“They let us know that it was a beautiful stance on our part, but they just wouldn’t feel safe inside the mosque,” Chartier said. “They’d never stay with us, because we’re just as marginalized as undocumented people are.”

Clifton Mosque is an instructive example for Muslims across the country currently exploring ways to join the Christian-led sanctuary movement, which rose to prominence in the 1980s as churches helped protect undocumented immigrants from Central America fleeing civil war. The movement has seen a resurgence since Trump’s election, with the number of affiliated congregations doubling to 800. Houses of worship are relatively well positioned to offer safe haven, because Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents avoid arresting people in “sensitive locations,” following a 2011 memo, which lists “churches, synagogues, mosques or other institutions of worship” among such locations. The sensitive locations policy “remains the same” under the Trump administration, an ICE spokesperson wrote in an email.

“We know it’s happening around the country, violence against Muslim communities,” said Manuel Pérez, a leader at the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers’ Center. “You feel, day by day, too much hate. So people are worried to attend activities at the mosque. Not everyone—for the Latino Muslims, it’s natural to attend—but for other people, they are a little uncomfortable.”

Some Muslim congregants were also nervous about turning Clifton Mosque into a sanctuary, despite added security measures recently put in place around the building.

“Members of the community definitely pushed back,” Chartier said. “They were afraid that we were making ourselves unnecessary targets.”

Imam Omar Suleiman, the resident scholar at the Valley Ranch Islamic Center near Dallas, believes Muslims shouldn’t give these fears too much weight—even though two Texas mosques were burned down in January alone.

“The conventional thinking is: We’re already vulnerable, so why make ourselves more vulnerable?” he said. “My response is: Everyone in our country is vulnerable right now. This is a dangerous time in American history. And we’ll be stronger when we’re all together, watching each other’s backs.”

Suleiman’s mosque is in the process of debating whether to declare itself a sanctuary congregation or a solidarity congregation. He has been organizing national conference calls and webinars on the topic, and has been working with the grassroots organization MPower Change, which on February 8 launched a call to Muslims across the country to join the sanctuary movement. The online pledge form offers a range of ways to participate in the movement, from attending vigils to providing physical space in a mosque.

Mohammad Khan, the campaign director for MPower Change, said the organization “would expect that each mosque will already have done some work in advance” by speaking to their local communities about what type of sanctuary efforts might actually be useful. “One of the underlying principles of the sanctuary movement is that this is not something you do for undocumented community members, but something you do with them.”