Will the majority-Catholic Supreme Court listen to the church on immigration?

WASHINGTON − Several Catholic bishops have taken the “extraordinary” step of freeing parishioners from their Sunday obligation to attend Mass if they fear leaving home makes them a target for immigration enforcement.

The entire U.S. conference of bishops has issued a rare public condemnation of the Trump administration’s tactics on illegal immigration.

The church is now hoping its moral firepower will persuade the Supreme Court to rule against the administration in two upcoming immigration cases.

Strikingly, the U.S. Catholic bishops are making not just a legal – but also an ethical – argument in their court filings.

The bishops view President Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship for some children born in the United States as “immoral,” the church wrote in a brief supported by biblical passages.

And allowing the federal government to turn away asylum-seekers at the border would “be a moral disaster, not just a legal error,” the church wrote in a separate case that will be argued March 24.

“It’s the Catholic bishops saying that the position of the current administration is not only anti-constitutional and anti-American; it is anti-Christian,” said Darrell Miller, a professor of the University of Chicago Law School. “That is a remarkable position for the conference of bishops to be making about the current administration.”

Most of the Supreme Court justices are Catholic

It’s also a view that could have a uniquely receptive audience. Six of the nine justices are practicing Catholics, and a seventh, Neil Gorsuch, was raised Catholic. (Ketanji Brown Jackson is Protestant; Elena Kagan is Jewish.)

And while faith considerations aren't formally part of the judicial process, the justices' backgrounds are often scrutinized for indications of how they're likely to vote.

"Some suggest that people of faith have a particularly difficult time following the law rather than their moral views," Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in her 2025 book, "Listening to the Law," referring to the scrutiny her Catholic faith received when she was first nominated to the federal bench. "I'm not sure why."

An analysis of cases decided by the court in the nine years after it became a majority-Catholic bench found a stark division between how often the Catholic justices sided with the church on cases it cared about versus how often the non-Catholic justices did. But that difference was “largely a function of ideology rather than ecclesial affiliation,” according to a 2015 scholarly article by Kevin Walsh, a Catholic University law professor who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia.

Dino Christenson, coauthor of a 2025 report about outside groups' influence on the court, said studies have consistently highlighted the justices’ ideology as playing one of the strongest roles in their decisions.

“However, the Court is largely Catholic and reminding them that the church and some of their parishioners are on one side may resonate with the Justices,” Christenson, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said in an email to USA TODAY.

Bishops have taken strong stand on immigration

The justices may have been aware, going into this batch of cases, of the strong stance the Catholic Church has taken on immigration. 

In November, the U.S. Catholic bishops issued a "special message" expressing concern for how immigrants are being treated in the United States.

It was the first time in a dozen years that the church invoked that particularly urgent manner of speaking. The last occasion was in 2013, when the bishops criticized a provision in President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul requiring some Catholic employers to cover contraception in their insurance plans.

Supreme Court has sided with church in recent cases

In one of a string of recent victories for the church, the court ruled in 2020 that employers with religious or moral objections did not have to help provide insurance coverage for contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act.

After siding with the Little Sisters of the Poor in that case, the court in 2021 ruled in favor of a Catholic social services agency that refused to certify same-sex couples as foster parents.

Last year, the court unanimously backed a Catholic charity in Wisconsin in a dispute over unemployment tax exemptions for religious groups but deadlocked over whether to allow the church to create the nation’s first religious charter school in Oklahoma.

Even when the church is not a direct participant in a case, the U.S. Catholic bishops will weigh in on legal battles that “touch upon important tenets of Catholic teaching.”

In recent years, the church has done so most often in cases involving religious rights, abortion, questions surrounding marriage and sexuality, and immigration.

Church notes Jesus Christ was a refugee

The immigration case the court will debate March 24 concerns the government’s ability to limit the number of people seeking asylum at border crossings by prohibiting migrants from setting foot in the United States, where the law allows them to request protection.

Immigrant rights organizations and asylum-seekers challenging the “turnback” policy argue the government has falsely claimed migrants were being denied entry because the border crossings lacked capacity to process them.

Though the policy is not being used now, the Justice Department wants to retain the option of using it.

The U.S. Catholic bishops note that Christ, whose parents fled with him to Egypt to escape persecution, was a refugee.

“The policy violates the obligation to care for refugees − a fundamental legal and moral principle that runs through nearly two millennia of Catholic faith, an international humanitarian consensus, and this Nation’s history,” the church told the court in a filing.

The bishops make a similar argument in the dispute over Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship, which the justices will take up April 1 in one of the term’s most high-profile debates.

The church said in a filing that the effects of the president’s order “are immoral and contrary to the Catholic Church’s fundamental beliefs and teachings regarding the life and dignity of human persons, the treatment of vulnerable people – particularly migrants and children – and family unity.”

Moral argument is 'predicated on history'

Miller, the University of Chicago law professor, views it as a shrewd move for the bishops to make a religion-based argument.

“They know that this is a Supreme Court that tends to be sympathetic to appeals that sound in the mode of religious discrimination,” he said. “And to say that this is a form of anti-religious bigotry ... is going to land different with this court than it might have with a court from 20, 25 or 30 years ago.”

Adam Feldman, a lawyer and political scientist who runs a blog called Empirical SCOTUS, said the church’s emphasis on religious teachings seems to be “a major pivot” from the more substantive legal arguments the church has filed in other big cases.

That focus on the Judeo-Christian tradition, he said, could be persuasive to a court that has increasingly used history and tradition to try to discern the original meaning of the Constitution and later amendments.

“The moral argument is really predicated on history,” Feldman said.

Can justices be swayed by moral arguments?

University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock, a leading authority on religious law, said moral arguments matter most when the law is unclear.

“This is a Court that claims to be textualists, and often claims that policy issues are not its concern,” Laycock said in an email. “If the law can readily be interpreted in more than one way, moral arguments may help a judge choose, although many judges don't like to admit it, even then.”

Though Laycock doesn’t see much ambiguity in the law in either immigration case, he said the possibility that a supportive filing − known as an amicus brief − could make a difference is too important to ignore.

“If you care about an issue, you feel obligated to file, just in case,” Laycock said. “But most amicus briefs turn out not to matter.”