A federal appeals panel has left standing a court order that bars immigration agents from making warrantless arrests at eight religious organizations' houses of worship, delivering a win to Quaker meetinghouses, a Sikh gurdwara, and a national Baptist fellowship in their ongoing dispute with the Trump administration. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued the ruling on August 18, affirming a Maryland district judge's injunction and keeping open a larger fight over how far deportation enforcement can reach into sacred spaces.
A Rare Unanimous Verdict
Immigration cases at the appellate level often break along the lines of which president appointed which judge. This one didn't. Senior Judge Barbara Milano Keenan and Judge Pamela Harris, both appointed by Barack Obama, sat alongside Judge G. Steven Agee, a George W. Bush appointee — and all three signed onto the same outcome, a lineup several outlets flagged as politically notable. Keenan authored the 40-page opinion holding that the government's rollback of decades-old restrictions on enforcement near houses of worship likely runs afoul of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the 1993 statute that forces Washington to prove a compelling interest and use the least intrusive method available before intruding on religious practice. Agee joined her opinion in full, then wrote separately to spell out how narrow he considered the ruling to be.
How a Decades-Old Safeguard Came Apart
The fight traces back to January 20, 2025, when the Department of Homeland Security tore up guidance — first issued in 2021 and rooted in agency practice dating to the 1990s — that told officers to steer clear of enforcement at "sensitive locations" including churches, schools, and hospitals. A DHS spokesperson framed the shift bluntly at the time, saying the change meant criminals would no longer be able to hide in America's schools and churches to dodge arrest. Within days, six Quaker meetings, the Sikh Temple Sacramento, and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship — a network representing more than 1,400 individual congregations — sued in federal court in Maryland. U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang granted a preliminary injunction that February, ordering DHS to revert to its 2021 approach for these specific plaintiffs while the case proceeded.
DHS appealed, but stumbled on a key point: it never told the trial court why its new policy served a compelling government interest, an omission the Fourth Circuit found fatal to its defense. As the opinion put it, DHS had essentially given up its case at the critical moment — or, in the judges' own words, quoting Agee's concurrence, DHS abdicated its burden of proof at a crucial juncture of the merits analysis.
The Evidence That Moved the Court
What tipped the scales was a factual record showing the mere possibility of enforcement had already changed how congregations functioned. One Cooperative Baptist Fellowship congregation reported that attendance at its English-as-a-second-language classes had fallen 66 percent since the policy took effect, while members of the Sikh Temple Sacramento — which serves roughly 30,000 people in the greater Sacramento area — described growing fear among congregants about attending services at all. The panel concluded that even a temporary chilling effect on communal worship amounts to serious, irreparable harm, reasoning that a burden on religious exercise counts as real injury even if it doesn't last forever. Because the religious-freedom claim alone was enough to justify the injunction, the judges explicitly declined to rule on the plaintiffs' separate argument that the policy also violates their First Amendment right to expressive association.
A Narrow Order, Not a Blanket Shield
Despite headline treatments suggesting churches everywhere are now untouchable, the actual order is far more limited. It covers only the specific worship sites tied to the eight plaintiff organizations, not houses of worship generally across the country. Agee's concurrence stressed that agents retain wide latitude: enforcement is still allowed with an administrative or judicial warrant, and exceptions remain for exigent circumstances such as a national-security threat, an imminent risk of physical harm, or the hot pursuit of a suspect. The order also doesn't extend to other categories the 2021 policy once covered, like schools or hospitals. In effect, the ruling restores a narrow slice of the old guardrails for a specific set of plaintiffs rather than building any kind of nationwide sanctuary protection.
Faith Leaders Across the Spectrum Push Back — With Mixed Results
This case is one thread in a much larger legal tangle. In Massachusetts, a federal judge issued a comparable injunction in February 2026 covering several Lutheran synods, the American Baptist Churches USA, the Alliance of Baptists, and Metropolitan Community Churches — but notably, three regional Quaker meetings that were also plaintiffs in that case were found to lack standing and were left out of the injunction entirely. Not every challenge to the policy has succeeded, either: a separate lawsuit brought by 27 Christian and Jewish organizations in Washington, D.C., was denied a preliminary injunction, with the judge in that case concluding the groups hadn't shown they were being specifically targeted rather than swept up in broader neighborhood enforcement. The pushback has also crossed political and denominational lines outside the courtroom. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the retired Archbishop of New York, said earlier this year that he teamed up with evangelist Franklin Graham — both members of a presidential religious liberty commission — to press ICE over agents showing up near Sunday Mass in New York, calling the practice a violation of religious freedom.
What Happens Next
Chuang's original Maryland injunction stays in place while the underlying lawsuit moves forward, so this legal fight is far from over. The administration could still ask the full Fourth Circuit to rehear the case with all its judges, or seek review from the Supreme Court, and a final ruling on both the religious-freedom and First Amendment claims remains pending. For now, the eight plaintiff organizations — and the hundreds of individual congregations affiliated with them — can operate knowing that ICE agents need either a warrant or a genuine emergency before entering their doors.
