Blog Details

A livestreamed video posted on the Facebook page of Sunless Lives Topic Minnesota, one amongst the assert’s organizers, shows a neighborhood of of us interrupting providers and products at the Cities Church in St. Paul by chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Honest right.” The 37-year-dilapidated mother of three became fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this month amid a surge in federal immigration enforcement actions.

The protesters declare that one amongst the church’s pastors — David Easterwood — moreover leads the local ICE discipline place of job overseeing the operations that personal fervent violent ways and unlawful arrests.

U.S. Department of Justice Assistant Attorney Frequent Harmeet Dhillon said her agency is investigating federal civil rights violations “by these of us desecrating a apartment of adore and interfering with Christian worshippers.”

“A apartment of adore is no longer a public dialogue board for your assert! It is a diagram safe from precisely such acts by federal felony and civil felony guidelines!” she said on social media.

Attorney Frequent Pam Bondi moreover weighed in on social media, announcing that any violations of federal legislation could perhaps be prosecuted.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, who participated in the assert and leads the local grassroots civil rights group Racial Justice Community, pushed aside the functionality DOJ investigation as a sham and a distraction from federal agents’ actions in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

“Whenever you happen to imagine the federal govt unleashing barbaric ICE agents upon our community and the entire damage that they’ve triggered, to personal anyone serving as a pastor who oversees these ICE agents, is nearly unfathomable to me,” said Armstrong, who added she is an ordained reverend. “If of us are extra concerned with anyone coming to a church on a Sunday and disrupting exchange as normal than they’re regarding the atrocities that we are experiencing in our community, then they personal to examine their theology and the must compare their hearts.”

The come by page of St. Paul-basically based Cities Church lists David Easterwood as a pastor, and his personal info appears to be like to examine that of the David Easterwood acknowledged in court docket filings because the appearing director of the ICE St. Paul discipline place of job. Easterwood looked alongside DHS Secretary Kristi Noem at a Minneapolis press conference final October.

Cities Church did no longer reply to a cellular telephone name or emailed assign aside a matter to for observation Sunday night time, and Easterwood’s personal contact info might moreover no longer straight be positioned.

Easterwood did no longer lead the piece of the provider that became livestreamed, and it became unclear if he became most up-to-date at the church Sunday.

In a Jan. 5 court docket filing, Easterwood defended ICE’s ways in Minnesota akin to swapping license plates and spraying protesters with chemical irritants. He wrote that federal agents were experiencing elevated threats and aggression and crowd support watch over devices treasure flash-bang grenades were crucial to guard against violent attacks. He testified that he became unaware of agents “knowingly targeting or retaliating against aloof protesters or excellent observers with much less lethal munitions and/or crowd support watch over devices.”

“Agitators aren’t correct targeting our officers. Now they’re targeting churches, too,” the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said. “They’re going from hotel to hotel, church to church, looking out for out federal legislation enforcement who are risking their lives to guard American citizens.”

Sunless Lives Topic Minnesota co-founder Monique Cullars-Doty said that the DOJ’s prosecution became faulty.

“Have to you got a head — a pacesetter in a church — that’s main and orchestrating ICE raids, my God, what has the sector formula to?” Cullars-Doty said. “We can’t relax idly and leer of us lumber and be led off beam.”

Be half of us at the Fortune Achieve of job Innovation Summit May perhaps well well perhaps also honest 19–20, 2026, in Atlanta. The next period of space of enterprise innovation is here—and the dilapidated playbook is being rewritten. At this titillating, excessive-vitality event, the sector’s most innovative leaders will convene to explore how AI, humanity, and strategy converge to redefine, again, the diagram forward for work. Register now.