“Episcopal clergy and lay leaders are among the hundreds of people of faith from across the United States who have travelled to Minneapolis, Minnesota, for a day of public witness and political action on Jan. 23 in opposition to what they are calling an ‘occupation’ of the city by federal immigration authorities,” the Episcopal News Service reports.
And inevitably, mass arrests followed, including clergy. Reuters report that demonstrators “Ignored commands to clear the road by officers from local police departments, who arrested and zip-tied dozens of the protesters, who did not resist, before putting them onto buses. Reuters observed dozens of arrests, and organisers said about 100 clergy members were arrested.
“Faith in Minnesota, a nonprofit advocacy group that helped organise the protest, said the clergy were also calling attention to airport and airline workers who they said had been detained by ICE at work. The group asked that airline companies “stand with Minnesotans in calling for ICE to immediately end its surge in the state.”
A two-day multi-faith gathering of progressive religious leaders in Minneapolis was held in a packed church. “Far from the typical flock of Presbyterian worshippers who frequent the church on Sundays, the more than 600 people who filled the pews represented a wide range of faiths — Christians of all kinds as well as Buddhists, Jews, Muslims and Indigenous practitioners, among others,” Religion News Service reported having been given special access. “All were religious leaders who had travelled to Minnesota on short notice, spurred by their faith to oppose President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign in the city.”
The subsequent shooting of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive-care nurse, by ICE agents will not do anything to quell the demonstrations.
Responding to the earlier shooting of Renee Good, and referencing social justice martyrs like Oscar Romero, the Episcopal Bishop of Robert Hirschfeld issued a warning, reported by RNS. “I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness,” he said. “I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order, to make sure they have their wills written. Because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us — with our bodies — to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”
Among the martyrs Hirschfeld mentioned was a local hero to his diocese, Jonathan Daniels, a white Episcopal theology student and civil rights activist who was killed in 1965, having visited Selma to join Martin Luther King jr’s campaign for voting rights for blacks.
A 2015 RNS article commemorating the 50th anniversary of Selma, that recounted the circumstances of Jonathan Daniels’ death, “‘He pulled me out of the way and the bullet hit him instead,’ said Ruby Sales, now 66, recalling the day, Aug. 20, 1965, that Daniels saved her life and lost his.
“They had just been released from jail, where they were held with other civil rights workers who were protesting the exploitation of black sharecroppers by white plantation owners in Fort Deposit, Ala. Daniels, 26, and Sales were in a group of people who stopped at a store to buy a soda. A white special deputy sheriff aimed a gun at Sales, and Daniels took the shot.
“Daniels, the valedictorian of his class at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), had left his Episcopal seminary in Cambridge, Mass., and headed to Selma, like others, answering King’s call after the first ‘Bloody Sunday’ march. But unlike many who left, he stayed and worked on voter registration in Lowndes County and also pushed for the integration of a white Episcopal congregation in Selma…
“Montgomery historian Alston Fitts, who was a Harvard grad school classmate of Daniels, said the white seminarian worked hard to not respond to hate in kind. He defended white Southerners to his Northern friends as ‘imperfect Christians.’
“King said of Daniels, according to a VMI website: ‘One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels.’
Daniels was not alone. On that day, he was accompanied by a Catholic priest, Richard Morrisroe, who, with Daniels, sought to protect the two back teenagers with them.
And there were three other Selma martyrs. Jimmie Lee Jackson was a 26-year-old deacon of his Baptist church in Marion, Alabama, who was shot fleeing police who attacked protesters by a state trooper. Unitarian minister James Reeb was attacked by four white men, clubbed to death, while walking to a church meeting with King. Viola Liuzzo drove her Oldsmobile to Selma to join the demonstration. She was shot by Ku Klux Klansmen because they spotted her, a white woman, in a car with a black man, a civil rights worker, whom she was driving from Selma to Montgomery.
Thousands of religious leaders and ordinary Americans came south to support MLK.
It may be that we are seeing a similar mobilisation in opposition to the heavy-handed tactics of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
And once again clergy will join the campaign.
While the conservative (including many evangelicals) spotlight has been on one group of demonstrators that disrupted a church service, the wider movement protesting mass deportation is likely more significant.
And liberal or progressive clergy will seize the moment and join the cause.
This should give pause for thought to evangelicals who, at present, seem content to urge people to support the rights of the federal agents and avoid confrontation.
“The protests we see across the country right now are underpinned by the radical socialist left, whose goal is to make the United States like Venezuela, ultimately destroying the America we know,” Franklin Graham, who heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, posted.
The same was said of MLK. Yet with hindsight, evangelicals look back with regret on their lack of support for his movement. And it should be remembered that Jonathan Daniels was no communist, but a graduate of the conservative VMI that honours his memory.
This story is not taking a stand on exactly how to respond to US immigration policy, but to point out that one beneficiary of the current situation will be the growth of social-justice-oriented Christianity. Evangelicals should be wary about defining themselves as as opposed to this campaign to protect a vulnerable group.
Image: ICE and Border Patrol agents on Nicollet Avenue on January 24, 2026. This follows the shooting death of Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti. Pretti is the second person killed and the third person shot by federal agents in Minneapolis this month. Image Credit Chad Davis
God bless these good, brave Christian leaders. The church in the U.S.needs more of this.
Franklin Graham has no idea that Matthew 24:24 was written about him and his ilk. Graham and the “German Christians” that promoted Hitler’s ideologies are saying the exact same words. A quick internet search of German Christians and the Holocaust, will open a lot of modern evangelical eyes. Simple Christianity, which Hitler approved of, is exactly was tech-bro Christians believe. Even Elon Musk is a “Social Christian”. In case you’re not clued into the brand of evil the Tech Bros are into look up Dark Enlightenment and read this gem about Peter Thiel. https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/