On June 28, Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja, a Catholic nun from Nigeria, stepped out of her home to take the short, one-block stroll to her church in McAllen, Texas. It should have been uneventful: dressed in her white habit and bearing a rosary, Sister Letty was walking to Sunday morning mass at Our Lady of Sorrows.

She didn’t make it — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped, arrested, and handcuffed the 56-year-old. They took her to a detention facility an hour away, reportedly confiscated her rosary, and declined to bring her the medication she takes. She called her diocese for help — and as news spread, both Republican and Democratic members of Congress appealed directly to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for details. Hours later, she was released — without explanation.

Plenty of questions surrounding this incident remain. According to her diocese, Sister Letty had worked as a registered nurse in the area for about a decade and entered the country legally. 

But the incident is not a one-off — and instead is representative of a concerning trend in America over the last year. Though ICE and President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement activities have receded from national headlines, Sister Letty’s detention shows how two forces are clashing in the second Trump term: the drive for hardline immigration enforcement and the constitutional imperative of preserving religious liberty and free exercise in America. 

The tightening of federal immigration enforcement around religious spaces and believers

The last year of Trump’s mass deportation program has produced many cases like Sister Letty’s — even if they haven’t made national news. Federal immigration agents have detained and harassed Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim chaplains and priests, while sparking fear across denominations — particularly as religious leaders and communities organized and led responses to immigration crackdowns across the country.

Both the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sister Letty’s case, or other religious liberty concerns. They have also not responded to requests for comment to other local and national outlets in the case of Sister Letty.

In November, the Episcopal bishop of Texas reported that a Kenyan priest working for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice had been detained by ICE while leaving his workplace and transferred to a detention facility. His diocesan leaders said he was working in the US legally, and had the proper documentation to be in the US. In July 2025, a Muslim hospital chaplain in Ohio was arrested and detained during an immigration check-in. An Egyptian immigrant, he was held in detention for weeks before finally being released. And earlier this year, Catholic Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago reported that priests in his archdiocese have been stopped by federal agents and ordered to prove their citizenship. That’s all on top of clergy who were shot at with pepper balls or sprayed with tear gas at anti-ICE protests in Illinois and California.

Yet this clash has shown up not just through harassment of clergy and those dedicated to religious life, but also in restrictions on how those in detention receive pastoral care, how those trying to provide that care are allowed to operate, and whether places of worship can be free of a federal presence. 

For years, federal immigration enforcement was limited by “sensitive location” rules designed to protect places like hospitals, schools, and churches from unnecessary intimidation. Those guidelines were first formalized during the Obama administration, kept in place by the first Trump administration, and reaffirmed during the Biden presidency. Nor were these restrictions entirely new: Some form of protection for houses of worship has existed for more than 30 years, according to the legal organization Democracy Forward. 

But DHS rescinded the “sensitive location” rules at the start of the second Trump presidency — to “empower” CBP and ICE  to go after “criminals” who “will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” according to a DHS statement at the time — triggering legal responses from immigrant rights and religious freedom groups.

“For decades, the federal government recognized a simple truth: targeting people at houses of worship violates religious freedom and harms communities,” Bradley Girard, the senior counsel at Democracy Forward, said earlier this year when announcing friend-of-the-court briefs in federal cases brought by a coalition of Quaker, Sikh, and Baptist groups. “These briefs make clear that the Trump-Vance administration’s policy is not only unlawful — it is dangerous. It chills religious exercise and undermines public safety by driving people into the shadows.”

Many of those suits ended up succeeding — at least in getting judges to protect various Baptist, Lutheran, Christian, and Sikh places of worship that could prove they were being affected by immigration raids. But broader federal protections for places of worship have not yet been formalized.

Instead, churches, religious organizations, and legal aid organizations have waged piecemeal legal fights to secure religious liberty protections, like in Minnesota and Illinois — particularly to exercise pastoral care, like providing counseling, sacraments, and religious rituals. In Minneapolis, for example, Groundwork Legal, a local nonprofit, public interest law firm, sued ICE over a ban on clergy access to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building.

“Under federal law — both the Constitution and statute — it’s clear that the government can only limit the ability of somebody to practice their religious faith, including the ability to provide [or receive] pastoral care, in the least restrictive means possible given the circumstances,” Irina Vaynerman, the co-founder and lead attorney of Groundwork Legal, told me. “And here, a categorical bar from even entering the building, to offering that care to anyone who wants to receive, it was obviously not the least restrictive means.”

Groundwork filed that suit in February on behalf of multi-denominational faith organizations and faith leaders under both the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment’s free exercise protections. They won a preliminary injunction in March, with a judge ordering the federal government to allow faith leaders to offer pastoral care to those held by ICE at the building.

Catholic clergy and religious leaders launched a similar suit last fall in Illinois after ICE and CBP officials denied clergy access to the Broadview federal center to minister to detained people — including offering Communion to them. They won a partial victory this year, when a judge ordered federal agents to allow clergy access for Ash Wednesday services — and in May, ICE and religious leaders reached an agreement to allow daily visits once again while litigation plays out. 

Vaynerman reiterated to me that the Illinois case is still playing out — these agreements and changes are temporary reprieves, in part because no national protections or guarantees have been formalized beyond piecemeal fights over religious liberty and free exercise in specific cities and around specific federal buildings or places of worship.

“Certainly this is something that we know folks are experiencing across the country…and we know that this is happening all over the country because there is not a standard protocol or policies related to this incredibly important constitutional and statutory right,” she said. “It is so important that the government recognizes [the importance of pastoral care] and then offers that level of access that is constitutionally required to support people going through one of the darkest times in their lives.”

This is a guest post by SherAli Tareen, Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College.

At its core Rajbir Singh Judge’s dazzling monograph Prophetic Maharaja presents an argument for “dwelling in loss” rather than seeking the enticing yet entrapping desires for restoration, recovery, and healing. By writing a “historical narrative that refuses to historicize,” Judge pushes his readers to examine notions of sovereignty and history that the practice of dwelling might make available. Conceptually, through the example of Duleep Singh (d. 1893) and the politics his life and memory make possible, the book seeks to interrupt dominant scholarly notions of historicism and colonial logics of religion and sovereignty, that reappear in varied apparitions in contemporary scholarship as well. It is very rare for a monograph, and even rarer for a first monograph, to offer an example of close and patient reading that rattles deeply held and deeply prized normative assumptions of one’s field of intervention. Judge achieves precisely that. And he does so in multiple ways and registers.

In Panjab Studies, there is a pervasive trend of excavating a redemptive narrative of a Panjabi cosmopolitan ethos that might offer the fantasy of traversing and transcending the alleged juggernaut of religious convictions that according to this view stifle such “cosmopolitan” pasts and futures. The Sikh tradition, under the calculus of this desire for “Panjabiyyat” or “Panjabiness” can either work as a quintessentially hybrid religion that naturally inheres pluralism or as a model for a colonial infested discursive machine that can only be repaired through the prophylactic of secular baptism. Judge entertains none such fantasy. In fact, Prophetic Maharaja conducts a devastating indictment of the politico-conceptual coherence as well as the desirability of the secular quest for Panjabiyyat by presenting a reading of Duleep Singh’s quest for sovereignty that does not seek to resolve, recover, overcome, or redeem any restorative project of liberal redemption and goodness.

Through an analysis both painstakingly layered and theoretically vivacious, Judge masterfully walks his reader through a terrain of political theology populated by visions of sovereignty neither liberal nor secular, but rather nestled in the refusal to exercise the sovereign decision to historicize, humanize, and heal any alleged ruptures of history. Judge’s analysis of Duleep Singh’s attunement to the loss and possibility of sovereignty propels the reader to confront and wrestle with a grammar of life that is not driven by or available for secular projects of dividing that life into binaries like religion and culture, state and society, plural harmony and exclusivist bigotry. Life, Judge teaches us, taking a cue from anthropologist Talal Asad, is “essentially itself.”

One of the great lessons of this book that I found particularly striking and productive concerns its theorization of loss and its simultaneous recognition that loss escapes and exceeds any neat theorization. Judge is at his most brilliant and intellectually courageous during moments in this book when he meditates on the aporias of his own encounter with the conceptual constitution of his project. And remarkably, and again in a rare achievement, these are precisely the moments when his argument is most piercing and compelling. His discussion of loss is a great example of this. As Judge writes very early in the book (in its Introduction), signposting an analytical attitude and conviction he sustains throughout the monograph: “rather than provide a new theorization of loss-which cements a relation to loss-this book endeavors to reckon with the powerful resources that work on loss, such as mourning and melancholia, and what they have already provided.” Judge continues, in a flash of utter brilliance, “I contend with loss instead of transcending it through recovery [emphasis mine]…I do not tie a thread throughout the text that provides an adequate answer to loss because there might not be any answer to it. In this sense the book does not provide a theorization of loss but dwells in the various rhythms of loss. My goal is not to recognize loss and provide it taxonomic space but to sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear throughout the text” (p. 13). This mini paragraph I have just cited represents a moment of tremendous significance in the study of South Asian History and Religion. Note, in the interest of careless readers who will rush towards the inconsiderate gesture, all too pervasive among historians of a certain ilk, to dismiss or undermine careful theoretical interventions as Judge’s here as convoluted high theory. Note particularly that dwelling, in Judge’s account, as both an analytical concept and as a mode and practice of life, is anything but passive inactivity. Exactly to the contrary, dwelling represents that aggressive commitment to a politico-conceptual ethic of refusing to repair and overcome loss through secular gestures of managing and healing the violence of history.

Dwelling in loss, instead of activating the secular instinct of historicizing, humanizing, and supposedly transcending loss makes possible a horizon of the political that comes to live with rather than attempt to overcome the aporias of life. Judge’s invitation to his readers to “sit with losses as they appear, disappear, and reappear” in the passage of a text or in the passage of history is I believe a profound call for suspending sovereign confidence in compensating for loss and treating the wound of historical contingency through the fantasy of historicist rigor, of returning life to its immanent materiality. What sort of politics and possibilities of sovereignty might become available by dwelling in loss, by sitting with rather than treating with the prophylactic of secular historicism the vertigo of historical conjunctures such as the one involving the loss, renewal, and diffusion of Duleep Singh’s aspiration for sovereignty? In asking and addressing this question, Judge successfully offers pathways for recognizing and exploring the political power and philosophical sophistication of imaginaries of sovereignty, like Duleep Singh’s, that are otherwise conveniently though perniciously catalogued as sorry tragedies of a colonized subject. Making Duleep Singh’s example speak back to and interrupt the alleged tragedy of his quest for sovereignty, Judge undertakes a critically important endeavor of decolonizing both colonial and contemporary secularist models of South Asian history populating the Western academy. This forum brings together outstanding scholars, conducting theoretically cutting edge critiques of secular power from multiple disciplinary perspectives, to engage, wrestle with, and celebrate a book with major ramifications and consequences in the study of religion, history, philosophy, and South Asia. The Prophetic Maharaja is in many ways a model and master seminar in bringing together invasive attention to the particularity of an archive and theoretical reflection that paves as well as shifts the terrain of multiple fields of knowledge simultaneously.

SherAli Tareen is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College and currently a Patricia Crone member in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ for the academic year 2024-25. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Analytical-Descriptive Studies category. His second book is Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023) which was selected as a finalist for the 2024 American Academy of Religion Book Award in the Textual Studies category.

Rajbir Singh Judge is Assistant Professor in History at California State University, Long Beach. Prophetic Maharaja: Loss, Sovereignty and the Sikh Tradition in Colonial South Asia was published in 2024, and over the next few weeks we have a series of contributors who’ll be offering their reflections, followed by a response from Rajbir. I’ll update this post with links to the other posts as they’re published:

Introduction by SherAli Tareen

LL Hodges, ‘Claustrophobic Archive‘

Amaryah Armstrong, ‘Black Internationalism, the Black Prince, and the Pressures of History‘

APS, ‘”What this means I do not know”: Loss and Rumours of Loss‘

Samaah Jaffer, ‘The Contention of Mourning‘

Marika Rose, ‘A Matter of Fantasy‘

Satbir Singh, ‘Dandy (de)livery‘

Basit Iqbal, ‘Non-redemptive Narration‘

Response by Rajbir