Faith communities have always found themselves at the center of movements for hundreds of years. 

Now, hundreds of clergy members have engaged in protests, vigils, sit-ins and mutual aid throughout Minnesota since Operation Metro Surge began. 

Organizers with First Congregational Church in Minneapolis said about a hundred protestors were arrested in front of Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport while praying on Jan. 23, according to CBS News. First Congregational Church members said they viewed it as a way of being — a call of faith and action. This event took place the same day hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans participated in a general strike, where many local businesses closed in solidarity with immigrant neighbors, and more than 50,000 Minnesotans took to the streets demanding ICE leave Minnesota, according to Labor Notes, a labor organization.

For clergy, ICE in Minneapolis is not only a call to action, but a call to faith. 

Announced in early December 2025, Operation Metro Surge brought more than 3,000 ICE agents to Minnesota, according to The Minnesota Star Tribune. 

Since the start of the surge, two civilians have died — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — and more than 4,000 people have been detained within Minnesota since December of 2025, according to the White House. 

DHS uses biblical quotes to recruit more ICE agents 

The Department of Homeland Security has been using biblical texts as a means of recruitment. A video meant for recruiting had the caption “Here am I. Send me!” The quote comes from the prophet Isaiah, where he is called to action by God. 

Meg Mercury, a doctoral scholar of theology and literature at Theological Union in Berkeley, California, finds these videos to lack religious understanding and oppose the ethical codes of Christianity. 

“There is not a single religion or theological background that doesn’t have something to say about how we treat our neighbors and the stranger or the foreigner,” Mercury said. “There is shared system of belief here, and those shared values are inviolable and right now, as a nation, we are massively violating them. To the extent that it doesn’t just violate what we’re about as the United States. It’s violating something so common to humanity.” 

Mercury said this use of biblical text to defend something that so clearly violates biblical principles is dangerous and continues to misinform and control. 

A space for community 

At the First Congregational Church of Minnesota, the broader community was welcomed Jan. 23 for potlucking and community. Many members had spent the day protesting or finding other means of resisting. 

People heard of the meeting through church newsletters and service announcements, Instagram or friends. No one was silent — both young and old were in community with one another. 

Church members, just like their clergy, told the Minnesota Daily they were angered by the violence they had seen. 

Linda — who wishes for her last name to stay private due to safety reasons — has been a member of First Church of Minnesota for more than a decade, and has been an organizer and activist even longer. She said she is angered by what she sees in the city she loves so much.

“What is going on right now is something like I’ve never seen before, and we cannot rely on our government to protect us any longer,” Linda said. “It is up to the people and the community.” 

During the day, Linda watched as priests knelt in protest. Even in her late 60s, she felt it was important to protest even with below-freezing temperatures. 

The actions of this community did not start in a day.

The church decided to act after months of studying community action through Sunday sermons and weekly reading groups. 

Rev. Jane McBride, senior pastor at First Church of Minnesota, said during the first Trump administration, the group intensively studied the Bible’s stance on immigration for three or four months.

“What is the history of immigration in the United States? How does our system work? Why is it so broken?” McBride said. “We learned a lot collectively. And, you know, then, we had to consider where we were going to stand on it all.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, McBride said when the community kitchen moved into the church’s fellowship hall, the two groups found community and allyship. Their differences allowed for their partnership to grow and continue to serve their community.  

“What happened was they supported us,” McBride said. “We were exhausted, and it was hard to feel like we had the energy to do the normal things we do as a church. They helped bring us back to life in that moment.” 

Their relationship with community kitchens has strengthened them and given them more ability to engage with the community around them. McBride said she views difference as something to embrace rather than push away and feels this view is welcomed by her fellow faith leaders working with one another.

“There’s just kind of, I think, a mutual sense of like, a generosity of spirit, and also that we don’t have to agree on stuff really to work together on common goals,” McBride said.“We agree on enough stuff or that we have a passion for some of the same things make from someplace different, and that is completely fine.” 

Love is active, not passive. 

For many, this is not the first time their faith has drawn them to action. 

McBride said her church has a history of conversation, of what they can provide to a community and where they need help themselves.

McBride said going back to biblical texts is key. 

“We’ve just been going back to the basics, right? Like, you know, feed the hungry, heal the sick, welcome the stranger,” McBride said. “I mean, I haven’t counted, but I think there must be hundreds of verses in the Bible about, you know, welcoming the stranger, or supporting people who are immigrants in your land.”

One of many clergy detained during a presentation of public prayer at the airport, McBride said through an email statement the airport action was a moment of “holy witness.”

“For myself and other clergy and people of faith, it felt necessary to put our bodies in the way of business as usual, and to appeal to the conscience of our political leaders, corporations and institutions to leverage their power,” McBride said in the email. “As I knelt on the freezing pavement in below-zero temperatures for over an hour, I felt a deep sense of prayerful solidarity — with neighbors being beaten and kidnapped, with children in hiding, with families being torn apart.” 

McBride sees action as the role of Christians to call out and recognize the harm within communities.  

“If we aren’t actively doing something to resist this occupation and to resist the terrors that our neighbors are living through, then we can’t really say we love them. I mean, love is active, and it does the things that it believes in. It doesn’t just sit around and talk about it,” McBride said.

To her, it is not enough to pray for those in pain but to show up and be present with them and visibly be on the side of justice and peace. 

“This moment has been really unifying because I think that we’re all just like, looking out at something that is evil and going, nothing really matters more than getting together, both stopping the evil that’s happening and also building the community that we all want to see,” she said.

McBride sees the beauty in mixed dialogues. She said even through misunderstanding, there can be unity with one another. 

Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, rabbi of Beth Jacob Congregation, said she sees similar patterns in action between different faith communities. She added that differences in opinion are beneficial.

Magill-Grimm was one of many speakers at the vigil after the murder of Renée Good to discuss her own reactions as well as what her community is doing to help one another. She has been working within interfaith and activist communities for many years and views her position as a rabbi to fight for justice and those who are oppressed. 

For Magill-Grimm, justice and action are central to her tradition. She added the actions of DHS and ICE taking place within Minnesota directly contradict Judaism.

“It’s so very clear to me that the way that human beings are being treated in our state right now violates the core understanding of my religious tradition,” Magill-Grimm said. “These people that have this relationship with God, and it always seems to be around some kind of issue of morality or issue of justice.” 

She said her community is focusing on decentralized work through mutual aid within existing relationships in congregants’ lives.

“People keep asking me, ‘do you have a collection going at the synagogue?’” Magill-Grimm said, in reference to fundraising and food drive efforts. “Not exactly, we’re encouraging people to donate where there’s — like, actual relationships, and where, we know that we’re actually meeting the needs of the people on the receiving end.” 

Magill-Grimm added all roles within a movement are important. 

Last week, it was announced by border czar Tom Homan that Operation Metro Surge would be coming to an end, and agents would be leaving Minnesota. As of Feb. 17, 1,000 ICE officers have left the state. 

Organizers and citizens are saying this is a distraction, rather than the end of an occupation —  an attempt to see a less organized Minnesota.

Reverend Joy Caires, head rector at Saint Clement’s Episcopal Church in St. Paul and one of the 99 clergy members detained at the airport, said she has been working in activist spaces for more than a decade within the Twin Cities. She said she sees her role as a priest to be present and visible within moments of turmoil. 

“I just am desperate for someone to hear us — this is not the dramatic moment of violence at the hands of ICE, this is the slow and deadly squeeze that kills far more efficiently than any gun,” Caires said.  “If a nation trembling on the brink of anarchy and ruin is so dead that it will not hear a plea to redress wrongs which the whole people admit call for reform, God, in mercy, pity us and our children.”