For a year, ICE and the Trump administration have made it harder for communities to live, gather and worship without fear. It started with the erosion of sensitive locations — which allowed ICE to conduct immigration enforcement activities on church grounds — and has spiraled to mass raids, using church properties as staging areas, arrests near and on places of worship, guns pointed at pastors, the dehumanizing harassment of immigrant and refugee communities, the unprecedented spike in deaths at detention facilities, the impunity that culminated with the death of Renee Good and the gaslighting by the current administration in the face of widespread criticism and calls for accountability.
An out-of-control federal government has the power to undermine the conditions that make religious freedom possible: our pluralistic way of life and the ability of all people to participate fully in civic life.
Religious freedom isn’t something that exists on paper. It is something that is lived. It is something that needs to be willed and acted on. In Minneapolis and across the country, the threats to the religious freedom of all people are not the people standing up for and participating in civic life but the people who wield state power in a manner that undermines it.
We are in solidarity with the people of Minneapolis and across the country who find themselves under these impossible circumstances, and we call on our elected officials to protect the safety and dignity of all people, to respect places of worship as spaces of conscience and community, and to restore the civic stability that religious freedom depends on.