A unanimous federal appeals panel, including a George W. Bush appointee, ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration's policy allowing immigration arrests at houses of worship imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit left in place a lower court's preliminary injunction that bars the Department of Homeland Security from enforcing its 2025 sensitive-locations policy against a coalition of Baptist, Quaker, and Sikh congregations. The three-judge panel found that DHS's rollback of the Biden-era ban on enforcement at churches, schools, and hospitals has already driven worshipers away from services and pressured religious leaders to abandon core tenets of their faith.
The ruling does not strike down the policy nationwide. It shields only the named plaintiffs, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which serves roughly 750,000 Baptists; Gurdwara Sahib West Sacramento, a Sikh temple serving 30,000 congregants; and six Quaker Meetings. But the decision hands the administration a significant legal setback as it tries to expand immigration enforcement into spaces that federal policy had treated as off-limits for years.
In the first days of Trump's second term, DHS scrapped the Biden administration's directive that barred immigration officers from conducting enforcement actions at or near places of worship, schools, and hospitals. The replacement policy told officers to use their discretion and a "healthy dose of common sense" when deciding whether to act in those locations.
A DHS spokesperson put the rationale bluntly in January 2025: "criminals will no longer be able to hide in America's schools and churches to avoid arrest." Judge Barbara Milano Keenan, an Obama appointee who wrote the panel's opinion, turned that statement against the government. She cited it as evidence that the threat to the plaintiffs' congregations was neither speculative nor hypothetical.
As CBS News reported, the panel found that DHS's own language showed the policy change was aimed squarely at locations like the plaintiffs', houses of worship that welcome immigrant worshipers and sit in or near immigrant communities.
Judge Keenan wrote that for those congregations, "DHS's statement emphasizing the rationale for this policy change shows that the threat of immigration enforcement at their houses of worship is real and substantial."
The plaintiffs brought their challenge under two legal theories: the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the 1993 federal law that bars the government from substantially burdening religious exercise without a compelling reason, and the First Amendment's free-exercise clause.
The panel credited evidence that the policy had already produced measurable harm. Keenan wrote that the new guidance "is having a chilling effect on their congregations and already has caused declines in attendance among members of [Cooperative Baptist Fellowship] and the Sikh Plaintiffs." For religious communities whose faith compels them to welcome all comers regardless of immigration status, fewer people walking through the door is not a minor inconvenience, it strikes at the act of communal worship itself.
The decision went further. Keenan found that the increased threat of enforcement "already has imposed a substantial burden on the ability of all the plaintiffs to express their religion through communal worship." The evidence, she wrote, showed that the policy "has resulted in substantial pressure on the plaintiffs to violate numerous beliefs."
The Trump administration has pursued its immigration enforcement agenda through multiple legal channels, including taking contested policies directly to the Supreme Court when lower courts have blocked them.
The composition of the panel matters. Two of the three judges, Keenan and Pamela Harris, were appointed by President Obama. But Judge G. Steven Agee, a George W. Bush appointee, joined the decision without dissent. That unanimous lineup makes it harder to dismiss the ruling as the work of liberal judges reflexively blocking a Republican administration's enforcement priorities.
The administration has faced a pattern of judicial resistance across policy areas. A fired federal prosecutor in Seattle sued the administration over her dismissal, and the Supreme Court's packed docket includes multiple cases testing the boundaries of executive power on immigration and other fronts.
The district court had issued the original preliminary injunction last year, and the 4th Circuit's decision leaves that order in place while the underlying case continues. The injunction applies only to the named plaintiffs, it does not prevent DHS from enforcing the policy at other houses of worship or sensitive locations nationwide.
The plaintiff coalition issued a statement after the ruling that cast the decision in broad terms. They said:
"This decision reaffirms a fundamental promise of religious liberty: every person should be able to gather, worship, pray, and serve their community without fear that immigration enforcement will unlawfully disrupt sacred spaces."
That framing puts the administration in an awkward position. The Trump White House has consistently championed religious liberty as a core priority. Here, a coalition of mainstream Protestant and Sikh congregations is using the same principle, and the same federal statute, to block one of the administration's signature immigration policies.
The DOJ has shown willingness to escalate legal fights to higher courts when it believes lower courts have overstepped, and the sensitive-locations case could follow a similar path if the administration chooses to seek further review.
Several gaps remain. The decision does not clarify whether the administration will seek review from the full 4th Circuit or petition the Supreme Court. The injunction's narrow scope, protecting only these specific plaintiffs, leaves DHS free to enforce the policy elsewhere, which means other congregations in immigrant communities have no court-ordered shield.
The underlying lawsuit is still active. A trial on the merits could produce a broader ruling, or the administration could revise the policy's language to try to survive judicial scrutiny. For now, the practical effect is limited but symbolically pointed: the government told the country it would no longer let criminals hide in churches, and a federal court, unanimously, told the government it cannot treat every immigrant worshiper as a criminal hiding in plain sight.
Enforcing immigration law is a legitimate federal responsibility. But when the government's own words make the case against it, and a Bush appointee agrees, the administration might consider whether the policy needs sharper aim, not a broader target.
