MINNEAPOLIS — The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Sunday that it has launched an investigation into a group of protesters in Minnesota. These individuals disrupted a church service attended by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official who reportedly acts as a pastor there.

The protest, organized by Black Lives Matter Minnesota, was broadcast live on their Facebook page. The footage shows activists interrupting the service at Cities Church with chants demanding “ICE out” and seeking “Justice for Renee Good.” Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was tragically shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this month, amid a heightened wave of federal immigration enforcement.

The demonstrators claim that one of the church’s pastors, David Easterwood, is also the head of the local ICE field office, which they accuse of employing violent and unlawful tactics in its operations.

Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice, stated that the agency is looking into potential federal civil rights violations. She condemned the protest as an act of desecration against a place of worship and an interference with the rights of Christian worshippers.

“A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest! It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws!” she said on social media.

Attorney General Pam Bondi also weighed in on social media, saying that any violations of federal law would be prosecuted.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, who participated in the protest and leads the local grassroots civil rights organization Racial Justice Network, dismissed the potential DOJ investigation as a sham and a distraction from federal agents’ actions in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

“When you think about the federal government unleashing barbaric ICE agents upon our community and all the harm that they have caused, to have someone serving as a pastor who oversees these ICE agents, is almost unfathomable to me,” said Armstrong, who added she is an ordained reverend. “If people are more concerned about someone coming to a church on a Sunday and disrupting business as usual than they are about the atrocities that we are experiencing in our community, then they need to check their theology and the need to check their hearts.”

The website of St. Paul-based Cities Church lists David Easterwood as a pastor, and his personal information appears to match that of the David Easterwood identified in court filings as the acting director of the ICE St. Paul field office. Easterwood appeared alongside DHS Secretary Kristi Noem at a Minneapolis press conference last October.

Cities Church did not respond to a phone call or emailed request for comment Sunday evening, and Easterwood’s personal contact information could not immediately be located.

In a Jan. 5 court filing, Easterwood defended ICE’s tactics in Minnesota such as swapping license plates and spraying protesters with chemical irritants. He wrote that federal agents were experiencing increased threats and aggression and crowd control devices like flash-bang grenades were important to protect against violent attacks. He testified that he was unaware of agents “knowingly targeting or retaliating against peaceful protesters or legal observers with less lethal munitions and/or crowd control devices.”

“Agitators aren’t just targeting our officers. Now they’re targeting churches, too,” the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency stated. “They’re going from hotel to hotel, church to church, hunting for federal law enforcement who are risking their lives to protect Americans.”

Black Lives Matter Minnesota co-founder Monique Cullars-Doty said that the DOJ’s prosecution was misguided.

“If you got a head — a leader in a church — that is leading and orchestrating ICE raids, my God, what has the world come to?” Cullars-Doty said. “We can’t sit back idly and watch people go and be led astray.”

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