The anti-ICE protest at a Minnesota church was a justified rebuke of the pastor's cruelty

A St. Paul church disruption exposed the moral bankruptcy of ICE, conservative Christianity, and right-wing media

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For months now, ICE has been going to churches to terrorize immigrants—or anyone they suspect deserves to be deported. They’ve arrested people on church property. A lawsuit against the agency said ICE goons “seized a man in front of a church near Los Angeles and brandished a rifle at a pastor in the process; detained a grandfather in the same city who was dropping his granddaughter off at a church school; arrested a man outside a church in Oregon; and carried out arrests on two Catholic parish properties in Montclair and Highland, California.”

That’s why many pastors in immigrant-heavy areas have told worshipers to stay home rather than attend worship services. The Republican Party had made it virtually impossible for those church members to feel safe in their houses of worship.

That’s also why a group of about three dozen activists in Minneapolis—where an ICE agent murdered an innocent woman, Renee Good, earlier this month—interrupted services at Southern Baptist-affiliated Cities Church in St. Paul on Sunday morning. They stepped into the building to yell “ICE out!” and “Justice for Renee Good!”

That’s not just a random church; that would have been pointless. This was a church that employs David Easterwood, the acting director of a local ICE field office, as a pastor.

It was a peaceful protest that was organized by the Racial Justice Network, Black Lives Matter Minnesota, and Black Lives Matter Twin Cities. And what occurred inside the church is nothing compared to the actual harm that ICE agents have inflicted upon the city’s residents.

But the same Department of Justice that refused to investigate ICE agent Jonathan Ross, despite mountains of evidence of his crimes, is now pretending the church protest was the gravest possible sin:

U.S. Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said her agency is investigating federal civil rights violations “by these people desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshippers.”

“A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest! It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws!” she said on social media.

Attorney General Pam Bondi also weighed in on social media, saying that any violations of federal law would be prosecuted.

(The right-wing mob is furious that former CNN anchor Don Lemon was aware of the protest in advance and documented it online. Naturally, they also want his head on a platter.)

The protesters didn’t desecrate a house of worship by demanding justice and peace for the people in their community. Easterwood desecrated it when he decided threatening immigrants with deportation was an extension of his faith. The people in that church were far better served listening to the protesters than anything they would have heard from the pulpit. As one Reddit user noted, another word for what the protesters did is “prophecy” because they spoke “the truth of God… to the people of God who need a corrective word.”

There are going to be critics who say this was not strategic. That it plays into the right-wing persecution complex. That it fuels a narrative in conservative media that protesters are against Christianity. But if you know anything about right-wing media, you know that those narratives were written long before anything happened. They will use anything to justify the story they want to push no matter how insignificant it is.

The Christians in that church dealt with a minor inconvenience. It’s nothing compared to the horror that’s been inflicted on the entire lives of people in that community, in part because a pastor at that church is personally leading a group of law-breaking, armed, government-backed mercenaries.

The tactics used by government officials to blow this incident out of proportion are no different from the way white supremacists once described civil rights protesters. Oppressive powers are never calm when faced with civil disobedience, and “good trouble” is meant to take people out of their comfort zones. There are countless examples of movements for justice being denounced as disorderly by the very institutions that thrive on the status quo.

And what else are protesters supposed to do at this point, anyway? Conservatives flipped out when the mayor of Minneapolis told ICE to “get the fuck out” of his city, as if a curse word was worse than ICE’s actions. They treat everything as a five-alarm fire and escalate in response to everything. Republicans aren’t listening to anyone else, so maybe this kind of protest finally gets their attention.

If protests are forbidden in houses of worship, then surely ICE raids on church property are illegal, too, but that obvious hypocrisy wasn’t addressed by the Trump administration. Neither was the fact that this ICE leader who has a side gig as a Christian pastor has no business telling others how to lead a moral life. According to ABC News, “In a Jan. 5 court filing, Easterwood defended ICE's tactics in Minnesota such as swapping license plates and spraying protesters with chemical irritants.”

It’s not like the other pastors at the church are any better either:

[Lead pastor Jonathan] Parnell also serves on the board of trustees of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, a school founded by Baptist Calvinist preacher John Piper. Last week, a professor at that school used the Sunday service at another church in the area to pray for God to bless ICE and “break the teeth” of ICE’s opponents.

Easterwood, by all accounts, wasn’t even at church Sunday morning, but he doesn’t deserve a moment of calm anywhere he goes for the rest of his life, and the people in that congregation should be ashamed of their own complicity in ICE’s campaign of terror by continuing to attend that church.

That’s essentially what one protest organizer said:

“When you think about the federal government unleashing barbaric ICE agents upon our community and all the harm that they have caused, to have someone serving as a pastor who oversees these ICE agents, is almost unfathomable to me,” said [Nekima Levy Armstrong, who participated in the protest and leads the local grassroots civil rights organization Racial Justice Network], who added she is an ordained reverend. “If people are more concerned about someone coming to a church on a Sunday and disrupting business as usual than they are about the atrocities that we are experiencing in our community, then they need to check their theology and [they] need to check their hearts.”

Armstrong also added that Jesus “went into the so-called houses of God, he flipped over tables… So that’s what we did today. We flipped over a table for truth, justice, and righteousness.”

All of that flies in the face of what Harmeet Dhillon said yesterday, when she blamed the protests on the “godless” during an interview with right-wing plagiarist and propagandist Benny Johnson: “The people on the left we're talking about, they're not familiar with what goes on in a house of worship. A lot of them are godless people.”

The protest inside the church ended after about 20 minutes, but the Trump administration, in an effort to distract from their own incompetence and cruelty, is now using the incident as proof that even more Trump-aligned agents need to pour into the city.

But make no mistake: This wasn’t some attack on Christianity. This wasn’t an attack by the godless. This was a protest against cruelty and plenty of Christians participated and endorsed it. One local Lutheran minister wrote online, “You cannot worship a Savior on Sunday who was crucified by a violent State, while the rest of the week acting as a violent agent of an unjust state force who is killing and targeting Americans according to hate.”

That’s why it’s deeply ironic that the president of the SBC’s North American Mission Board promised to “provide protection” for their churches if Minnesota leaders “won’t contain lawlessness.” The lawlessness is coming from inside the SBC church, sanctioned by people like Easterbrook, not from the Christians and allies trying to help the “least of these.”

That doesn’t mean the protesters won’t be charged with something, though. The Department of Justice says the protesters violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) which protects access to places of religious worship. But that law bans anyone from obstructing, desecrating, or preventing access to houses of worship. The protesters didn’t do any of those things. They came inside and chanted their slogans… then left. (Keep in mind that right-wing protesters have done exactly that to LGBTQ-affirming churches without any complaints from the Justice Department.)

This mild disruption drew attention to the blatant hypocrisy of so many conservative churches. They claim to worship Jesus while supporting those who would’ve deported him if he was walking on a Minneapolis street.

To watch conservatives clutch their pearls over temporary chants for social justice while excusing armed agents stalking church parking lots and a pastor who encourages them to harass brown people is to excuse right-wing brutality.

The protests made some people uncomfortable. ICE is actively destroying innocent people’s lives. And the Trump administration is only focused on the former.

What happened in the church was peaceful, targeted, and in line with Christian theology. No one’s faith was under attack. But you can bet that the Republican administration will do everything it can to redirect public anger away from ICE’s documented abuses and toward those who are brave enough to confront them.

Don’t fall for their fiction. They want silence in the face of cruelty; they don’t deserve it. The scandal here isn’t that some voices were raised in a church for 20 minutes. The scandal is that a pastor actively supporting Trump’s reign of terror was preaching from that pulpit in the first place.

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