Religion News Service has a good follow-up piece to that explosive This Week in Worcester (Mass.) story that went viral last week, but was otherwise ignored by national media.
“Exclusive: Trump DHS Plans Immigration Raids on Churches Over Holidays,” John Keough’s report claimed in the small-town local outlet. But this wasn’t just about raids on churches in Worcester, it was about raids on churches nationwide.
When we discussed that story here last week, I mentioned that I had questions about the story, which relied on mostly anonymous sources. (Keough’s story also seemed a bit confused about Baptist polity, but I was willing to give him a pass for that — Baptist polity can be bewildering even for Baptists.) My sense of that story, taken by itself, was “Big, if true” — with probably too much of an “if” on that “if true” at this point. In the Hollywood version of a newsroom that everyone who’s ever worked in a real newsroom wishes was real, Jason Robards or Liev Schrieber would be fighting with Dustin Hoffman or Mark Ruffalo to go back and nail this thing down before its ready to run.
But, as I said here, Keough’s story also doesn’t need to be taken by itself. We may not have a smoking-gun document from the Department of Homeland Security detailing its plans to raid nonwhite churches during the holidays, or US attorneys willing to confirm the existence of such plans publicly, by name, but we do have the supporting evidence of the actual reality that ICE and CBP are, in fact, already raiding “immigrant” churches and rounding up the members of those churches wherever they find them.
That story is both big and true — confirmed, documented, verified, checked-out, substantiated, and suitable for print. And it’s a story that Bob Smietana, Aleja Hertzler-McCain, and Jack Jenkins have already been doing a great job covering for RNS all over America. They understand that this is “religion news,” and they’re covering it as best they can.
But what about Keough’s more specific claims of some official DHS plan to target immigrant churches over the holidays? Can his allegations be confirmed? That calls for further reporting even if the notion of the current administration having any coherent kind of “official plans” about anything seems like a category error (see, for example, the administration’s many conflicting official plans regarding the maybe-American, maybe-Russian plan of surrender for Ukraine).
Smietana & Co.’s report for RNS follows up on Keough’s story by understanding that his report is, itself, news. Their starting point is reporting on the reaction to his reporting in the very churches that would be targeted in such raids: “Viral warnings of planned ICE raids on churches have pastors worried.”
Again, those pastors were already worried — or more than worried. They were being terrorized for months, long before last week in Worcester, by raids and threats and the reality of missing members. And the RNS piece recognizes that Keough’s TWiW article is not the first or the only story warning of church raids circulating among such churches.
On Tuesday (Nov. 18), the pastor of an 80-person Latino Pentecostal church got a concerning WhatsApp audio message. The message, allegedly created by an unidentified pastor, circulating among Atlanta-area evangelical faith leaders, claimed massive immigration raids would occur there on Thursday and Friday.
Soon, church members were sending him messages asking what they should do about the potential raids. By that evening at their teaching and prayer service, he had to address the rumor with his congregation.
“Stay calm,” he told them in Spanish, but “take care of yourselves. Don’t go out if you don’t need to go out.”
The pastor, who requested anonymity to protect his congregation, said he’d evaluate the situation on Thursday and make a decision about whether to cancel that day’s service three hours before its scheduled start.
By Thursday afternoon, he decided to go on with his service, having seen a video from Luis Estrada, a Telemundo Atlanta anchor, saying the viral message was unreliable because of lack of evidence. The anchor noted the Trump administration’s pattern of targeting Democratic-led states, which if consistent, would exclude Georgia. But other pastors canceled their services, and Estrada said in the video he received over 100 messages asking about the mysterious audio.
Faith leaders in other parts of the country were also worried this week, after a local news site in Massachusetts published a story warning of potential U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on churches over the upcoming holidays went viral. The story was shared through social media channels and messaging apps before leaders could sort out whether the reports were true or not.
ICE and other Department of Homeland Security officials have yet to raid a church building. But immigration agents have arrested immigrants on or near church property in at least a dozen instances so far this year, after the Trump administration rescinded an internal government policy discouraging raids on sensitive places like houses of worship. And fear of further escalation remains at the forefront in the minds of many worshippers at immigrant-heavy and Spanish-speaking churches, where attendance is down in many congregations.
Viral stories like the one from New England only magnify those concerns, faith leaders say. Published on a local news website called This Week in Worcester, the story cites unnamed Department of Justice sources in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York who claimed that DHS plans to raid Spanish-language churches and other houses of worship over the holidays.
The story also cited an unnamed Hispanic pastor who said government agents had already been to his church to ask about the names and addresses of church members, as well as several pastors who said they received advertisements for the CBP Home app, which DHS uses to encourage people to self-deport. It said evangelical leaders such as the Rev. Clint Pressley, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, were briefed on the plan.
Their report doesn’t ding Keough for citing “an unnamed Hispanic pastor” considering that comes just five grafs after a lede sourced to an unnamed Latino pastor. But the RNS team does fail in its attempts to track down any of his sources from the DOJ or the SBC.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin denied the report of church raids in a statement to RNS. … However, McLaughlin did not rule out a raid on a church.
Given McLaughlin’s established lack of credibility, her denial almost serves as a confirmation. This woman lies a lot and cannot be regarded as a trustworthy, good faith source of anything.
What about the Southern Baptists?
Southern Baptist leaders said they have had no discussion with the DHS about any raids on churches.
“Neither the SBC President nor the Executive Committee has participated in briefings or been in any discussions with governmental officials about these immigration enforcement operations,” Brandon Porter, the SBC Executive Committee’s vice president for communications, told RNS in an email.
Pressley, who is pastor of Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, told RNS he’d had no contact with DHS.
Here, again, we trip over the oxymoron of Baptist polity. Pressley isn’t a bishop or an archbishop. And pinning down who “Southern Baptist leaders” are or what they know is like trying to nail Jell-o to a wall. There’s no such thing as an “official” SBC position, and barely any such thing as an SBC “official.” The denomination isn’t a denomination — it’s an association or convention of local churches that act collectively only on set policies their delegates have agreed to support collectively.
For years, for the SBC, that included refugee resettlement work — something most Southern Baptists supported (in theory or in practice) as recently as 15 years ago. That’s why the SBC helped to form the “Evangelical Immigration Table” — delegating and affirming its support for refugees and asylum-seekers through motions passed at the Convention’s conventions. That was “official SBC policy” on immigration.
But not anymore. The SBC officially broke with the Evangelical Immigration Table two months ago (as reported by Bob Smietana for RNS). And there are more than a few Southern Baptists in this photo and in that room:
So while I’m pretty sure Keough didn’t get it right in reporting about DHS briefing Clint Pressley, I’m not convinced he’s totally wrong about some kind of “Southern Baptist leader” giving an implicit thumbs-up to DHS “not ruling out” raids on churches like those of that unnamed Pentecostal pastor in RNS’s piece. Because the unnamed attorney in the Massachusetts office of the DOJ who spoke to Keough sure sounds like a Southern Baptist (“He said that he does not see how this plan is in line with either American values or Biblical doctrine,” Keough wrote, and that phrase “biblical doctrine” is very specific dialect.)
The RNS reporters also talked to Keough himself, who stands by his story and explains the circumstances that gave him connections both to the Spanish-speaking congregations and the DOJ Deep Throats cited in his reporting. He insists that he’s telling us what they told him.
The final word — for now — in their follow-up goes to that anonymous pastor from Atlanta:
In Atlanta, the Pentecostal pastor said most of his congregation has some type of legal documents, but even for them, “the fear comes because of the separation of their families, children, wives, husbands.” With the whispers of massive raids, the “uncertainty of what will happen, will they come? Will they not come?” looms large, he said
Church members felt reassured early on in Trump’s second term that immigration enforcement would target criminals, and the pastor encouraged members to pay any fines and get right with the law. But, by now, they’ve seen news reports of immigration enforcement outside churches and cases where immigration authorities don’t appear to respect someone’s documents.
And that, again, is the context for all of this. Tricia McLaughlin is the Baghdad Bob of the DHS. And Clint Pressley-not-Pressler is irrelevant.
All that matters for these churches, their pastors and their congregations, is that their members are not safe. Not this week in Worcester, not next week anywhere else. The One Big Beautiful bill — passed with the votes of Southern Baptist legislators and blessed with the near-unanimous support of anyone who might be described as a a “Southern Baptist leader” — increased the budget of ICE tenfold, creating the paramilitary force intended to carry out the “Mass Deportation” agenda targeting undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and nonwhite citizens nationwide.
The members of these churches are already seeing, feeling, and living the effect of that at their jobs, in their neighborhoods, and in their homes.
It may be that ICE is officially planning to barge into Spanish-speaking churches as they gather for Christmas services or it may be that they will muster their troops in the parking lots of those churches or it may be that they will “merely” continue to have their masked jump-out squads waiting down the street to abduct and beat and imprison those Christians before they arrive or after they leave those services.
But regardless of the specific merits or demerits of one local reporter’s story, none of those churches and none of those church-goers are safe now. And that’s the biggest religion story in the country.
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