clergy & faith leaderS’
toolbox for immigrant justice
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As clergy and faith leaders, you are a moral voice, and elected officials hear you differently than they hear an activist. This section offers starting points for how to engage your important voice in advocacy and organizing.
Congress
Eighty-plus clergy and faith leader signatures on a letter to a congressman received a personal response within two weeks, but left many unanswered questions. What do we do when our voices are ignored or silenced? The standard next move is not another letter — it is a scheduled district-office visit by a small clergy delegation with one specific ask. This section offers tools to help you take that next step.
Six steps: pick the ask, decide solo versus delegation, schedule it, use a lobby-visit roadmap, run the meeting, follow up with staff. You do not have to be perfect or experts to talk to those charged with representing you!
The RAFT framework, developed by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, offers a clear outline for writing your first letter to the editor. The basics include keeping your letter under 150 words and localizing a federal issue. Plus, this tool explains how to run a congregational letter-writing session. Will you host one this fall?
This toolkit includes four downloads and teaches you how to run an advocacy meeting.
This captivating and agitational piece by Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews offers a provocative question: “Are you a chaplain to the Empire or a prophet of the Resistance?” This is a must-read piece for leaders and laity alike..
This worksheet was prepared by Professor Marshall Ganz to introduce the concept of “story” in community organizing. Here, you will begin to understand key concepts in organizing, including building your story of self and recognizing the story of us.
Sheriffs
A distinction that matters for every letter you write. Bed rental (an IGSA contract, which is what Ste. Genevieve, Greene, Phelps and Ozark counties have) is a different practice from deputization (a 287(g) agreement) and different again from information sharing. Naming the right one is part of what makes a letter land instead of being dismissed.
Sheriffs and police chiefs often see themselves as public servants working under unseen constraints. Consider appealing to their desire to serve, to public safety — identify clearly that voluntary entanglement with immigration enforcement makes their community less safe, and is a net negative for them — to their standing as elected officials, and where it applies, to their own faith. It may be worth it to name plainly that financial implications should not outweigh moral ones.
Note: in the St. Louis region, the MICA Project, Missouri Workers Center, the ACLU and ArchCity Defenders are working collaboratively on regional strategies to end police collaboration with ICE. Please build relationships with these local experts if you haven’t already — they are your best resources.
Lays out the three sheriff practices — information sharing, deputization, bed rental. Open the full PDF in a browser; the website may block automated readers.
Although this toolkit from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center is from 2015, some sections remain accurate. Pay special attention to the section on power mapping. It explains who actually holds which lever: sheriffs run the jail, county legislative bodies pass the budget and can create oversight.
This is a national campaign led by a great organization; this page has a dedicated sheriff’s-department section with concrete demands and tactics: sign-on letters, call-ins, budget leverage.
Older, but it correctly identifies county commissioners as primary targets at bed-rental facilities — not just the sheriff.
287(g) and Local Police Cooperation
Start here. Plain-language explainer of the three models — Warrant Service Officer, Jail Enforcement, and Task Force (near-full ICE powers in the community). English and Spanish.
One of the most current 287(g) documents available.This offers the moral and policy arguments against this model, recently updated.
This is the best tracker for current 287(g) agreements.Open the interactive map for Missouri to get granular.
The named playbook for getting an agreement rescinded. Dated 2019; the overarching strategy holds, but some specifics are no longer accurate.
This is a line-by-line annotation of an actual 287(g) agreement text — use it to read and better understand any 287(g) agreements active in your area.
Outcomes of Local Advocacy
Clergy and faith leaders sometimes assume advocacy means writing to a politician in Washington DC and waiting. The record in our region says otherwise, and it is worth knowing before you decide that your own ask is too small. Pro tip: send the letter or make the call anyway.
In May 2026, Ashrei supported a congressional oversight visit to the Ste. Genevieve County Jail, with support from Abide in Love Ste. Genevieve and the MICA Project. Rep. Wesley Bell (MO) and Rep. Nikki Budzinski (IL) toured the facility; they even met with detained immigrants who were supported through the Hotline. What they found — roughly 150 ICE detainees, a pregnant woman without adequate prenatal care or clean water, people sleeping on thin trays because of overcrowding — was amplified by St. Louis Public Radio, KSDK, the Belleville News-Democrat and others. A visit happened because organizations here asked for it and prepared the ground.
The same pattern holds for local enforcement data, for 287(g) reporting, and for the accountability work in Overland following the deaths of Glendy González de la Cruz and Nixon Pérez Paz. Ashrei has placed the story of police collaboration with ICE in local media more than thirty times since 2022, including in Spanish. Faith leaders were the story in February 2026, when clergy marched across the Martin Luther King Memorial Bridge — the action this Collective grew out of.
The practical lesson: a specific, documented, local ask — made by named clergy, to a named official, about a named facility — moves. Ashrei has built the oversight instrument to support it, including a structured set of questions for detention facility visits covering medical and prenatal standards, ICE officer access, law library compliance, pod occupancy, outdoor access and language interpretation. Ask for it before you meet an official.
Ashrei’s account of the May 2026 visit — what was asked for, what was found, what followed. The clearest template available for what a clergy delegation can set in motion.
St. Louis Public Radio’s coverage. Useful when you need a citable public source rather than an advocacy page.
February 2026. The action this Clergy Collective grew out of — worth reading if you are wondering whether clergy presence registers publicly.
Local reporting on 287(g) in this region, placed by Ashrei. Good background before a conversation with a police chief or city council.
Multiple blog posts on many topics, including: reflections from the vigil for Glendy and Nixon, a night at the bus station when the hotline rang, what emerges from the dashboard data -- this is where the work is narrated as it happens.
Detention: visiting, writing, and bonding people out
Writing letters to detained people is the lowest-risk, highest-immediacy congregational action in this entire toolbox. It needs no facility access, no legal training, and no permission. It can be a coffee-hour activity next Sunday.
One caution the Collective raised itself, and it is the right caution: escalation can cost a legal partner the jail access they have carefully preserved. Before organizing anything at a facility, read Freedom for Immigrants’ guidance on what a non-attorney volunteer may and may not do — that document is the guardrail that protects your legal partner’s access.
26 linked resources. The richest visitation hub anywhere.
Produced by Freedom for Immigrants. Start here, then pair it with a letter-writing event guide and run it after services.
Read this before your legal partner has to ask you to. Defines what a non-attorney volunteer may and may not do.
If you want a standing clergy visitation program at a county jail, this offers a blueprint.
People inside detention dial 9233# free, Mon–Fri 8am–8pm PT / 11am–11pm ET. Multilingual. Volunteers help submit bond fund requests and connect people to letter-writing and visitation groups. Put this on a wallet card for families at all four jails.
The Collective has already drafted roughly twenty oversight questions covering pregnant and nursing detainees, medical care, legal information and ICE access, jail conditions, and language access. Ask Ashrei for the current version — it is directly reusable.