Over a year since Donald Trump and JD Vance spread falsehoods about the city’s migrants eating pets, Haitians’ temporary protected status is set to run out Feb. 3.
An American Baptist church is just one block from where nurse Alex Pretti was executed Saturday by federal agents in the street. The church held a joint worship service the next morning elsewhere, but opened up its own building to serve those coming or leaving
Hundreds of clergy from around the country gathered in Minneapolis to learn from Minnesota faith leaders how to protest against ICE enforcement. Then they took to the streets and helped block the city’s airport.
In 1845, a group of pro-slavery Baptists created the Southern Baptist Convention to defend enslavers serving as missionaries. One hundred and eighty years later, SBC leaders defend a pastor serving as an ICE leader. Editor-in-Chief Brian Kaylor reflects on this through line.
The faith leaders, who hail from across the country and represent a range of religious traditions, deployed to neighborhoods with significant immigrant populations, where DHS agents have been most active.
Viral video of the protest shows activists standing up during the middle of a service at Cities Church and calling for the ousting of David Easterwood, a pastor at the Southern Baptist church who is also acting director of the St. Paul ICE field office.
Brian Kaylor, a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship-affiliated minister and leader of the Christian media organization Word&Way, called having an ICE official serve as a pastor ‘a serious moral failure.’
‘Jesus — who they claim to worship — went into the so-called houses of God, he flipped over tables. … So that’s what we did today,’ said minister and organizer Nekima Levy Armstrong.
‘I’ve asked (clergy) to get their affairs in order, to make sure they have their wills written,’ said the Rt. Rev. A. Robert Hirschfeld, the Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire.
The ICE shooting in Minneapolis, like the Jan. 6 insurrection, brings into sharp relief two different visions in America. Many of us now filter what we see through a pair of political eyeglasses, blurring facts with ideology.