There Is a Sign on the Door of a Church in Minneapolis Naming a Federal Court Order. It Did Not Work.

I have sat in the back row of a church for most of my adult life, and I sit there for the reason back row people sit there. I like to see the room. I do not especially like being seen in it.

In all those years I have never once turned around to look at who came in behind me. I have thought about the sermon and the coffee and whether the man two rows up was going to attempt the descant again. I have never wondered what anyone behind me was writing down, because it never occurred to me that anyone would be.

University Baptist Church in Minneapolis has a sign on its building. It says the premises are a protected area pursuant to a federal court order in a case called New England Synod v. Department of Homeland Security. Somebody printed that. Somebody decided where to hang it.

Last week, court documents said a federal agent went in anyway, undercover, and stayed at least two hours.

Here is what is actually in front of a judge, and it is worth separating from how it will be described to you by the end of the week.

Eleven religious plaintiffs, including American Baptist Churches USA, the Alliance of Baptists and several regional bodies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, sued the federal government in July of last year over the decision to rescind the sensitive locations policy, the rule that had discouraged immigration enforcement at churches, schools and hospitals. In February a judge granted them a preliminary injunction, 62 pages of it, temporarily barring warrantless enforcement on the grounds of the churches in the case, with an exception for exigent circumstances.

On Thursday, August 20, those plaintiffs filed a motion accusing the Department of Homeland Security of "multiple egregious violations" of that order, and asked the court to make the government explain why it should not be held in contempt. They asked for expedited consideration. The surveillance came to light through filings in a separate case, which described DHS operations at five churches in the Midwest, one of them covered by the injunction.

The government's answer is not that it did nothing. According to the motion, DHS lawyers told the plaintiffs' lawyers that what happened does not count as an "immigration enforcement action," and so the order does not reach it. Surveillance, on that reading, is a different category of thing than enforcement.

A DHS spokesperson told Religion News Service the agency does not comment on ongoing investigations or on investigative methods.

I want to be careful here, because this is a motion and not a finding. Everything the churches allege is so far an allegation. A judge has not ruled that anyone violated anything. The plaintiffs' own argument, that DHS is offering a reading invented after the fact rather than one it actually held at the time, is a characterization made by the side that is angry, and it may not survive contact with the record.

And I want to be careful about something else, which is more uncomfortable.

Most of the readers of this publication would not agree with what these particular congregations are doing. These are mainline churches, several of them progressive, and the reason a federal agent had any interest in their buildings at all is that they have made themselves places where people without papers feel safe. That is a contested position. You are allowed to think it is the wrong one.

The liberty does not care. That is the entire architecture of the thing. A protection that only covers the sanctuary whose politics you share is not a protection, it is a preference, and preferences get revised by whoever is in the building next. If an agent can sit for two hours in the back of a Baptist church in Minneapolis because the government has decided that watching is not enforcing, then the question of who else can be watched, and in which sanctuary, and under what redefinition, is no longer a question about immigration at all.

American churches have been watched by their own government before. Black congregations in the civil rights years did not have to be told this. They assumed it, and they were right to.

Luke has Jesus telling his disciples that nothing is covered that will not be revealed, and that what they have whispered in private rooms will be proclaimed from the housetops. It is not a comfort verse. He says it to people who are about to be watched, and he does not promise them privacy. He promises them that the accounting runs in both directions, and that it is not the watched who should be afraid of the light.

I keep coming back to the sign.

A congregation sat down and decided that the way to be safe was to print a court order and fix it to their own front door, in English, at eye level, where a stranger coming in could read it. That is a strange kind of faith in paper. It is also the most ordinary American thing imaginable, and I do not think I have ever loved and pitied a piece of church signage more.

I still sit in the back row. I still have not turned around. But I have started to understand that this was never innocence. It was just a very long run of not needing to know.

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Sources

1. Religion News Service, Jack Jenkins, "11 faith groups accuse Trump administration of violating court order while spying on churches," August 20, 2026.
2. Motion in New England Synod, ELCA v. Department of Homeland Security, D. Mass., entry 117.
3. Preliminary injunction in the same case, February 2026, entry 74.
4. Religion News Service, "Despite government surveillance of their churches, Minnesota congregations remain defiant," August 19, 2026.