition of labor organizations, interfaith groups and parishes, with member organizations and constituents in all 50 states.
Esther Sung, the legal director of Justice Action Center, said it was bipartisan consensus for decades to avoid conducting deportation and detention operations in places like food banks, vaccination clinics or testing sites, funerals, day cares or disaster relief shelters.
“There had been a constant policy in place for over 30 years by Republican and Democratic administrations alike protecting sensitive locations,” she said, “and never once was that policy ever walked back.”
The Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights group focused on litigation, won a separate case this month when a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from shutting down a work program for migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti. The Innovation Law Lab, a nonprofit based in Portland, Ore., was involved in pushing back against Mr. Trump on his approach to asylum and policies devised to curtail other forms of legal immigration during his first term.
Since Mr. Trump returned to office, at least three other lawsuits have been filed with the goal of blocking immigration agents from having free rein to conduct enforcement operations in schools, churches and community centers.
Two were brought by coalitions of religious organizations, which argued, among other things, that they had lost congregants because anyone at risk of deportation stopped participating in public life. Only one has resulted in a meaningful restriction on immigration enforcement in places of worship, and it fell far short of the goals outlined in the lawsuit on Monday.
Related challenges have had mixed success with the legal arguments they presented, and judges have been skeptical of a number of the claims on which they were predicated.
Judge Dabney L. Friedrich of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia declined to immediately intervene to stop the new policy this month, writing that there was not yet evidence that enforcement tactics singling out sensitive spaces were “sufficiently likely or imminent” or that they had a chilling effect on public life.
Judge Friedrich reasoned that it was unclear that ICE agents or others had staked out sensitive locations or targeted them in a way that caused disproportionate harm. She added that apparent declines in participation at houses of worship were difficult to attribute to Mr. Trump’s immigration policy.
Ms. Sung said that the effect of Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda on civic life had somewhat crystallized, and that the groups and people her organization had spoken to were well equipped to document examples.
Beyond the narrower question of the legal status of sensitive locations, she said, the factors a judge might consider had increased significantly since earlier challenges, making the matter more urgent.
Among other examples, Ms. Sung noted the administration’s new emphasis on trying to punish cities and institutions that resisted Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, such as a proposed policy to defund local governments that do not allocate resources to immigration enforcement.
Ms. Sung said high-profile deportation cases — including the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and the administration’s refusal to retrieve him from a prison in El Salvador, despite an order from the Supreme Court — have also contributed to a climate of anxiety.
The complaint filed on Monday argues that a spate of hastily executed removals of people to extrajudicial confinement in places like Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, known as CECOT, had significantly raised the stakes for associations involved in the suit.
In an effort to avoid “deportation to an indefinite detention in a maximum-security prison outside U.S. borders,” the complaint said, many people who used to associate with or receive services from the groups were staying away.
“The immigration enforcement landscape was really different in February than it is now,” Ms. Sung said. “In February, we did not have Kilmar Abrego, we did not have Gitmo and Venezuelans being taken in shackles to either Gitmo or CECOT in El Salvador, and we didn’t have college students getting picked up off the street or from a citizenship interview and being detained.”
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the U.S. Department of Education, the White House and federal courts.
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