Key points:
- United Methodist clergy from across the U.S. joined in a Minnesota interfaith protest Jan. 23 against federal violence.
- Now with federal agents responsible for another person’s death, pressure for accountability and truth-telling is mounting.
- United Methodist clergy from outside the state say that what they learned in Minnesota they plan to apply in their own communities.
After some 50,000 people from across the U.S. took to Minneapolis’ icy streets to peacefully call for ICE to clear out, the Rev. Mariah Furness Tollgaard expected Jan. 23 would prove historic in the fight for justice.
“Friday felt holy — like Resurrection morning, like Pentecost fire on the prairie wind — the unity, the singing, the prayers,” she preached Jan. 25 at Hamline Church, a United Methodist congregation in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Tollgaard, the church’s senior pastor, was among 100 Minnesota clergy arrested while trying to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement from using the airport that day in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. She then helped lead a prayer vigil at her church that evening.
“It felt like we had put a crack in the ice, and I went home that night believing that January 23 would be remembered as a turning point.”
But then came Saturday morning when federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse at the local veterans’ hospital. He died while trying to help a woman who was also documenting immigrant enforcement activity. His last words, according to bystanders, were: “Are you OK?”
Tollgaard led her congregation on Sunday morning in a time of grief after federal agents gunned down another Minnesotan who — like Renee Good, the mother and poet killed Jan. 7 — was trying to help his immigrant neighbors. But the pastor and others at the church also spoke with resolve.
With Friday’s peaceful protests, Americans from varied walks of life — including clergy — braved temperatures as low as minus 20 Fahrenheit (minus 29 Celsius) to bear witness to what is happening in and around the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. They also learned lessons they could take back home to their communities to support neighbors targeted by federal Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
U.S. United Methodists, including multiple bishops, are increasingly speaking out against the tactics of the federal government.
“The Church has long taught that human dignity is not granted by governments,” wrote Missouri Conference Bishop Robert Farr in a letter calling for courageous Christian witness. “It is given by God. Jesus tells us that whatever we do to the least of these, we do to him. Again and again, Scripture reveals that God’s heart is found among those pushed to the margins. The Church must stand with immigrants, refugees and all who seek safety, dignity and due process.”
The United Methodist Council of Bishops also issued a statement condemning the violence in Minnesota.
"The United Methodist Church deplores the use of violence, fear, separation, and intimidation as a means of creating social order," Council of Bishops President Tracy S. Malone wrote on behalf of the council. "Such means do not build beloved community. We reaffirm our longstanding commitment to the sacred worth of every person and to the way of peace taught and embodied by Jesus. We stand against the separation of children from their families. We detest the inhumane, evil actions that are perpetuated by governmental authorities."
United Methodist ministries also are stepping up to ensure people receive the care they need. The Minnesota Conference has now set up an emergency fund to help congregations in caring for their neighbors.
One of the guests who helped lead Hamline United Methodist in worship Jan. 25 was Rena Moran, a Ramsey County commissioner and member of Camphor Memorial United Methodist Church in St. Paul. Moran had come to help the church celebrate United Methodist women but also wanted to speak to what she was seeing as one of the congregation’s local elected representatives.
How to help
The Minnesota Conference offers guidance for public witness. “Church leaders and laity alike must balance public and prophetic witness, care for their neighbors, safety, and nonviolent engagement,” the conference said.
The conference also has set up an emergency fund for churches trying to help their neighbors, especially those fearful of leaving their homes. People can donate here.
“We are in a moment in a time,” she said, “when our church, our faith, our belief, is needed now more than ever to create a government that values all of us — that is not creating laws that are pitting us one against the other.”
The Rev. Steph Dodge, pastor of Glendale United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, first saw an invitation to clergy to join the protest five days before arriving in Minneapolis on Jan. 22 to help prepare for the event. She said it was amazing to see so many people standing up for their neighbors.
“We see so many little tidbits on the news or social media, and we think like they’re just kind of isolated things, but traveling to Minnesota and being in Minneapolis like it’s just amazing to see how many people are playing a part,” she said. “People have formed all of these networks that are helping provide food for people who can’t get out of their house. They’re collecting money for people who can’t pay their rent because they’re too afraid to go to work. And it just seems like so many different people are connected and helping out in whatever ways they can.”
Dodge described the community support as “a beautiful image of the Body of Christ,” while she acknowledged that a lot of Minnesotans involved are not Christians.
“We are not powerless. We have never been,” Tollgaard preached. “Many have said it plainly: This occupation isn’t about enforcing immigration law — though clearly immigrants and BIPOC people of Minnesota have borne the brunt of this moment. This occupation is about controlling a people, subjugating a free state. Minnesota has become a testing ground because if Minnesota falls, then they continue on the path to consolidated control.”
She spoke during a month that has seen more than 3,000 heavily armed and masked federal immigration agents put the Twin Cities under siege.
An agent shot Good through her car window. Agents dragged Chongly Scott Thao — an elderly U.S. citizen — out of his home into the freezing cold dressed only in Crocs and his underwear. One of the men ICE was targeting is already serving a sentence in a Minnesota prison with plans for the federal agency to detain him upon his release.
Agents also detained a 5-year-old Minnesotan boy coming home from preschool carrying a Spider-Man backpack and sent him and his father to detention outside San Antonio.
Last week, The Associated Press reported on a memo that shows ICE asserting sweeping powers to enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant — a development many legal experts decry as a violation of U.S. constitutional rights.
Days later, agents killed Pretti. As with Good, eyewitness videos contradicted Trump officials’ description of the U.S. citizen as “a domestic terrorist” intent on killing federal agents.
Video showed Pretti directing traffic away from the agents and then running over to help a woman that agents had shoved to the ground. He was standing in front of the woman when agents pepper sprayed them both and then proceeded to pin him down on the ground and surround him in scrum. After one agent removed a gun that Pretti evidently had holstered at his side, the other agents shot him 10 times.
According to bystander videos and witness statements, Pretti never pointed or brandished his weapon, which he had a legal permit to carry.
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“He wasn’t a protester. He was a protector,” Tollgaard said. “He did what any of us would pray to have the courage to do. He loved his neighbor as himself.”
The Rev. Ingrid McIntyre, pastor of Glencliff United Methodist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, joined in the Jan. 23 protest and stayed the night just three blocks away from where Pretti was killed the next day. For the first time, McIntyre said she experienced the blindingly acrid presence of tear gas nearby.
In Good, Pretti and the Minnesotans she met, McIntyre said she sees the face of Christ.
“They are in the street. That is where Jesus was,” she said. “Jesus wasn’t sitting safely behind a desk somewhere, right? Jesus wasn’t sitting safely in an apartment complex on the 10th floor. No, Jesus was present, and he didn’t do it in a week or two after he had some committee meetings. He did it right now.”
Both McIntyre and the Rev. Becca Girrell, a United Methodist pastor in Vermont, expressed disappointment that only 30 of the roughly 700 faith leaders who came from outside Minnesota were United Methodist. They also both expressed a desire for United Methodists to do more to address the current crisis.
But both also said they will be taking lessons home with them to help their communities. Girrell lives about a four-hour drive away from Lewiston and Portland, Maine, which are also now being targeted by immigration enforcement.
“We didn’t just go to protest,” said Girrell, pastor of United Community Church, a joint United Methodist and United Church of Christ congregation in Morrisville, Vermont.
“We went to learn from the community that is modeling how to resist, and how to model noncooperation with unjust systems and community support rapid response.”
Like Tollgaard, Girrell sees Minnesota as a testing ground for more widespread repression nationwide.
However, Tollgaard also expressed hope that Minnesotans’ experience with ice of the freezing kind can help them freeze out ICE’s tactics from going further.
The federal agents “underestimate the people of this land,” Tollgaard said.
“They forget that under all of this cold, there is a beating heart of love that no federal agency can kill,” she preached. “Friends, the thing about ice — whether it’s on our lakes or in our laws — is that it never lasts forever. The deep freeze can feel endless, but every year the warmth returns.”
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umnews.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
