On January 25th, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reversed nearly thirty years of precedence limiting immigration-enforcement actions in sensitive locations. Many sources have erroneously labeled this as a Biden-era policy, but successive administrations have reaffirmed and updated this policy since it was first issued under Bill Clinton in 1993. In its most recent iteration, the “Mayorkas Memorandum,” the policy directed as a “foundational principle” that “to the fullest extent possible, the DHS (including Immigrations and Customs Enforcement [ICE] and Customs and Border Protection [CBP]) should not take an enforcement action in or near a protected area.” Such protected areas included schools and other places where children gather; medical and mental healthcare facilities; social services facilities; locations where disaster relief is being provided; places where an ongoing demonstration, parade, or rally is taking place; spaces where funerals, weddings, or other religious or civil ceremonies occur; and places of worship or religious study.
On January 31st, 2025, fewer than two weeks into the second Trump presidency, acting Secretary of Homeland Security Benjamine Huffman issued the Huffman Memorandum (followed soon after by a similar memorandum from the acting Director of ICE, Caleb Vitello), rescinding the Mayorkas Memorandum, which had been in place since 2021. Huffman removed “bright line rules [from an agency head] regarding where our immigration laws are permitted to be enforced,” instead directing agents to use their own discretion “along with a healthy dose of common sense.”
When the Trump Administration abruptly ended these decades-old protections, several Yearly Meetings (Philadelphia, New England, Baltimore, and New York Yearly Meetings) and two Monthly Meetings (Adelphi and Richmond Friends Meetings), joined by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Sikh Temple of Sacramento, sued the federal government on the grounds that reversing the policy violated their First Amendment religious freedom rights under the “Exercise Clause” of the U.S. Constitution ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."), as well as their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). RFRA was passed (nearly unanimously) by the U.S. Congress in 1993 in response to the Supreme Court decision in Employment Division v. Smith, which limited the ability of individuals to claim religious exemptions from “neutral laws of general applicability.” Under RFRA, any challenge to a federal law on the basis of a free exercise claim requires courts to hold the law to the high legal bar known as “strict scrutiny”. This means the law must “serve a compelling government interest” and be the “least restrictive means” to accomplish that interest. To date, 21 states have passed their own version of RFRA that apply to state and local statutes.
On February 24th, 2025, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang granted a preliminary injunction in part to the plaintiffs (the Friends Meetings, et al). In granting the injunction, Judge Chuang found that the plaintiffs’ case had a substantial likelihood of succeeding in the underlying trial, that the plaintiffs had already and would continue to suffer irreparable harm because of the government’s actions, that the balance of harms each party would suffer if the preliminary injunction were granted tipped in the favor of the plaintiffs (i.e., the harm the government may suffer by granting the injunction was outweighed by the harm the plaintiffs would suffer it were not), and that granting the injunction was in the public interest. Judge Chuang’s ruling held that the plaintiffs had already suffered a decline in attendance and noted that in cases of First Amendment claims, the mere threat of harm was sufficient to warrant a preliminary injuction, due to the importance of the rights threatened.
Judge Chuang limited the scope of the injunction in several important ways, however. Most importantly, he found that the plaintiffs had only demonstrated that their own case was “likely to succeed on the merits.” In other words, they had demonstrated that their worship communities would be substantially harmed by the new policy, in violation of their First Amendment rights and RFRA protections, not that all worship communities would. In so finding, Judge Chuang denied their request for a nationwide injunction that would bar enforcement actions at all sensitive religious sites, applying the injunction only to those of the plaintiffs. Similarly, the plaintiffs had sought to require a judicial warrant (one signed by a judge) for any enforcement actions at sensitive religious sites, but the Mayorkas Memorandum (and all previous iterations of such memoranda) required only an administrative warrant (one signed by an agency head). Given that preliminary injunctions are intended only to maintain the status quo while the case proceeds, Judge Chuang found that the injunction could only return to the burden on the government enshrined in the Mayorkas Memorandum, an administrative warrant issued by the U.S. Attorney General. Relatedly, he found that 8 U.S.C. § 1226a (a subsection of the U.S. legal code) limits his ability to issue an injunction preventing agents from enforcement actions backed by an administrative warrant. This means that until the case is decided (or in the event the government can successfully appeal the injunction), they must abide by the Mayorkas Memorandum in relation to the Quaker, Baptist, and Sikh communities that were parties to the lawsuit, requiring ICE and CBP to exercise deference to the religious communities and only undertake enforcement actions on and around their property when in possession of an administrative warrant. Judge Chuang’s order granting the preliminary injunction in part can be read here.
Discussion:
The underlying case is still proceeding in the Courts, and the state has filed an appeal against the preliminary injunction in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit. In February 2026, a group of scholars of Quakerism filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs (amicus curiae briefs are advisory legal documents submitted by interested parties not taking part in the lawsuit. They may provide information or suggest legal reasonings for deciding the case a certain way.). It is possible that the underlying case may be decided more broadly than the injunction. Because preliminary injunctions are required to be limited in scope in ways district and other higher court rulings are not, a favorable decision for the plaintiffs may be applied to all religious communities, not just the plaintiffs. The progress of the case can be tracked at Justitia and Court Listener. Ongoing updates on the case are also provided by the Friends Journal here.
Although many Americans associate religious freedom cases with the Christian right, the protections of the First Amendment and RFRA are for everyone. RFRA’s history is illustrative. The “Smith Peyote case,” Employment Division v. Smith (1990), was a landmark ruling that shook American law and jurisprudence on its release. Authored by hardline conservative Antonin Scalia, the majority opinion was joined by fellow conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist; two swing justices, Byron White and Anthony Kennedy; and liberal justice John Paul Stevens. Swing justice Sandra Day O’Connor concurred (meaning she agreed with the judgment of the majority but differed in her reasoning), and the three remaining liberal justices, Harry Blackmun, Thurgood Marshall, and William Brennan, joined Blackmun’s dissent. Blackmun’s dissent highlighted the danger of the majority’s ruling: minoritized religions with beliefs and practices the religious majority may find “unusual” are the least likely to be conferred protection by the First Amendment. And it is well to note that, Friends, with a long history in the United States (and of victories in the courts) and religious beliefs and practices that are largely legible to the broader public as religious, are well-positioned to leverage both traditional First Amendment challenges, as well as the increased protection afforded by RFRA.
The Smith Peyote case, though, is a historical oddity because the opinion, joined predominantly by conservative and swing justices, was seen as an all-out attack on religious freedom. The justices in the majority argued that granting religious exemptions to “neutral [i.e., not targeting religion] laws of general applicability [i.e., not limited in their scope to certain persons or groups]” would amount to raising religious conscience above and outside of the law. It is well to note, however, that the case turned on a religious exemption from a prohibition on drug posession for those receiving public benefits in the state of Oregon. The two men who sued, Alfred Leo Smith and Galen Black, were members of the Native American Church, which uses peyote as a sacrament. The question of how the Court may have decided a similar case involving more “mainstream” religious practices, if such a case even reached the Court because of targeting by government intervention at all, is worth sitting with.
The opinion in the case, moreover, is telling: the conservative justices suggested legislative redress of Galen and Black’s grievances, directing the appellants (appellants are those appealing the decision of a lower court, appellees are those who “won” in the lower court and want the decision to stand) to seek passage of legislation that would validate their religious exemptions. Three years later, not the appellants in the case but the U.S. Congress itself would take up this suggestion, passing RFRA, which balloons the scope of religious exemptions from “neutral laws of general applicability.” RFRA creates a high bar the federal government must meet in any Free Exercise case. The government must prove both that it has a compelling interest the law will effectively serve and that the law is the least restrictive means of serving that interest.
The parade of successful RFRA challenges that have followed in its wake have contributed to the increasing deference of the nation’s highest court to religious exercise. including over and above the Exercise Clause’s twin opening the First Amendment, the Establishment Clause. For example, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), a public high school football coach was fired for repeatedly refusing to stop praying on the field with his student players after games. The Court explicitly suggested that the Free Exercise claims of Kennedy and his minor students took precedence over the Establishment Clause’s forbidding any law “respecting an establishment of religion,” reversing decades of precedent. While Bremerton did not turn on RFRA, it helps illustrate the effectiveness of Exercise claims in the Courts. But several high-profile cases that have, such as Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (finding that certain for-profit corporations like Hobby Lobby can bear Exercise rights subject to the high bar of protection conferred by RFRA) or Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania (in which Catholic groups argued RFRA protected them from enforcement of the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate), have been seen by many as regressive.
So why should RFRA be important to Friends? RFRA is a powerful tool for all religious groups and has been successfully wielded for progressive causes. In Individual Members of the Medical Licensing Board of Indiana v. Anonymous Plaintiff 1, the plaintiffs used Indiana’s version of RFRA to argue that an abortion ban violated their religious beliefs. To extend the ruling beyond the named plaintiffs, the ACLU sought and was granted a class action certification, meaning that the religious exemption from the abortion ban was extended to anyone with similar religious beliefs (compare this to the extremely circumscribed ruling in the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting case). Indeed, RFRA has repeatedly been used for what many might identify as its intended purpose, in light of its history: Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal exempted a church from the Controlled Substances Act for their use of plants containing the hallucinogenic drug DMT in religious exercise. And, as discussed above, the plaintiffs in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting v. Department of Homeland Security have thus far successfully leveled RFRA claims against the government.
Continued and redoubled efforts to leverage RFRA in the favor of Friends and their communities thus bears great promise.
-Izzak Novak [the views expressed above, particularly in the section marked "discussion," are those of the author and the author alone]