On Christmas Eve, faith groups gathered outside the Aurora immigration detention center to serenade the people held within. Outside, the singers bellowed hymns and carols loud enough to permeate the walls. Inside, immigrants flocked to the facility’s windows.
As the shadowed outlines of detainees’ heads and hands filled the frosted windows, the Rev. Chris Gilmore later recounted, he and the nearly 100 carolers present shouted, “We love you!”
“There was this connection,” said Gilmore, lead pastor at the Sixth Avenue United Church of Christ in Cherry Creek. “At least on that night, people knew they weren’t forgotten. Sometimes we feel helpless, but at least we could let them know on Christmas Eve there is love for them.”
Colorado faith leaders and parishioners across religions have rallied around the state’s immigrants as they’re targeted by President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation efforts. Church members deliver groceries to immigrants too afraid to leave their homes. They offer know-your-rights trainings. They’re accompanying immigrants to check-ins with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and acting as legal observers in court.
Clergy have long contributed to social movements, but experts said immigration is an issue increasingly hard for churches to ignore as parishioners read holy texts about embracing the foreigner while their neighbors and fellow congregants fear detention and deportation.
Coloradans of varied faith backgrounds described turning the Biblical command of “love thy neighbor” into action rather than just a platitude shared in the pews.
Parishes that once kept their doors open to any prospective worshipper are now strategically locking their buildings and designating certain areas as private to protect immigrants from being targeted by ICE, said Shara Smith, CEO of the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado, a network of more than 400 congregations representing more than two dozen faith traditions.
The alliance, which describes itself as the largest faith-based organization in the state, launched a “Choose Love, Not ICE” campaign to encourage houses of worship to vocally support immigrants.
“We are all deeply devastated by what we’ve seen in other parts of the country like Minneapolis,” Smith said, referring to the recent operation in Minnesota that resulted in the arrest of thousands of immigrants and the killing of two people by federal agents. “There’s nothing right now that says Colorado isn’t next, so faith communities are engaged in safety planning.”
The devout told The Denver Post about a moral obligation to help the vulnerable and speak out against wrongdoing, a desire to be on “the right side of history” and a duty to rebuke injustice done in the name of God as their guiding light. Several people interviewed for this story pointed to the Biblical verse Leviticus 19:33-34: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them.”
“Faith is being distorted to justify a lot of the cruelty we’re seeing,” Smith said. “We have seen the distortion of faith to suit a political agenda, so it requires clergy step forward to clarify when those distortions are happening and speak to our common values and the moral obligation we all have to care for those who are vulnerable in our society.”
She clarified that churches are not advocating lawlessness.
“The majority of people being detained by ICE are law-abiding folks who are in the immigration process,” Smith said. “You can be a nation of laws and enforce our laws without succumbing to cruelty. We can respect our laws without sacrificing our own humanity in the process.”
Representatives of ICE’s Denver field office did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Whistles, warrants and worship
St. Mark’s Lutheran Church sits in the culturally diverse community of Aurora.
The neighborhood is predominantly Latino, said Pastor Michael Mortvedt, and the church is proud to serve its community.
St. Mark’s offers its building to local organizations such as Amigos de Mexico, a nonprofit providing resources to the Latino community. Hundreds of people visiting Amigos de Mexico’s twice-monthly food drives and medical clinics used to wait in line outside of the church, but when Mortvedt got word about increased ICE arrests last year, he told the organization that its patrons could wait inside the building for protection.
The church is starting a Signal chat to communicate about sightings of ICE operations, Mortvedt said. They’ve distributed “know your rights” cards to parishioners. They’ve ensured leaders have phone numbers for the Colorado Rapid Response Network, a statewide hotline that verifies reports of ICE activity.
Inspired by the clergy response to ICE in Minneapolis, the Lutheran congregation is assembling bags with whistles to blow when someone spots ICE agents, and creating QR codes that can be scanned with phones to access immigration resources.
And church leaders are talking about what to do in the event of an ICE raid — stand at the church doors, ask to see a judicial warrant, stall as best they can, Mortvedt said.
“Part of my ordination vow, my baptismal promise, was to support justice in the community,” he said.
Lutheranism’s founding accompanied antisemitic rhetoric and behavior, Mortvedt said, so it feels important to him to learn from history and speak up now. The congregation has lost at least one member who felt the pastor was “too political,” Mortvedt said.
“We’re just trying to let people know this is a safe place,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can.”
‘Shoulder to shoulder with your neighbor’
St. Mark’s sits about two miles south of ICE’s Aurora detention center, where Adams County health officials are investigating after advocates alleged widespread illness.
The facility can hold up to 1,530 detainees. An ICE report in January put its population at 1,153, of which 828 people were listed as noncriminal detainees.
The detention center has become a regular site for vigils and protests, including by the Greater Metropolitan Denver Ministerial Alliance, which held a rally there late last month to demand justice for people killed by ICE, including Minneapolis residents Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who both had Colorado ties.
Coloradans are also protesting potential ICE expansion in the state.
Approximately 30 miles north in the small town of Hudson, ICE has identified a defunct private prison as a potential site for a facility that would house about 1,300 detainees, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado.
The Chicago-based real estate investment trust that owns the former Hudson Correctional Facility, Highlands REIT, also owns several apartment buildings across Denver.
On Monday, dozens of faith leaders and congregants gathered in front of one of those apartment buildings in downtown Denver, demanding that Highlands REIT abandon any business dealings with ICE and asking residents of the Chamber Lofts at 1726 Champa St. to contact their landlord to demand the same.
Weld County faith leaders who are part of the multi-faith community organization Together Colorado led the event. They told the crowd they reached out to Highlands REIT CEO Robert Lange to request a meeting to discuss their concerns about the ICE facility, but have not received a response.
The Post has also not received any response in its attempts to contact Highlands REIT.
The gathered faithful — some wearing religious stoles and collars — held signs reading “Every human being is a reflection of the divine” and “ICE out.” They sang protest songs, including one with the lyrics: “I send my hope/I send my prayer/I send my strength to those resisting everywhere.”
Demonstrators shouted out the faith backgrounds represented in the crowd: Judaism, Unitarianism, Methodism, Presbyterianism, Catholicism, Lutheranism, Episcopalianism.
“As I reflected on our gathering here today… I was reminded of the vision that the ancient prophet Isaiah had with respect to his own day, a day in which his people were entangled with the imperial powers, seeking to ward off invasion,” said the Rev. Chris Bollegar, rector at Broomfield’s Holy Trinity Anglican Church. “Isaiah saw through that to another day. Thank you for being here… Thank you for your love that brings you shoulder to shoulder with your neighbor — treating them as yourself.”
Learning from history
In November, a federal judge in Denver found that immigration authorities had routinely carried out illegal arrests in the state.
ICE arrested a Durango father and his two children on their way to school in October and claimed the agency thought the father was someone else. The asylum-seeking family agreed to self-deport the U.S. because of the trauma they experienced in detention, they said.
A fifth-grade teacher in Douglas County self-deported in November after her October arrest, despite her school claiming she had legal authorization to live and work in the country.
Nearly two-thirds of the 3,500 immigrants arrested in Colorado in 2025, through October, had no prior criminal convictions, according to the most recent ICE records available through the Deportation Data Project.
Lifelong Catholic Gary Barnes bears witness to the people making their way through the complex immigration court system.
For the 70-year-old retiree, supporting immigrants is not a partisan issue. It’s about loving his neighbors. For a resident of northwest Denver, where generations of Latino families have built a long-lasting community, Barnes is all too aware that his neighbors in the pews and on his street could be targeted by ICE.
“I’m in a Catholic parish, but I’m concerned about my community, not just my parish,” Barnes said, declining to identify the church he attends. “I’m concerned about the people on my block that may be at risk for detention or deportation. I’m very concerned about our neighborhood.”
Compelled by his faith — the Beatitudes shared by Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount and the seven themes of Catholic social teaching — Barnes became a volunteer court watcher. This group of vetted volunteers distributes legal information outside the federal immigration court in downtown Denver, sits in on court proceedings to act as witnesses, and waits outside courtrooms to listen to immigrants’ stories, entertain their children and direct them to resources.
In November, retiring Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila led hundreds of local Catholics in a sermon outside the Aurora detention center.
He reminded attendees that “dignity is not bestowed by any government” and comes from “God and God alone,” and that Democrats and Republicans “treated immigrants as pawns for their own elections” and have “failed every immigrant,” Denverite reported.
More than 10 million Christian immigrants in the country are vulnerable to deportation, according to a report released last year by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The report found that the overwhelming majority of immigrants at risk of deportation in the U.S. are Christians, with 61% of those people identifying as Catholic.
The large number of Catholic immigrants makes the Catholic Church uniquely suited to respond to this moment in history, said Barnes, who is learning Spanish so he can better contribute to this cause.
“It’s not political for me,” Barnes said. “It’s just the gospel. It’s welcoming the stranger. It’s knowing these people who immigrated have not done this because it’s easy. Nobody wants to leave their homeland if they don’t have to.”
A couple of Christmases ago, an Afghan man and his son arrived at the doorstep of the Messiah Community Church, a small Lutheran congregation across the street from Denver’s City Park.
The father and son had walked 12 miles, stopping at churches along the way in search of help. Pastor Inga Oyan Longbrake said she wasn’t supposed to be at Messiah that day, but happened to stop by for an errand when she found the pair in need.
The father had helped the U.S. military in Kabul, she said, and eventually fled the country. That left a family of 10 down on its luck, navigating the complex immigration system.
The 81-member congregation pitched in to partner with the family, Longbrake said. They helped them find a place to live and covered their rent and utilities for an entire year.
“Historically, Christians really haven’t always done the right thing when it comes to standing on the right side of justice, like slavery and during World War II,” Longbrake said. “If we’re going to learn from history, we need to remember those moments and use our voices now.”
Longbrake has been inspired by the clergy’s response in Minneapolis, where the pious organized, provided mutual aid, acted as legal observers and got arrested in the name of defending vulnerable populations.
“It just makes you go, ‘Yeah, absolutely. That’s exactly what we’re meant to do in these moments,’” Longbrake said. “There is risk. There is always risk. When you’re ordained, you take ordination vows. When I was a kid sitting in the pews, I didn’t expect these kinds of things might be asked of me, but I took the vows, and so that’s the deal.”
‘A theological mandate to do this’
Clergy have long played a role in protest movements, said Deborah Whitehead, religious studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder.
From the Catholic Church’s protests of the nuclear arms race to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black church’s leadership during the civil rights movement to various faith traditions opposing the Vietnam War, religious figures have moved the needle in social movements, Whitehead said.
Congregations have the resources social movements depend on: people, meeting spaces, donations and networks, said Kraig Beyerlein, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society and a professor of religion and social movements.
Some of that mobilization is directed toward conservative causes — overturning Roe v. Wade, for example — and some toward progressive issues, Beyerlein said.
In Beyerlein and Mark Chaves’ 2020 research in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the social scientists found congregations in 2018 and 2019 mobilized more to defend immigrants than in years past.
“It seems likely that this increased congregational mobilization on immigration is a post-2016 response to the Trump administration’s hardline policies on this issue,” the researchers wrote.
Even still, Beyerlein said congregations mobilizing for social movements are the exception, not the rule.
“Maybe it’s gotten to be so bad that these grievances now are mobilizing some people who might have otherwise stayed home,” he said.
Immigration is an interesting cause, Beyerlein said, in that it can drum up bipartisan support. Not only are there so many immigrants within religious communities, but there are explicit spiritual texts supporting the cause, he said.
“I do think there are some causes or issues more likely to be mobilizable than others,” Beyerlein said. “I do think immigration is one of those… Even in (predominantly white congregations), you look at these theological texts, and they are kind of hard to ignore. It seems we have a theological mandate to do this.”
Rabbi Adam Morris feels that call to help.
Morris, who presides over Park Hill’s Temple Micah, said Jews know what it is like to be a stranger.
“We know what it’s like to be looked down upon and dismissed and dehumanized, and it’s one of our most profound calls to be kind to the stranger and offer refuge to the stranger,” he said. “To get deeper, more existential: We’re all strangers and we all deserve that respect, love and attention, not in spite of but because of our differences.”
During Trump’s first term, Temple Micah partnered with a Methodist church to house an undocumented woman in sanctuary, Morris said. The temple, which now shares space with the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, values the opportunity to collaborate across faiths.
This weekend, the temple scheduled a social justice information session so the congregation can learn how to combat “growing injustice,” Morris said.
“Religiosity is kind of appropriated by the right, by conservatives, and that’s wrong, inaccurate and unfortunate, because there are a great many people whose religious and spiritual lives are essential and important to them who have a different perspective on what our traditions and wisdoms say to us,” Morris said.
“The idea of how we treat the stranger is so often repeated in our sacred text, it’s almost absurd that that hasn’t translated to people who claim to follow the same tradition.”
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our daily Your Morning Dozen email newsletter.