A group of more than 600 United Methodist clergy unhappy with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a fellow Methodist, on his zero-tolerance enforcement of US immigration law is bringing church charges against him, according to a United Methodist Church news release.

Sessions is a member of a Mobile, Alabama United Methodist church.

However, an authority on church history and polity said he's unaware of a complaint against a lay person ever moving past the district level.

The group claimed in a statement that Sessions violated Paragraph 2702.3 of the denomination's Book of Discipline.

The group accuses the attorney general of child abuse in separating younger children from their parents and holding them in mass incarceration facilities; immorality; racial discrimination and "dissemination of doctrines contrary to the established standards of doctrines" of The United Methodist Church.

"I really never would have thought I'd be working on charges against anybody in the Methodist connection, much less a lay person," said the Rev. David Wright, a Pacific Northwest Conference elder and chaplain at the University of Puget Sound in Washington State, and organizer of the effort to charge Sessions said in the news release.

But Wright said the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy as enforced by Sessions, combined with Sessions' use of Romans 13 to justify the policy, led him and others to conclude that more than a statement of protest was needed.

The Rev. William Lawrence, professor emeritus at Perkins School of Theology and an authority on Methodist history and polity, said anyone in the church can bring a charge against anyone else. While it's not uncommon for pastors, district superintendents and bishops to get complaints about a layperson, he said a formal complaint bringing charges is extremely rare, according to the news release.

The Book of Discipline allows for a church trial and even expulsion of a lay member, but the first step in a long process would be for the member's pastor and district superintendent to solve the complaint through "pastoral steps," Lawrence said.

Wright said the group's goal in filing charges was to prompt such discussions.

"I hope his pastor can have a good conversation with him and come to a good resolution that helps him reclaim his values that many of us feel he's violated as a Methodist," Wright said.