A group of woke faith leaders, including Catholic bishops, Protestant pastors, and rabbis, wrote a searing letter calling on senators to vote against President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” arguing that the controversial piece of legislation will “be used to target faith communities,” among other criticisms.
For background, on June 26, 2025, an interfaith coalition wrote a letter to the U.S. Senate formally opposing President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” and voiced concerns about the legislation’s potential negative impact on migrant families and states’ rights. The letter was signed by more than 40 religious figures, including numerous Latino evangelical leaders.
In the letter, the coalition expressed concerns about the bill’s provision of “tens of billions of dollars to the government to undertake a mass deportation campaign,” which the faith leaders argued “will separate US families, harm US-citizen and immigrant children, and sow chaos in local communities.” Moreover, the coalition wrote that the deportations would harm “hard-working immigrant families essential to our economy.”
In addition, the faith leaders wrote that the passing of the bill would cause “widespread unrest like we recently witnessed in Los Angeles,” referring to the violent anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) riots that broke out on June 6, 2025, and resulted in the deployment of National Guard units and U.S. Marines.
Furthermore, the coalition said that the funding from the bill “also will be used to target faith communities,” adding, “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has removed places of worship from its sensitive locations list, allowing ICE agents to enter them for enforcement purposes.” The signers of the letter then said that they had “already witnessed a reduction in attendance of many of our religious services in our denominations.”
Moreover, the faith leaders said that attendance in their congregations had been reduced because “the threat of enforcement has deterred many families from practicing their faith.” Additionally, they argued that the bill’s funding of a border wall “will drive migrants into the most remote regions of the border and lead to an increase in migrant deaths.”
The coalition said that, in addition to causing increased migrant deaths, the bill’s passing would also “hurt the local environment along the border and force desperate asylum-seekers seeking safety to increasingly rely on human smugglers.” Then, they turned their focus to the proposed Medicaid cuts in the bill, which they argued would drive migrants “deeper into poverty.”
Then, the faith leaders cited the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to back up their arguments, saying that according to the nonpartisan organization, “The bill transfers wealth from those in the bottom 10 percent of income to those in the top 10 percent of income in our nation, increasing the already large gap between the rich and the poor.” Based on this statistic, the coalition said that the bill “will harm the poor and vulnerable in our nation, to the detriment of the common good.”
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