clergy & faith leaderS’
toolbox for immigrant justice
- Start here
- Sacred Texts & Reflection
- Your Tradition
- Protect & Prepare
- Teach & Learn
- Advocate & Organize
- Vote & Civic Engagement
- St. Louis & Missouri
- Build This Together
- Before you rely on this
“What is the role of denominations? Those are good bones — the statements and positions and explainers of each denomination, those are bones.” Find yours here, so you are not arguing from your own opinion but from what your body has already said.
Jewish
Signed by the rabbinic, congregational and cantorial bodies of all three major movements. The single strongest ‘my movement already said this’ document to hand a hesitant board.
~47 items, including actual letters rabbis sent their congregations, ‘How to Speak to Kids About Deportation,’ and a guide to hosting an immigration paperwork clinic. The most practically useful page in this whole section.
Six pathways — values, education, ritual, philanthropy, advocacy, volunteering. HIAS will consult with your congregation to build a plan.
A named national clergy cohort, and the most natural next step for a rabbi or cantor who wants a standing commitment rather than a one-off.
5–10 adults, six-month commitment, background checks and training, at least $1,000 raised per newcomer. A real yes/no board decision.
Reform movement resolutions, a social media toolkit, and live action alerts including sensitive-location protection.
For when concern about antisemitism is invoked to justify harming immigrants. Read this before you preach if you expect pushback from inside your own community.
Roman Catholic
Approved 216–5. “To our immigrant brothers and sisters, we stand with you in your suffering… You are not alone!” Read it from the pulpit.
The foundational joint US/Mexican bishops’ pastoral letter. Available in Spanish. Works as an adult formation text.
Hand this to a lay leader as the parish’s starter plan.
Learn / Engage / Take Action, plus ‘You Are Not Alone,’ a pastoral accompaniment initiative.
A one-click commitment, plus Cabrini and Juan Diego prayer cards in English and Spanish.
Find the St. Louis agency and ask what they need. Note their scam warning page — worth flagging to congregants.
Baptist — and the best practical toolkit we found in any tradition
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is a plaintiff in litigation that produced a preliminary injunction protecting houses of worship from ICE enforcement, and they built a full bilingual congregational toolkit around it. It is denominationally neutral in substance, free, in English and Spanish, and it answers the question clergy new to this work actually ask first: what do I do if agents come to my building? Every tradition should look at this, whatever your denomination.
Everything below, in one place, plus a complete Spanish set.
Adopt it as your written protocol before you need it. Highest payoff of any single download here.
Take it to your vestry, board, session, or deacons for adoption.
Train greeters and office staff on what not to answer.
Print and post on your doors. The single easiest thing on this website.
What the court order does and does not do.
Run it as a three-session adult formation series.
The most current single handout we found anywhere.
Presbyterian (PCUSA)
One-stop ‘what has our denomination actually said.’ Current, and unusually well organized.
Office of Immigration Issues, PDA Migration Accompaniment Ministry, and consultation contacts.
Advent 2026 is four months out. Good timing to commit now.
Adult education curriculum, February 2026.
Host a film-and-discussion night.
Episcopal
An honest gap. episcopalchurch.org blocks automated access, so we could not verify Episcopal Migration Ministries’ current materials or General Convention resolution numbers. The resources almost certainly exist and are substantial — someone needs to open these in a browser and fill this in. Meanwhile, the local Episcopal infrastructure is real and reachable.
Unverified — open in a browser before relying on it.
Missioner for Public Advocacy: the Rev. Dr. Teresa Mithen Danieley, publicadvocacy@diocesemo.org. The best single lead into Episcopal structures here.
Bilingual worship resources; missioner the Rev. Dr. Valori Mulvey Sherer.
Congregational accompaniment. Unverified — confirm before distributing.
Lutheran (ELCA)
ELCA’s official social message on immigration dates to 1998 — it predates the existence of ICE. AMMPARO is the live program, but its resource library filter returned nothing on two attempts. The usable Lutheran material is at Global Refuge.
Accompanying Migrants with Protection, Advocacy, Representation and Opportunities. Includes a map of participating congregations — find the nearest one and call them.
Four video modules with discussion guides, plus a covenant retreat where a congregation commits to three action items for the year. The best structured year-long on-ramp we found.
Liturgy, vigil resources, a disinformation toolkit, and family/children materials.
The official teaching document, for the record. Spanish also available.
United Methodist
Wallet-sized myth/fact card. Order for the whole congregation.
The denominational statement.
A guide to supporting immigrants and migrants.
Includes one-click advocacy on the Sensitive Locations Act.
United Church of Christ
A structured path to becoming a welcoming congregation.
Actual funding for a congregation starting a ministry. Worth naming from the podium.
Contact: Megan Bergert, bergertm@ucc.org.
Evangelical
Sermon outlines, ‘Equipped to Act’ guide, family devotionals for preschool and elementary, and video trainings.
They will send a speaker to a church gathering. One to two weeks’ lead time; fees not published, so ask.
Show one episode at a board meeting.
The evangelical statements, in English and Spanish.
Muslim
An asymmetry worth naming out loud. Across ISNA, CAIR, MPAC, Emgage, Muslim Advocates, ICNA Relief and ING, exactly one resource is built for what clergy in this work actually need — MPAC’s Imam’s Guide. There is no Muslim analogue to HIAS: no Muslim refugee-resettlement agency with a congregational program. That gap is visible to anyone who goes looking. It is an invitation to build, not something to paper over.
Rights regardless of status, administrative vs. judicial warrants at the door, workplace enforcement, locating a detained relative, and a cut-out safety card. Print and stack in the lobby.
English, Arabic, Bengali, Bosnian, Farsi, Somali, Urdu, Dari, Pashto. Note honestly: these cover law enforcement, employment, travel and hate crimes — they are not ICE-specific. Use MPAC’s for ICE.
Where to point a congregant whose TPS is at risk, and a reliable source for accurate litigation status in a khutbah.
Includes a specific section on added precautions for non-citizen protesters. Essential before any congregant joins a public vigil or action.
The most plausible source of a speaker for a mixed-tradition adult education series.
Unitarian Universalist
Draws on Hebrew scripture, Christian teaching, Islamic texts and the UDHR — unusually quotable at an interfaith gathering. Its tiered calls to action are a ready-made menu for a congregational conversation.
Side With Love, the UU Solidarity Initiative, and ‘Six Questions Congregations Need to Answer About Community Safety in This Moment.’
Long-term congregational accompaniment: housing, legal aid, family reunification. Deliberately flexible about what role your group plays.
A single service spotlighting one issue. An easy first step.
Two complete four-session curricula, grades 1–3 and 4–6, plus a family night. Free. The best turnkey children’s religious education resource we found in any tradition.
Quaker
The best single curated link hub in this entire toolbox, and one every tradition should read. Includes Columbia Law’s RFRA-immigration FAQ and World Relief’s guidance on ICE in places of worship.
Letter-to-the-editor talking points and reflection questions. A clergy person can write and place an op-ed from this in an afternoon.
Including KYR at immigration court and for business owners.
Free posters for a lobby or a lawn. Genuinely easy visible solidarity.
Black church traditions
We have to be straight about this, because it shapes who this toolbox actually serves.
We checked the AME Church, the Church of God in Christ, the National Baptist Convention USA, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, and the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World. None has a discoverable immigration position statement, office, staff position, or congregational resource. PNBC’s Social Justice Commission names five priorities and immigration is not among them. This is not a gap in our searching; it is an accurate picture of the institutional landscape.
Which means: for Catholic, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, UCC and Baptist clergy, this toolbox curates. For AME, COGIC, National Baptist, PNBC and PAW clergy, it has to create — and it should not do that by handing Black clergy mainline Advent liturgies. The right move is to build it in partnership, borrowing a frame and a format that already work.
Two openings are real. The AME Social Action Commission has a newly seated chair, Bishop Francine A. Brookins, elected January 2026 — a named person to write to. And the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference has already built exactly this kind of curriculum twice, on Palestine and on mass incarceration. The New Jim Crow Study Guide is the format model: it teaches a Black-church audience to read enforcement, surveillance and incarceration theologically. Extending that lens to immigration enforcement is a short step, and SDPC is the natural partner.
This section is deliberately unfinished. If you want to help build it, that is the most valuable contribution anyone can make to this toolbox right now.
Explicitly names immigrant rights as a priority area. The clearest Black-church-rooted immigration framing we verified anywhere — use the moral fusion frame to connect racial profiling and civil rights history to immigration enforcement.
The organizing method behind the frame.
Not about immigration — and that is the point. This is the format to adapt, and SDPC is the partner to adapt it with.
Roster only, no program described. Chair: Bishop Francine A. Brookins, seated Jan 2026. General office: generalsecretary@ame-church.com, 615.254.0911. Worth a direct letter.
Exists “to affirm and actualize the founding vision of the convention to be a radical community of Baptists committed to advancing human and civil rights.” Immigration is not yet on its list of priorities. Someone could put it there.
Traditions with little or nothing of their own
Clergy from the Church of the Nazarene, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, and Ukrainian Catholic parishes will not find denominational immigration resources, because we could not find any. Rather than pretend otherwise, we recommend going straight to the practical and ecumenical material: CBF’s ICE contingency plan, the ACLU of Missouri’s guidance for places of worship, Global Refuge’s Faith Alliance, and the Whistle Project. For Ukrainian Catholic parishes specifically, the live bridge is Ukrainian humanitarian parole and TPS, where Church World Service’s sponsorship program is directly on point.
Directly relevant to Ukrainian parole and TPS cases.
Co-sponsoring a family is the highest-commitment, highest-impact option in this whole toolbox.