MINNEAPOLIS — The U.S. Department of Justice said Sunday that it is investigating a group of protesters in Minnesota who disrupted services at a church where a local official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement apparently serves as a pastor.
A livestreamed video posted on the Facebook page of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, one of the protest’s organizers, shows a group of people interrupting services at the Cities Church in St. Paul by chanting, “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.” The 37-year-old mother of three was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis this month amid a surge in federal immigration enforcement activities.
The protesters allege that one of the church’s pastors, David Easterwood, leads the local ICE field office overseeing the operations that they say have involved violent tactics and illegal arrests.
U.S. Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon said the Justice Department is investigating federal civil rights violations “by these people desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshipers.”
“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.
Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi also weighed in on social media, saying that any violations of federal law would be prosecuted.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, who participated in the protest and leads the local grassroots civil rights organization Racial Justice Network, dismissed the potential federal investigation as a sham and a distraction from federal agents’ actions in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
“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 Armstrong, who noted that 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.”
The website of St. Paul-based Cities Church lists David Easterwood as a pastor, and his personal information appears to match that of a man by that name identified in court filings as the acting director of the ICE St. Paul field office. Easterwood appeared alongside Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a Minneapolis news conference in October.
Cities Church did not respond to a phone call or emailed request for comment Sunday evening, and Easterwood’s personal contact information could not immediately be located.
In a Jan. 5 court filing, Easterwood defended ICE’s tactics in Minnesota such as swapping license plates and spraying protesters with chemical irritants. He wrote that federal agents were experiencing increased threats and aggression and that crowd control devices like flash-bang grenades were important to protect against violent attacks. He testified that he was unaware of agents “knowingly targeting or retaliating against peaceful protesters or legal observers with less lethal munitions and/or crowd control devices.”
ICE said in a statement: “Agitators aren’t just targeting our officers. Now they’re targeting churches, too. They’re going from hotel to hotel, church to church, hunting for federal law enforcement who are risking their lives to protect Americans.”
Black Lives Matter Minnesota co-founder Monique Cullars-Doty said that the federal prosecution was misguided.
“If you got a head — a leader in a church — that is leading and orchestrating ICE raids, my God, what has the world come to?” Cullars-Doty said. “We can’t sit back idly and watch people go and be led astray.”
Churches have also been the target of federal immigration raids in the last year. Soon after the start of President Trump’s second term, Homeland Security issued a directive rescinding a Biden-era policy that had protected areas including churches and schools from immigration raids.
Brook writes for the Associated Press.