As part of Minnesota’s “Day of Truth and Freedom” on Friday, January 23, clergy leaders in Minnesota are urging residents not to shop, work, or go to school in protest of the ongoing occupation of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement across the state.
“What is happening here in Minnesota is a horror that we’re living through, but we’ve been organizing in preparation,” Minister JaNaé Bates told Sojourners.
Bates is the co-executive director of ISAIAH, a faith-based organization that has been helping to organize the day of action.
“It’s not completely a shock.”
Faith leaders join unions and labor organizers in what is effectively a day-long general strike across Minnesota communities. And a day prior, a clergy-led group called MARCH (Multifaith Antiracism, Faith and Healing) spread a call to action, asking faith leaders from around the country to make a pilgrimage to Minnesota.
“In the targeted violence against immigrant communities from Latine and Somali neighborhoods — where families are being torn apart by masked agents, where communities are organizing, resisting, and protecting one another, and where Renee Good’s life has been taken with reckless disregard for the preciousness of human life — we are witnessing an eruption of corruption, racism, and the worship of money over life itself, now threatening the soul of this nation,” MARCH shared in its call to clergy.
“We therefore call on clergy and faith leaders of all faiths, representative of every part of the country, to join us for a day of witness and resistance — a working convening rooted in accountability to impacted communities and designed to build the relationships, skills, and commitments needed for sustained action across the country.”
Organizers told Sojourners that between 400 and 500 clergy had registered, planning to march in freezing temperatures and holding teaching sessions with local Indigenous and civil rights groups.
Those who are local to the area or have already descended upon Minnesota are bundled up in the streets themselves, volunteering as legal observers to document the actions of ICE agents.
According to Religious News Service, about 200 faith leaders spread out across Minneapolis on January 22, carrying whistles and singing hymns from the Civil Rights Movement.
“You can only preach against ICE for so long before God calls you to get out of the pulpit and get to the streets,” Rev. Joshua Shawnee, from Inclusive Catholic Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said.
Where faith leaders could not travel to Minnesota, they are carrying out their own forms of resistance, including fasting in solidarity.
In Oakland, California, for instance, faith communities are urging a “solidarity fast” from noon on January 22 to noon on January 23.
“We will pray and fast in solidarity here in California to resist the violence inflicted on our own neighbors, friends, and families, while also sending our prayers with our Bay Area Faith Delegation traveling to Minneapolis,” organizers wrote in a planning document, shared by The Oaklandside.
As for Bates and the Minnesota-based leaders, their work is to continuing to hold firm in their beliefs — and their demands.
“In my faith, when it is time for one to go, we say to one another: ‘Peace be with you. You may go in peace,’” Bates said in an address earlier this week. “ICE, you may go in peace. You surely couldn’t stay in peace, and so we are asking that you leave in peace.”
She said ICE officers were “acting quite illegitimately,” and doing things “that are very illegal” and “against our constitutional rights,” concluding that “when illegal things happen, there should be consequences.”
“Our ask, our demand, especially as moral witnesses, especially as moral authority, is that we call you into your better self,” Bates continued, speaking directly to ICE. “The reality is, we know that no human being is irredeemable. No human being is beyond the touch of the almighty God. We are praying for you. We are praying for your soul.”
Bates added that this is why so many organizers from various traditions, including “Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Unitarian,” and more, were coming together in these efforts centered around “truth and freedom.”
In addition to providing space for community members to gather, lament, and practice “faithful action” together, she said, the January 23 activation comes with four demands.
“We have four demands that have been consistent since the killing of Renee Good,” Bates said. “The first is that ICE must leave Minnesota. The second is that the one who is very much responsible for the murder of Renee Good must be held accountable.”
“The third is that our congressional folks need to do their job,” she continued. “You have a job, and that job is to ensure that what is happening here … does not continue to happen here and should not happen in any state in our country. That means you must do all you can to freeze every single cent that this illegitimate agency is getting … it must stop, and you can stop it.”
ISAIAH and other faith groups have also been demonstrating in front of corporations that have contracts with ICE, urging them to divest from the federal government’s immigration agenda and support vulnerable communities. On the morning of January 23, the group live-streamed a demonstration opposing Delta Airlines’ connections to ICE.
Hundreds of clergy members and ISIAH organizers have also convened at Target headquarters to demand justice, singing hymns with a few lyrical twists.
“We can stay here all day, we shall not be moved,” they harmonized. “We are shopping elsewhere, we shall not be moved.”
Ultimately, Sojourners reported, this effort persuaded Target CEO Brian Cornell to agree to a meeting.
These mounting actions tie into the group’s fourth demand: “For all of our corporations and businesses to stand in alignment with the people of Minnesota,” Bates said.
While the demands of faith leaders are clear in their efforts to eliminate ICE and protect communities, the call is not motivated by some sort of political gain, but by what they claim as a religious imperative.
“This is not about anti-ICE activists,” Bates concluded in her impassioned speech.
“This is about our neighbors. This is about grandmothers. This is about teachers. This is about firefighters. This is about all of us who are hurting about what’s happening … We need to step up together. Let us all be grounded in that — in our God, in our faith, and in our witness. Amen.”
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Header image courtesy of Faith in Minnesota/Facebook
