They Shot the Pastor Anyway: When Religious Authority Met Federal Force

Faith leaders thought their collars would protect them. They were wrong.

The Presbyterian minister was wearing his collar. Department of Homeland Security agents shot him in the head with pepper balls anyway. The Unitarian pastor arrived at the scene of a killing in clerical dress. Federal officers fired rounds near her head within the hour. Across American cities, clergy are learning what happens when the federal government no longer appears to respect the moral authority they’ve wielded on for generations.

Faith-based resistance to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda started on Day 1 — Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon at the National Cathedral. But as Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations intensified through Los Angeles, D.C., Chicago and now Minneapolis, the organizing evolved. Rapid response networks. ICE observer trainings. Whistle brigades. Tactics shared between cities. 

But clergy collars aren’t always de-escalating anymore. DHS mocks its religious critics on social media, calls them “imbecilic morons” and keeps advancing. Reporter Jack Jenkins has been on the ground watching one of the largest faith-based organizing movements in modern American history collide with federal power appears unmoved by their prayerful protests.

Pastors are still patrolling. Churches are still training volunteers. The resistance is growing more sophisticated by the week. But the fundamental premise — that religious leaders carry a kind of protective moral weight — has cracked open. Drawing on lessons from the past, some faith communities are re-learning what to do when the government mocks their moral authority.

TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript was generated using AI tools and may contain minor transcription errors.

AMANDA HENDERSON: From Religion News Service and the Institute for Religion, Politics and Culture, this is Complexified—a podcast for the religiously curious and politically frustrated. I’m Amanda Henderson.

A Presbyterian minister was wearing his collar when federal agents shot him with pepper balls. He wasn’t alone. Across the country, clergy are showing up to protests and discovering the thing that’s supposed to protect them, the thing that’s supposed to de-escalate, doesn’t work anymore.

For generations, a clergy collar at a protest meant something. It signaled moral authority. It was supposed to cool tensions between law enforcement and demonstrators. But over the past year, clergy are learning in real time that the old rules don’t apply. Clergy are being mocked on federal social media, called “imbecilic morons,” arrested, shot with pepper rounds. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is invoking Christianity on its own feeds to justify what it’s doing. Two competing religious narratives about the same events, two different claims to moral authority.

To help us understand how we got here, we’re joined by Jack Jenkins, national reporter at Religion News Service, who’s been on the ground in these cities watching this unfold. Jack, welcome back to Complexified.

JACK JENKINS: Thank you.

AMANDA HENDERSON: You’ve been tracking the events happening around the increased ICE enforcement around immigration for the past year at this point, if not longer. Can you share about what this looks like now and how we got here?

JACK JENKINS: Yeah. I mean, I should mention, you know, religious pushback to the president’s immigration policies and mass deportation agenda began his first full day in office, right? We all remember that sermon preached to him by Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde in the Washington National Cathedral, asking the president to have mercy on immigrants, among other people.

AMANDA HENDERSON: And this is part of a long tradition of faith communities working on behalf of immigrants and refugees in the United States.

JACK JENKINS: Exactly. So then it went from rhetoric to on-the-ground pushback and responses to the influx of Department of Homeland Security agents and ICE agents into various American cities, which were launched as a series of targeted campaigns by the president and his administration.

The first big example we had was, of course, Los Angeles. I interviewed a priest right at the time that was happening—a Catholic priest who said he was on these rapid response groups where he would hear about an ICE raid and run over there, try to minister to the people who were affected, try to provide pastoral care, but also document what was happening in that moment. And so that meant pulling out his cell phone and documenting the raid and the activities of ICE agents themselves.

And we went from LA—after that it was LA, and then I think the next major one was DC. And I should mention there were lots of spurts around in various different places—in Colorado and San Francisco and Portland—but kind of these concentrated campaigns in LA and then DC, and then Chicago in particular was one. Operation Midway Blitz was the term, where we had a very concentrated critical mass of DHS agents pushed into that city by the administration.

Now, when I went out and reported in Chicago, that was fascinating because the level of religious pushback had increased, and it increased in sophistication.

AMANDA HENDERSON: So let’s zoom out. How do you see this evolution taking place as these targeted cities continue to move?

JACK JENKINS: Yeah, we started to see something when we got to Chicago and then later to Charlotte, North Carolina, which was faith leaders kind of building on each other’s experience and, in many instances, actively talking to each other—

AMANDA HENDERSON: Communicating across cities.

JACK JENKINS: Yes, about how best to push back against DHS and ICE. One of the things that was different there was that there was this DHS ICE facility right outside of Chicago in Broadview, Illinois, that then became known as the Broadview facility, and that became its own locus of protest. And then there were often very intense responses by DHS agents. We saw that video go viral of a Presbyterian minister, David Black, being shot in the head and body with pepper balls, and then that sort of building on itself.

And so I talked to many clergy who had been shot with pepper balls in and around that facility. And it ultimately culminated in a massive protest where at least seven faith leaders were arrested in that one protest.

And then, in addition to that, there was this kind of emergence of these ICE observers, or ICE watchers. They go by a number of names. They’re tracking ICE. When they hear that ICE is in a location, they often have whistles around their necks, and they blow whistles to alert the surrounding community.

AMANDA HENDERSON: And this is legal, correct? To be tracking and watching?

JACK JENKINS: The activists argue that everything they’re doing is within the bounds of the law—that they have every right to film and to document ICE officers. Now, DHS and some ICE officers have frequently threatened some of these people with arrest, alleging that they’re impeding their activities and their law enforcement activities when they follow them, or that sort of thing. That is, of course, heavily disputed in court.

AMANDA HENDERSON: There you go. I want to pause right there. So one of the things that I’m seeing and hearing you say is how faith communities are telling the story of what they’re seeing, and how videoing that, sharing that out, talking between cities, is a part of controlling the narrative in one sense. And there’s this disputed narrative that we also hear from the Trump administration, from more conservative groups—this different narrative. And how does that play into, you know, seeing that this is a contested narrative, and faith communities are trying to break through to tell the story of what they are seeing and experiencing? How does that play into the tactics that faith communities are calling upon to resist ICE in this way?

JACK JENKINS: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s worth noting that there have been multiple times over the last year that DHS has sent me a statement with a description of what happened at a certain place—whether it’s an encounter with a faith leader, an action of detention, what have you—and that the story of the people who were on the ground or the faith leaders I’m talking to is the opposite, right? Completely conflicting narratives of the same incident.

And I think a lot of the religious leaders that I’ve spoken to, one, just feel compelled to show up because of the nature of their faith. In some instances, I’ve spoken to faith leaders when DHS just showed up on their church property, right? Like somebody ran onto their property and they went and confronted them, or they happened to be detaining one of their parishioners and they ran out to go observe that. So that’s not necessarily an organized form of resistance. That’s just like a pastor responding in the moment. And so there’s that dynamic.

And then there’s also faith leaders who do think—the reality is that a lot of faith leaders still hold some degree of moral weight, in varying degrees, in our society—and they do want to add their voices to that, to counteract a narrative that they see as incorrect coming from the federal government.

And on top of that, it’s worth noting that the Department of Homeland Security on its various social media feeds has often invoked religion, primarily Christianity, on a regular basis. And so I have spoken to a number of faith leaders who have found that to be deeply offensive and want to counter it, not only in terms of what they saw as the facts on the ground, the narratives coming out of DHS, but also countering it theologically—wanting to articulate a different vision for the faith that they claim.

AMANDA HENDERSON: Yeah. I mean, traditionally, faith communities and clergy have been a credible source of both information and moral authority. They’ve kind of held a stature outside of the typical debate. And I mean, even faith communities used to be a safe place for people to take refuge who were avoiding deportation or disputing deportation. And it seems like there’s also this shift in politicization of faith communities—that these faith communities who are countering ICE are kind of dismissed, and this conservative version of Christianity is used to justify the deportations and to reinforce this particular political view.

JACK JENKINS: And not just dismissed. I mean, DHS has openly mocked its religious critics. I referred to the Presbyterian minister who was shot in the head with pepper balls. They referred to him as a “pastor” in air quotes. With the protesters—there was a faith-led protest at that same Broadview, Illinois DHS facility—when DHS quote-tweeted footage of that protest when people were getting arrested, which again included at least seven faith leaders being arrested, and referred to them as “imbecilic morons” who needed to get a job.

Wow, right? Like this is them referring to faith leaders. So it’s not just disagreeing, it is mocking. And so that tension is very real. And again, that’s not necessarily unique to how DHS treats its critics in general, but it extends all the way to faith leaders.

AMANDA HENDERSON: And how does that play into—okay, so now we’re moving from Chicago to Minneapolis, and faith leaders are battling all of these different realities. They’re both trying to advocate and counter the ICE enforcements, and they’re trying to break through the noise and bring credibility to a sense of moral authority for those who are immigrants and refugees. How does that look in Minneapolis as these faith communities are evolving in their resistance?

JACK JENKINS: I need to give a little bit of the setting, the scene here, because Minneapolis is a little bit different.

AMANDA HENDERSON: Okay.

JACK JENKINS: Because the raw volume of ICE agents and DHS agents, and the ratio of that to the number of residents, is significantly higher than we’ve seen in other cities.

AMANDA HENDERSON: A shift—a significant shift that has happened.

JACK JENKINS: And so when I was in Minneapolis, you know, I’m certain there are people who agree with what DHS is doing and agree with that. They were hard to find. I mean, it was a city that is—no matter where you went, in certain parts of the city, you couldn’t avoid both the presence of DHS and ICE, and the pushback against it.

I want you to hear this one clip. I did a ride-along with a Unitarian Universalist minister, Reverend Ashley Haron, who was patrolling her neighborhood to kind of see if ICE was in the neighborhood. DHS—I want to point out when I’ve done this in the past with other folks in Chicago, there were whole sections of the Chicago suburbs that they were covering. There are so many volunteers in Minneapolis that she was only covering her small neighborhood, which also happens to be the neighborhood where Rene’e Gill was killed by an ICE agent earlier this month.

And so we were patrolling through that neighborhood, driving past her memorial over and over and over again. And at one point I asked her, “Hey, you know, how often do you see ICE? Is ICE really, kind of, really present in this community?” Let’s listen.

[Audio clip begins]

JACK JENKINS: I know that you live a block from where Renee Good was killed. Has ICE shown up in the neighborhood since her killing?

ASHLEY HARON: Oh, absolutely. They’re here all the time. Everywhere. They were sitting out in front of my house yesterday. And you know the reports today? Oh, we gotta—we got folks honking and following right here. It looks like they may be following somebody. I’m gonna see if I can go along with them.

[Audio of multiple honking cars, whistles, other noisemakers driving past]

[Audio clip ends]

JACK JENKINS: That was a whole caravan of people following this suspected ICE vehicle, and we peeled off behind it and then ended up going somewhere else. But we encountered suspected ICE vehicles multiple times during her hour-and-a-half, two-hour shift, driving around that small circle.

AMANDA HENDERSON: And this is a significant shift from your time in Chicago.

JACK JENKINS: Yes. And the religious pushback is also fairly ubiquitous. You know, when I went down to see the memorial—Rene’e Gill’s memorial—the first time, there was another church half a block away that was having a vigil, a solidarity vigil, in response to her killing that I didn’t even know about. I just saw people walking over there.

And the thing to keep in mind there too is that a lot of these communities had been activated as activists since back in 2020 at the killing of George Floyd.

AMANDA HENDERSON: Yeah. This is an important point in Minneapolis. It seems that this is also building on a foundation that was already activated.

JACK JENKINS: Right. And to the point where the partnerships between faith communities and others are super normative. At one point I went—an ELCA pastor had set up this event between her church, a bookstore, and a brewery across the street, where if you showed up and you had a whistle around your neck—so a whistle that would allow you to alert people about ICE—they would give you a free drink.

And when I went there and spoke to her, she was like, “Yeah, this partnership began back in 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing and the great deal of activism and protests that happened then.” And so relationships that I think other cities might have to be building on the fly in response—those who want to resist ICE and DHS—in Minneapolis, a lot of those relationships already exist.

[Break]

AMANDA HENDERSON: We have seen the significant ramping up in Minnesota as compared to Chicago and LA and DC. Where do we go from here, knowing that there is a significant influx of funding coming to expand and grow ICE efforts? What are you hearing? Where are they going next, and what does the religious response look like?

JACK JENKINS: So a few things that were evident even in my time in Minneapolis, and we’ve already seen DHS officials announce new initiatives, for instance around drones. When I went up to the Whipple Building, which is a federal building that ICE and DHS are staging a lot of their activities in Minneapolis—I drove under a drone to get over there. That was hovering around. And so that might be a presence in and around any number of people, including churches, to keep an eye on.

There’s already been some reporting that ICE is going to Maine next, particularly a town in Maine with a large Somali American population. I’ve heard faith leaders—actually Evangelical, Hispanic Evangelical faith leaders—readying a press conference to respond to what they say is increased ICE and DHS activity in the Central Florida, Orlando area.

And so, you know, I think that there are many cities that are kind of preparing for the potential for ICE to show up at the same level that we see in Minneapolis. Now, you know, we’ve also heard things about New York. But the thing to keep in mind about Minneapolis is that with 3,000-odd agents that DHS seems to have—anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 in that city—that eclipses almost the local police department.

AMANDA HENDERSON: Yeah, that’s really wild, right? Almost double the number of ICE agents as there are police officers. Am I understanding that correctly?

JACK JENKINS: It’s more. I’ve lost track of the numbers. This is why I’m a reporter and didn’t do well in math. But I do know enough math to know that 3,000 would not eclipse the number of, say, NYPD officers, right? So if they were to do a similar initiative in New York City, they would need a lot more officers to add to the same level of ratio of DHS agents to average citizen that they have in Minneapolis right now in a place like New York City.

And so my suspicion is that, or at least what we have heard, is that they would very much—DHS would very much like to spend that kind of money on recruitment, and that they would love to scale up their efforts throughout the course of this year.

And so if that is the case, I mean, I remember when I talked to people in Charlotte, when there was about a week-long initiative there after Chicago, you know, it was interesting to hear that within 24 hours of ICE appearing—DHS and Border Patrol as well showing up in that state—there were hundreds of people packing into churches for ICE watch trainings.

And here’s the thing: that was not even a direct response. A lot of those trainings had been set up months before because local religious activists were already trying to take the initiative. Because once the “big, beautiful bill” got passed, which adds a lot of funding to DHS, they were like, “We need to get ready for whenever they hit North Carolina.” It just happened to coincide with their arrival.

And they said that they were taking cues from their religious colleagues in Chicago. They were in conversation with different clergy and different groups in different parts of the country.

So, you know, look, there absolutely are religious professionals who support what DHS is doing and have been loud about that. But it is difficult to avoid when you go to some of these cities, the raw number of clergy from a number of different faiths. I didn’t even get into Minneapolis—there’s a significant Muslim population and their response, and different Jewish groups, for instance, have been involved in this pushback in New York City and elsewhere.

But this is one of the largest spurts, or just waves, of faith-based organizing that I have seen in the modern, 21st century. Full stop.

AMANDA HENDERSON: Yeah. Wow, wow. That’s a big statement.

Okay, so one of the things that I’ve been thinking about as well is—as the heat gets ratcheted up, there are more and more instances of protesters kind of lashing out. And, you know, the anger and frustration—this can easily lead to violence, which then piles on more violence. We’re talking on Thursday, January 15th. Just last night, someone was shot by an ICE officer in the foot. And this is a fear that a lot of people talk about, is that this is going to rapidly snowball into something worse. How are religious leaders working to try and keep the protest strong but peaceful?

JACK JENKINS: So this has been a traditional role that clergy have often had at protests. They help de-escalate tensions. I reported on some things that occurred during, say, Ferguson, for instance, where clergy tried to de-escalate tensions between the police and protesters.

I say that, and it’s very clear that a lot of clergy still want to be that presence. But I will tell you that I have now spoken to multiple ordained clergy who have said that they are concerned that that’s not working anymore.

When I was driving around with Ashley Haron in Minneapolis, she wasn’t wearing a collar. She had been wearing one earlier, but she wasn’t wearing one while we were driving around. And she was like, “Yeah, traditionally it helps de-escalate, but when I showed up”—because she ran to the scene of Rene’e Gill’s killing shortly after it occurred because she lives a block away—”it’s on video, within 45 minutes to an hour, DHS agents were firing pepper bullets or pepper rounds right near her head indiscriminately.” And she was in a clerical collar then.

And I spoke to a pastor out in Chicago who wasn’t a big protester, but actually went down there to try to help de-escalate tensions. And he had a direct encounter with Bevino, who’s the Border Patrol official that’s gotten a lot of attention, who put his hands on the pastor as well. And he was visibly wearing a collar.

So there is concern that the clergy have where they are, in many ways, wanting to be a de-escalating force.

AMANDA HENDERSON: Yeah. And this has always been a resource—having clergy present to be able to de-escalate. And now what happens when that’s no longer effective, or respected?

JACK JENKINS: Exactly.

AMANDA HENDERSON: Yeah. Well, Jack, thank you so much for being here, for showing up to tell these stories. You know, we talked about the importance of being on the ground, eyes and ears, and we really appreciate the ways that you are there watching and telling the story and bringing that to us.

JACK JENKINS: Thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure.

AMANDA HENDERSON: Complexified comes to you from the Institute for Religion, Politics and Culture at Iliff School of Theology, in partnership with Religion News Service. Senior Producer is Jonathan Woodward. Our editor is Julia Windham. Associate Producer is Josh Perez. Consulting Producer is Paul O’Donnell. I’m Amanda Henderson.

The world needs us now. We need more thinking, more questions, more curiosity, more Complexified. Share this episode with three of your closest friends and email me right now at [email protected]. That’s [email protected].