Earlier this year I wrote about the origins of the sanctuary movement.

The sanctuary city movement emerged in the first years of the Reagan administration as Quakers, Catholic Liberation Theology and other leftist churches allied with the Soviet bloc intervened to protect leftist radicals fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua from deportation.

That’s why the original announcement of the sanctuary movement was timed to the anniversary of the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an El Salvadoran leftist activist whose death was used to campaign against U.S. aid to the country’s anti-Communist government.

The leftist churches did not offer to defy the law for all refugees, but focused specifically on the Reagan administration’s policy of deporting refugees from “El Salvador and Guatemala” as “illegal and immoral”

At the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, one of the founding places of the sanctuary movement, Rev. John Fife, who would later be arrested and convicted, had put up a sign reading “This is a sanctuary for the oppressed from Central America”. Key figures in the sanctuary city movement did not just harbor illegal aliens, they helped them cross the border, leading to deliberate confrontations with the government that allowed them to play martyrs.

Lately, some of the same churches have been playing this game by offering ‘sanctuary’ to illegal aliens.

The Trump administration, unlike the previous open borders administration, authorized ICE enforcement in these so-called ‘houses of worship’ who worship leftist politics and whose deity is a dead guy named Karl.

There are predictably lawsuits, one went well and one didn’t.

The Quakers, a Latino church, something called Wisdon Inc, along with a ‘Reconstructionist’ synagogue (an atheistic movement that focuses on leftist politics – the clergyman from the relevant institution as a “half-Filipino, transgender Jew”) sued claiming that their institutions somehow had immunity from federal law enforcement.

Considering that no raids had actually happened, the judge, a Trump appointee, found that they had no case.

An Obama judge however found that another group of Quakers along with a Sikh temple somehow had immunity from federal raids to “mitigate the potential collision between the interests of government and religion” in light of the “First Amendment.”

The same folks making this argument were also the ones who argued that the government could shut down churches and synagogues.

But it can’t arrest illegal aliens inside them.

The First Amendment does not give houses of worship immunity from law enforcement action. What it says is that the government cannot interfere with reasonably lawful religious worship.

That means the government cannot for example outlaw scripture because it disagrees with its words. It can however impose religiously neutral zoning regulations, for example.

There is generally an effort to avoid a direct collision with longstanding practice, thus during Prohibition, Catholic and Jewish clergy were able to obtain wine for religious reasons.

But none of this covers actively shielding wanted fugitives.

The judge’s ruling insists that since the Sikhs believe everyone must be welcomed and therefore the government can’t arrest illegal aliens in their temples. That’s not how the First Amendment or religious freedom work.

But the Left doesn’t actually believe in religious freedom. Or it wouldn’t have closed churches while keeping bars and BLM riots open during the pandemic.

Article posted with permission from Daniel Greenfield