Religious organizations—be it churches, synagogues, or networks of religious institutions—were once at the front lines of immigration activism in Connecticut. But both policy and religious responses have changed since the start of the second Trump Administration.

On President Donald Trump’s first day in office, he issued an executive order allowing immigration enforcement officers more leniency when policing religious institutions, among other “sensitive locations.” This was the first step in a ramp-up of arrests and raids on illegal immigrants across the country.

Asked about their experience since January, several Connecticut faith leaders aren’t mincing their words:

“I don’t know that we were really structured to deal with the level or to respond to the level of cruelty and the overwhelmingness of it all,” Rev. Josh Pawelek of the Unitarian Universalist Society East (UUSE) said. “We have to get there. I think there is going to be a lot of discussion, a lot of thinking, a lot of reformulating, and a lot of organizing so that we can respond more effectively.”

These faith leaders say several factors have impacted their ability to support immigrants facing deportation: new immigration directives that limit the protected status of churches and other “sensitive locations,” a larger law enforcement presence and expedited deportation process, fear, and changing budgets of partner social services and charities that help illegal immigrants and asylum seekers.

The concept of “sensitive locations” where immigration enforcement is limited has existed since 1993, but guidelines were significantly expanded in 2011 under President Barack Obama. A memo sent out by the then-Director of the Department of Homeland Security, John Morton, explicitly designated the following areas as sensitive locations: schools; hospitals; churches and other institutes of worship; public religious ceremonies such as weddings and funerals; and public demonstrations. This memo instructed ICE officers not to make arrests, conduct interviews or searches, or surveil these locations or nearby areas. Restrictions around sensitive locations were expanded again under President Joe Biden.

Days after Trump’s executive order in January, a new directive from ICE, which was outlined in a memo called “Common Sense Enforcement Actions in or Near Protected Areas,” removed restrictions on public areas in courthouses and instructed ICE agents to use “common sense” when it comes to enforcement near protected areas. 

“As a result, DHS is not issuing rules regarding where immigration laws are permitted to be enforced,” ICE’s website states. “Instead, through the Jan. 31, 2025, ICE memorandum, the ICE Director charges Assistant Field Office Directors and Assistant Special Agents in Charge with the responsibility for making case-by-case determinations regarding whether, where and when to conduct an immigration enforcement action in or near a protected area.”

Since then, religious leaders say there has been a massive shakeup in Connecticut. 

“People are afraid,” said Rev. Jamie Michaels, who is the pastor at First & Summerfield United Methodist Church (UMC) in New Haven. “There is a callousness and a viciousness to what the Administration is calling immigration enforcement that is new, that is overwhelming, that is really scaring people.”

She referenced the high-profile story of Meriden high school student Kevin Rosero Moreno and his father as an example of an unjust arrest. The two of them were taken into ICE custody after an immigration hearing at a Hartford courthouse. She says that they were following the government’s orders by going to the courthouse, and it is unfair that they were “taken” anyway. 

“Everyone could be a target at any moment, and that makes it really difficult to support people,” Michaels said. “It makes it really difficult for people to go to work, to take their kids to school, to go to church, to go to the grocery store, to be a part of the fabric of the community.”

This expression of fear is a change from years past, when Connecticut congregations took a variety of stands against federal immigration enforcement activity.

A handful of Connecticut churches made national headlines in 2017 when they provided sanctuary to immigrants facing deportation in their buildings. Because of the churches’ statuses as “sensitive locations,” ICE officers could not enter the churches to arrest the men.

Michael’s congregation, First & Summerfield UMC, and the Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal, both in New Haven, went public about their choice to house asylum seekers. Other religious congregations, like Unitarian Universalist Society East (UUSE), also hosted immigrants fighting deportation or seeking asylum, but with less fanfare. 

Rev. Josh Pawelek is the pastor at UUSE. The congregation hosted a young man seeking asylum for a few months during the first Trump Administration. The congregation acted as his sponsor while he was going through the legal process of obtaining asylum in Hartford. There are several reasons why the church only gave refuge to one person in the last decade, though, including issues that occurred during that asylum seeker’s stay related to the man’s trauma, according to Pawelek. But in this new environment, he says the congregation no longer feels they have the option to offer asylum. 

“We’re not even reconsidering it now,” he said. “I don’t know of any congregation in Connecticut that is considering offering sanctuary now… in the traditional way, where you’re very public about it and you go to the press and you make a statement, ICE could just come in and take the person with a proper warrant.”

That’s not to say there aren’t quiet efforts being undertaken elsewhere. 

Michaels and her congregation at the First & Summerfield UMC have not been deterred from offering sanctuary to people, but they are doing things differently than they did in the past.

“When somebody comes to the church and explains to us their situation and asks for support, we do what we can,” Michaels said. “Sometimes that’s housing, if our facility works for them, and we agreed mutually that it’s a good fit. But sometimes that looks like connecting them with other people or other communities, who might be a better fit to provide the kind of security or support or advocacy that they need.”

Michaels has been with First & Summerfield for two years, and during her time there, they have housed a handful of immigrant individuals and families, she said. 

“There’s a lot of cases in which the immigration court moves more quickly on towards a deportation order than people can be reasonably expected to make their own defense or make their own case,” Michaels said. “I wasn’t the pastor here under some of our more long when some of our more long term guests were trying to process through those cases… but I can tell you that the goal of all of that was so that they would have enough time that their attorneys could process a reasonable legal defense for them, and could go through the legal processes of protecting them and of arguing their right to be in this country.”

Michaels said that the church has also housed some people since the most recent Trump administration started, building on the church’s history of immigration civil disobedience.

In 2017, First & Summerfield, under the leadership of Rev. Thomas Kim, allowed two undocumented immigrants to stay in the church after they were given deportation orders: Marco Antonio Reyes Alvarez and Nelson Pinos. The church held news conferences where elected officials spoke and invited reporters into the sanctuary to photograph both men and their families at different points in time. 

But things are different now. Michaels was hesitant to give out any information about the people who lived in the church. She declined to answer questions about what region of the world they came from, but she did say that they had hosted families with children that were “elementary school-aged and younger.”

One person came to the church just before the election and left just after the inauguration, according to Michaels. The church also housed a family of two and a family of four since President Trump took office. 

“We try as much as possible to care for the people who step onto our doorstep and say, I need help,” Michaels said.

She says that there are a lot of things in the Bible that can be debated, but says one thing that is clear and consistent is the commandment to care for strangers.

 “Right from the very first time God sets forth rules for humankind, back in the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, where God is laying out for communities, this is how you should care for each other, this is what your communities should look like,” she said. “In Leviticus, Chapter 19, God says, ‘You shall treat the strangers who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love them as yourself, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’” 

The implementation of new directives has been followed by an increase in ICE operations in Connecticut and across the country.

ICE has not published data on arrests in 2025 so far, and ICE representatives from the Hartford field office did not respond to questions about immigration enforcement data.

Since January, around 405 people have been arrested by ICE in Connecticut, and 164 people were deported, CTData reports. In 2024, only 247 people were arrested, and 142 were deported from Connecticut.

The data was obtained by the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against ICE and published by the Deportation Data Project (DDP). The DDP believes the information it received from ICE about removals is incomplete. Not only that, some entries in the arrest and deportation logs are missing location information, and as many as 5% of the entries in the dataset may be duplicates.

There have been more arrests and multiple operations in the state since July. 

This includes the four-day operation in mid-August, Operation Broken Trust, which led to the arrest of 65 people in the state. Twenty-nine of the people arrested were charged with or convicted of “serious crimes,” including kidnapping, assault, drug offenses, weapons violations, and sex crimes, according to a press release from ICE.  ICE also claims that other people arrested have criminal histories in their native countries or are members of transnational gangs. 

Eyewitnesses and videos show that, during this time, people were arrested outside of courthouses in Danbury, Stamford, and Norwalk. 

In their press release, ICE officials released information about the criminal history of some of the men who were arrested. Most were arrested for non-immigration crimes and faced charges in the past, but very few have been convicted of crimes before they were detained by ICE agents. One of the men who was convicted of crimes was Ruben Antonio Fuentes, who was found guilty of cruelty toward a child, carrying a prohibited weapon, and possession of drugs and cocaine, among other offenses, according to the State of Connecticut Judicial Branch website. 

Fuentes was only found guilty of a Class C and Class D Felony for Risk of Injury to a Child and misdemeanors for the other offenses. Because of that, the state employees could not legally cooperate with ICE in their detention. 

Connecticut has a Trust Act, which makes it illegal for local and state law enforcement officials to detain people solely based on immigration violations. It also limits the cooperation between state and local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement officers. Unless the illegal immigrant is convicted of a Class A for B Felony, Connecticut law and judicial enforcement cannot legally cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

The Trust Act was established in 2013, but was expanded most recently in May of this year. The new law allows individuals to sue towns and cities that cooperate with immigration authorities.

“Make no mistake: Every person that we arrested are criminals and breaking federal law, but many of these individuals also victimized innocent people and traumatized communities — rapists, drug traffickers, child sex predators and members of violent transnational criminal gangs,” ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Boston acting Field Office Director Patricia H. Hyde said in the press release. “They all made the mistake of attempting to subvert justice by hiding out in Connecticut.”

The acts of entering the country illegally, lying on visa applications, overstaying visas or evading inspection by immigration officers are all crimes. Breaking these laws for the first time is a misdemeanor, and subsequent violations are felonies. Even first-time violators can face deportation.

Two weeks after Operation Broken Trust, ICE officers detained dozens of people in Connecticut as part of the multi-state Operation No Escape. This operation was also aimed at people with past criminal histories.

But Michaels and others disagree with Hyde’s sentiment.

“We’re hearing in the national news, we’re hearing from the folks at the top, that the goal is to go after and seek and detain and deport the worst of the worst, people who are criminals and people who are a danger to the community,” Michaels said of arrests and deportations in general. “What we’re seeing is that parents of elementary school children, people who are working jobs in their communities, people who are supporting their families, people without any criminal records whatsoever, high school students, are being taken, and I mean taken. (They’re) encountered when they go to what they have been told is the proper way to handle their immigration case, when they show up at court or their court date, which is what the government has told them that they are supposed to do.”

Michaels says this has created an environment where “the fear is incredible” and is tearing at the “fabric” of many communities.

President Trump’s first election and term in office were galvanizing forces for many progressive religious institutions, leading many to get involved in immigration advocacy and the sanctuary movement.

UUSE is one of them. 

Pawelek said his congregation “mobilized” after the 2016 election and quickly declared itself a sanctuary church, although he believes, in hindsight, they should have done that sooner.

“Most of our people are liberal or progressive, and most of our people voted for Obama. I think we had a rosy view of him, and didn’t feel so much urgency, although he was known as the Deporter-in-Chief,” Pawelek said. “It just might have been harder to feel the urgency when it was a Democrat, particularly an African American Democrat, in office, versus Trump coming in with a very stated anti-immigrant bias.”

There are a handful of legal immigrants at UUSE who have been naturalized, and also people who have family members who are in the process of obtaining citizenship. So, Pawelek says, the deportations have not had an immediate impact on his congregation.

“The direct impact (of deportations) is not huge, meaning we don’t have a significant number of undocumented people in our congregation,” Pawelek said. “The impact is more indirect. It has to do with the social justice work that we engage in, and a lot of that is we are constantly trying to figure out what’s the best way to support the different immigrants rights groups.”

His congregation has also worked directly with families who are impacted by deportations, usually after the primary breadwinner has been arrested. Immigration advocacy groups have gotten them in touch with around three families, whom they usually support for a few months at a time. This support includes helping them secure food, medicine, diapers, and other needs.

Rabbi Herb Brockman also got involved in immigration advocacy around 2016. Unlike Pawelek, he liked Obama’s immigration policies and thinks that the country should return to them.

“President Obama arrested and deported almost as many people as Trump, but there was a system in place,” Brockman said. “They got their time in front of a court, and they could fight their case.”

Obama’s immigration record is contested. Officially, three million people were deported during his time in office, which is the highest number of deportations during any presidential administration; however, that number includes people who were turned away at border crossings and other points of entry before they could enter the country. Most past presidents did not count turnarounds in their official records. When compared to President George W. Bush, there was a significant drop in the number of people removed from the country under President Obama.

On the other side, many people have also accused the Obama administration of fast-tracking deportation cases and targeting people who committed low-level crimes, such as traffic offenses. 

Brockman’s synagogue, Congregation Mishkan Israel (CMI), never hosted any asylum seekers or gave asylum to anyone facing deportation. However, CMI and Brockman have supported immigrants and asylum seekers in other ways.

Brockman is personally involved with the New Haven sanctuary movement, a network of clergy members in the New Haven area who help people facing deportation.

“At the unfolding of people being arrested (in 2017), we started to use that to provide sanctuary for people… It is actually an old idea, it goes all the way back to the Bible cities of refuge that were to be established when the ancient Israelites came into the land of Canaan,” Brockman said. “We started to organize, and what that meant was getting together resources, people, human resources, legal resources, that would provide families that needed to seek sanctuary, mostly individuals, more than families.”

Largely, the sanctuary movement provided legal support to people who were at risk of being arrested and deported, and material resources to families. 

“We tried to find ways to be supportive of them, both, personally and psychologically,” Brockman said. “(We were) taking them to food pantries so that they would have whatever the basic necessities were, and at the same time, we were also working with a group of lawyers that had agreed pro bono to be supportive.”

Many clergy members also showed up to court hearings to support immigrants—something that is still happening today, according to Pawelek.

However, the churches and synagogues do not work alone.

An outer network of secular organizations and legal assistance groups has been stretched thin since the start of the newest Trump administration. An overloaded workforce and funding are both issues, according to Michaels.

Michaels specifically referenced Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS). 

IRIS played a large role in helping asylum seekers resettle in Connecticut for years. They helped asylum seekers find housing, employment, education, and other social services. IRIS’s annual budget, $15.3 million as of their 2023 990 reporting, relied on $11.4 million of taxpayer-funded government grants.

“Almost immediately after Trump took office (in 2025), there was a huge, massive, immediate removal of funding for immigrant, integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services,” Michaels said. “IRIS has largely had to shutter. I think there is still a bare bones framework, but they’re not providing any of the kind of housing support and services that they were.”

IRIS did not respond to multiple interview requests.

As organizations were losing funding, illegal immigrants were losing access to government-funded social services. 

The One Big Beautiful Bill not only limited the ability of noncitizens of the United States—including certain lawful residents—to access Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, it also eliminated Medicaid access for illegal immigrants. 

“I think a lot of us and the faith community who care about these things are still getting our footing, which in some ways sounds strange to say, eight months into the Trump administration,” Pawelek said. “I think there is going to be a lot of discussion, a lot of thinking, a lot of reformulating, and a lot of organizing so that we can respond more effectively.”

Connecticut faith leaders interviewed for this investigation say they are not just motivated by a general sense of right and wrong, but by scripture as well. Both Michaels and Brockman cited repeated commandments to welcome strangers into their midst because the ancient Israelites were persecuted as foreigners in Egypt.

“In the Hebrew Bible, the most often mentioned commandment is to welcome the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” Brockman said. “Thirty-nine times it’s mentioned, more than keeping kosher, more than wearing your head cover. It’s the most important thing.” 

Michaels again mentioned Leviticus 19, which is the same chapter that mentions field tithing, or leaving part of a field unharvested so needy people can pick fruits or grains—although she does not believe that the ancient Kingdom of Israel, where this type of tithing was first practiced, ever existed. Michaels interprets this practice as being specifically for the benefit of foreigners. 

“There are rules about how farmers and business people, who are providing for their communities and for their families, are instructed not to reap their fields all the way to the edges… because there will be strangers who are coming through your land, and that food is for them,” Michaels said.

Pawelek agrees: “At the heart of virtually every religion across the planet, and I’m talking about Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Unitarian Universalism, is a mandate—it’s not just a call, it’s a mandate—to be hospitable, to welcome the stranger, to love your enemy, to protect the alien, to treat, to treat the foreigner as you would treat the citizen,” Pawelek said. “If we can’t do that, what is our faith good for?… It is fundamental to the Western religious tradition.”

And for Brockman, it’s not just the Jewish scripture that compels him to act. He is also taking lessons from Jewish history. 

Recently, a group of religious leaders, including Brockman, protested Avelo Airlines for deporting illegal immigrants as a part of a contract with the federal Department of Homeland Security. 

He says the fact that Avelo Airlines was flying illegal immigrants out of the country reminded him of how the Nazis utilized French railroads during the Holocaust. 

“There are moral equivalencies,” Brockman said. “Have we been worse? Absolutely, there’s no question about it… We want to hold people to account based on principles that we have, principles of faith, principles of morality, principles of what we believe this country was founded upon.”

But religion has its limits for some people. 

Pawelek says he mostly spends time with progressives who are against mass deportations. Even among them, he says, there is an active debate about what role the church should play in advocacy in general.

“I think you’ll find people who are concerned that the church shouldn’t be involved in politics… It’s enough to have a sermon about it, but to get more involved in, that feels risky, dangerous and not appropriate,” Pawelek said. “On the other end of that, you’ll have people like myself who really think that the church and faith leaders, the rabbis, the imams, the priests, the ministers, need to be very public about their concerns, their outrage, and making the moral argument that this is wrong and it needs to stop, and we need to do everything we can.”

Pawelek, Brockman and Spring each think that the Connecticut Trust Act is reasonable and that it is appropriate to deport people who have committed violent crimes. Michaels, however, is hesitant to draw any line.  

“Nowhere in my scriptures am I commanded as a person of faith to say, you set the boundaries, you decide who is allowed to come into your community and who isn’t, and you decide what to do with them if they shouldn’t be there,” Michaels said. “It’s my responsibility simply to care for who comes into my circle, and that’s what we that’s what we hope to do.”

Pawelek doesn’t know what the future holds. He said the faith community in Connecticut is still getting its footing and trying to understand what is happening with mass deportations, and the best way to fight them. One thing he is certain about is that they will continue to rally for this cause.

“These are fundamental violations of the Western religious moral teaching,” Pawelek said. “I don’t have any other way to put it. We really are mandated to, at the very least, serve as allies to immigrant communities.”

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