WASHINGTON — A federal judge Friday declined to block the Trump administration from carrying out detention and deportation operations in houses of worship, finding that a coalition of more than two dozen religious organizations had not made a clear case that their spaces and congregants had become common targets.

The ruling stemmed from a lack of clarity about how President Donald Trump’s promised mass deportation campaign has been carried out in practice.

While the prospect of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents sweeping through churches, mosques and synagogues in search of congregants in the country illegally immediately raised alarms in religious communities, Judge Dabney L. Freidrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said there were few signs, so far, that was happening. “Absent evidence of specific directives to immigration officers to target plaintiffs’ places the court finds no credible threat of imminent enforcement,” she wrote.

— The New York Times