clergy & faith leaderS’
toolbox for immigrant justice

Welcome to the new Immigrant Justice Toolbox! This digital toolbox is designed for clergy and faith leaders who are on their journey leading congregations and communities into the work of justice for immigrants. The purpose of this toolbox is to close the gap between caring about this issue and knowing what to do about it.

This toolbox is an invitation: pick a lane, pick a timeframe, do one thing. You cannot do everything. Nobody can. What is your lane, as a leader — and what is our lane, as a community of faith leaders?

This toolbox is collaborative: Ashrei’s Clergy Collective launched this toolbox in August 2026 and will continue maintaining it. As new tools, tips and samples emerge and are developed, we invite you to contribute to developing this toolbox. Share what worked, what didn’t; what you found, what you created. We are building a collective moral voice and we need you.

Quick Start Guide, two pagesQuick Start GuidePDF, 2 pages · opens in a new window
If you only do one thing this week, order free Know Your Rights red cards from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center — they come in 59 languages and cost nothing — and print the ACLU of Missouri’s guidance for places of worship for your staff and board. Both are in Protect & Prepare, and together they take about twenty minutes. Make sure your team and community know these resources exist; share them and equip your community to share this knowledge.
This is the Ashrei Foundation’s toolbox, and most of what matters in it is local. Ashrei is the administrative and infrastructural home of the St. Louis Rapid Response Hotline, leads the Immigrant Family Emergency Response Fund, publishes the region’s only immigration enforcement dashboard, and convenes this Clergy Collective. The national organizations listed throughout are genuinely useful — but the hotline that answers when someone in your congregation is detained, the data that tells you where arrests actually happen, and the people who will train your volunteers are all here, in St. Louis. Start there.

Five lanes

Preach & Teach

You have a pulpit/bimah/minbar and a congregation that trusts you. The fastest thing you can do is name the immigration injustices from the front of the room, with a text from your own tradition.

Sacred Texts & Reflection Your Tradition Teach & Learn

Protect & Prepare

Your building is a place people come to. Decide now — in writing, with your leadership body — what happens if ICE agents come to your door. Do not make those decisions in the moment. Plus, preparing when your congregation may be less likely to be targeted for enforcement offers you an opportunity to share the process and tools with neighboring congregations who may be more impacted and have less capacity to manage such detailed, intentional processes in the midst of crisis.

Protect & Prepare

Accompany

Show up with people: at ICE check-ins, at hearings, at the jail, at the door. This is the work almost no one else can do, and clergy presence has the potential to change what happens in a room.

Protect & Prepare Advocate & Organize St. Louis & Missouri

Advocate

You are a moral voice that elected officials and people in other positions of power answer differently than they answer an activist. Sheriffs, city councils, and members of Congress are all reachable.

Advocate & Organize Vote & Civic Engagement

Fund & Feed

Bond money, groceries, rent, gas cards, commissary. Unglamorous, immediate, and always short-term. If your congregation has money and limited bandwidth, start here.

St. Louis & Missouri Advocate & Organize

What’s in the Toolbox

  1. Sacred Texts & Reflection

    Every tradition already has the language for this. The work is not inventing it — it is remembering it out loud and putting it into action, and…

  2. Your Tradition

    Many of our diverse traditions offer “good bones” for this work — the statements, positions and explainers of each denomination.…

  3. Protect & Prepare

    This is the first question almost every clergy person asks, and it deserves a written answer before it is an emergency: what happens if immigration…

  4. Teach & Learn

    Often, those closest to the impacts are shocked by the number of people who don’t seem to know what’s going on. The first step for…

  5. Advocate & Organize

    As clergy and faith leaders, you are a moral voice, and elected officials hear you differently than they hear an activist. This section offers…

  6. Vote & Civic Engagement

    Clergy ask this constantly, and they are right to: what can a house of worship legally do in an election season? Here is the honest answer, the…

  7. St. Louis & Missouri

    This is the part of the toolbox that exists nowhere else. Everything above you could find with enough searching. This you cannot.

  8. Build This Together

    This toolbox is deliberately unfinished. It was built fast, for one gathering, and the most useful things in it will come from the people who use it.

  9. Before you rely on this

Every section lets you filter by how much time you have — this week, this season, or this year — and by your own tradition.

A note on how this was built. This toolbox was researched and drafted with the help of AI, then reviewed and edited by Ashrei staff. Every component had real hands and human eyes before publishing. Links go to primary sources wherever possible — please check the date and, for anything legal or medical, confirm with a professional before relying on it. We are doing our best to keep this updated, current and reliable in a fast-paced environment. Feedback is welcome and encouraged!

Aug 17 Event Materials

Everything handed out at the Clergy and Faith Leader Gathering on August 17, 2026. All free to print, copy and pass on.

  • Quick Start Guide

    The orientation handout from the gathering: what the toolbox holds & how to use it, the hotline number, and the first three things to do when you get back to your congregation.

    PDF · 2 pages
  • My Neighborhood Network

    The fill-in worksheet for mapping the people and congregations closest to you, so you know who to call before you need to call them.

    PDF · 1 page
  • Slides from the gathering

    The full presentation from August 17, for anyone who could not be there or who wants to run the material with their own congregation.

    PDF · multiple pages
  • Event Handouts

    The printed materials distributed on the day, collected into one file.

    PDF · multiple pages
229 resources, verified manually on 8/6/26. Links break, phone numbers change, and policies shift — especially regarding immigration law. Please remember that nothing in this toolbox is legal advice. For legal questions about immigration enforcement at your congregation, please consult an attorney licensed in Missouri. To help you get started, please visit the attorneys here: bit.ly/stlrrattorneys.