Protestors demonstrating against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement occupation of the Twin Cities entered Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota Sunday to confront David Easterwood, a pastor who’s also the acting director of the city’s ICE field office. The Department of Justice is currently investigating the protest led by civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong.
“I don’t understand how as a pastor, he thinks that that’s acceptable,” Levy Armstrong, also an ordained reverend, said in a Washington Post interview Monday. Armstrong first learned of Easterwood as a defendant in a protest rights lawsuit alleging that he and other ICE officials “have acted to suppress this dissent by abducting United States citizens and holding them incommunicado for hours.” Easterwood denied many of the Lawsuit’s claims in an official declaration.
When Levy Armstrong and over 20 protestors arrived at Cities Church on Sunday, Easterwood was not present. The lead pastor Jonathan Parnell presided over the church and told journalist Don Lemon, “Our church had gathered for worship, which we do every Sunday. We asked them to leave, and they obviously have not left.”
The protest lasted around 25 minutes and was captured on video, which has since been removed, with participants chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.” Good was shot and killed by Jonathan Ross, an ICE officer, earlier this month.
Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the DOJ will investigate the protest for “potential violations of the federal FACE Act.” Her statement on X claimed the protestors were “desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshippers.”
Lemon may also be investigated for reporting on the protest. “No one has a right to protest by trespassing into a private house — especially a house of God almighty. Freedom of the press does not protect journalists, nor anyone else, when they are actively committing crimes,” Dhillon wrote on X Monday.
“It’s notable that I’ve been cast as the face of a protest I was covering as a journalist — especially since I wasn’t the only reporter there. That framing is telling,” Lemon responded in a statement. “If this much time and energy is going to be spent manufacturing outrage, it would be far better used investigating the tragic death of Renee Nicole Good — the very issue that brought people into the streets in the first place. I stand by my reporting.”
The FACE Act has very different origins from protests in churches. Passed in 1994, the act stands for Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances and is meant to prevent abortion protestors from physically preventing people’s access to clinics. In the context of the Sunday protest, the FACE Act also prevents protestors from meaningfully preventing worship activities through “physical obstruction exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.”
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The law states that it does not “prohibit any expressive conduct including peaceful picketing or other peaceful demonstration.”
“President Trump will not tolerate the intimidation and harassment of Christians in their sacred places of worship,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X Sunday. “The Department of Justice has launched a full investigation into the despicable incident that took place earlier today at a church in Minnesota.”
“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,” Levy Armstrong said.
