America's faith communities are keeping careful watch as Congress wrangles over border security - a process expected to yield the most dramatic changes in immigration policy since the 1980s - and many religious leaders are not liking what they see so far.

Increasingly, they are making their presence felt on Capitol Hill, where the Senate is now drafting its version of immigration reform. In their own churches, synagogues, and mosques, many leaders are striking a defiant pose toward an immigration bill the US House has already approved.

At stake is the moral high ground on immigration. The religious leaders see new border-tightening moves as intruding on their obligation to care for strangers - no questions asked. Those who argue the other side, that immigration must be curtailed and the border secured, also couch their position in moral terms, saying it is unprincipled to aid and abet those who have entered the US illegally.

A key sticking point: part of the House measure that would force any individual, including church workers, to see documentation before giving help to immigrants, or risk imprisonment.

"It is none of the government's business who and how religious people serve," says Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, president of Interfaith Alliance, which represents 70 faith traditions. "Would the US Congress have told the Good Samaritan not to help a stranger in the ditch?"

Cardinal Roger Mahony in Los Angeles, who leads the largest Roman Catholic archdiocese in the US, created a stir recently when he said he would order priests under his supervision to defy any federal legislation that requires churches or other social organization to press immigrants for legal papers before giving them help. He also called on Catholics in the archdiocese's 288 parishes to fast, pray, and push politicians for humane immigration reform, inferring that the House reforms fall short in that regard. "The war on terror isn't going to be won through immigration restrictions," Cardinal Mahony said.

As a whole, California, with its large immigrant population, may be less adamant about the need for an immigration crackdown than is the nation at large. Two-thirds of Californians back a temporary guest-worker program, and 70 percent are not worried that illegal workers are taking jobs away from American citizens, a Field Poll reported last week.

The rhetoric over immigration reform has become inflamed of late. A coalition of religious leaders has said the legislation the House approved in December reflects "hysterical" anti-immigrant sentiment.

The measure's supporters, meanwhile, say the faith groups are engaging in some hysteria of their own and are deliberately mischaracterizing the House bill.

The House legislation "does not target churches and aid providers as some have claimed," says Jeff Lungren, spokesman for Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R) of Wisconsin, the bill's sponsor. "The opposition to this is a real stretch and based on such a misapprehension of our motivation that we can barely comprehend it. We wish all this energy would be exerted toward fighting alien smuggling."

The House measure includes reforms that have raised the ire of religious leaders. Specifically, it expands "alien smuggling" to include those who help an immigrant remain in the US when they know that person is in the country unlawfully - and imposes criminal penalties, ranging from prison time to fines, for those who provide such help.

This definition, say faith leaders, makes no distinction between smuggling operations, on one hand, and social-service organizations, refugee and aid groups, and churches, on the other. Moreover, they say, it will make church officials into unwilling enforcers of policies with which they disagree.

The House measure would also create a new federal crime of "unlawful presence" and broaden the definition of immigrant violations, as well as grant state and local law-enforcement agencies more authority to investigate, apprehend, arrest, and detain immigrants they find.

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