At a JIAC sponsored meeting on April 29 2025, JIAC joined a growing groundswell of opposition to the Trump Administration’s decision to break with the time-honored American tradition of affording places of worship freedom from intrusions by police or other forms of governmental oversight, in keeping with the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion.

We signed onto A Covenant to Protect the Sanctity of Sacred Spaces, a declaration penned by the Program Council of Olympia’s Interfaith Works to oppose Trump’s announcement in January that there will be no place of sanctuary from assault by government agents.

“These agents have been instructed that it is now acceptable to pull the faithful from prayers, children from classrooms, and the sick from hospital beds and emergency rooms,” the Covenant reads. “We do not, must not, and will not accept this.”

The document is a promise of mutual aid, making the declaration that “We will treat any invasion of one of our sacred spaces as an invasion into the sacred space of every one of us.”

In signing onto the declaration, JIAC joins with the dozen congregations in Olympia that form Interfaith Works along with many other individual signators.

The Covenant closes with these words: “Our faiths call us to compassion, justice, and the protection of the most vulnerable, and we will not falter in this sacred duty. May our collective resolve serve as a beacon of hope and a shield against injustice, ensuring that no house of worship is turned into a place of fear.”