Many faith leaders were dismayed when the government announced last January that federal immigration agencies can make arrests in churches, schools, and hospitals, ending the protection of people in sensitive spaces.
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.
Minneapolis-area AME Church officials stated Renee Good’s death ‘never should have happened’ and listed more than a dozen ways they have tried to meet community needs there.
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.
Worshippers took a moment to pause, mourn, and sing, even as they continued to organize resistance efforts against ICE's escalated presence in Minneapolis.
Editor-in-Chief Brian Kaylor reacts to a Calvinist pastor in Minnesota to offered a blessing for ICE after the killing of Renee Good. Each generation has preachers excited to stand up as chaplains for the empire.
The faith-based networks, which developed organizing infrastructure and relationships during the Floyd era, are joined by newcomers as resistance efforts have intensified since Good’s shooting.