Editor’s note: This piece was written after the death of Renee Good but before the death of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The death of Renee Nicole Good ignited renewed street tension amid an already chaotic start to 2026. From mass deportations and controversial mis-deportations,…
Faith, silence and protest in Union Square
Last Friday, I joined what was estimated at 4,000 people in Union Square in New York City. We gathered to protest the murder of Renée Good and the detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos. But the purpose of the march…
I Trained to Monitor ICE but Found Myself Feeding the Hungry
I sit at a friend’s kitchen table at her home in our South Minneapolis neighborhood. A vinyl tablecloth wrinkles under my notebook as we work together to make a grocery list for her family so I can shop for her.
Tim Walz invokes Anne Frank in pressing Trump to end ICE operations in Minnesota
Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, invoked Anne Frank in exhorting President Donald Trump to call off the ICE operations in the Twin Cities in which a second protester was killed over the weekend.
The dawn of Apple Pie ISIS
Let’s be clear about language before we are clear about lives. The word “agent” will not be used here to describe armed, militia-style bullies with low emotional intelligence who terrorize communities, abduct children in Walmart parking lots, ambush day laborers…
Connecting the dots from the unitary executive president
You, along with millions of other American citizens, may be wondering where those tense confrontations in Minneapolis came from. What brought those 3,000 ICE agents to the Twin Cities and the angry citizens into the streets? Many different streams of…
BJC calls for ICE accountability
Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty has joined the call for Congress to pass the Protecting Sensitive Locations Act “and hold ICE accountable by withholding their funding,” according to an email sent to supporters Jan. 28. The religious liberty watchdog…
As anger mounts, ICE director called to court appearance Friday
The chief federal judge in Minnesota is fed up with the Trump administration’s persistent violation of court orders and the rights of detainees amid increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement actions. As a result, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz has ordered the acting…
As religious leaders decry Pretti’s death, SBC president is silent
The president of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination apparently had nothing to say about the murder of a 37-year-old ICU nurse in Minneapolis last Saturday. But Clint Pressley had quite a lot to say a week earlier when a group…
Faith groups speak out against Minneapolis murders
Grief and fury over the second fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by at least one immigration agent is reaching massive proportions. The condemnations by humanitarian and civil rights organizations have grown ever louder since news of the Jan. 24…
Human warehouses should spark ‘fires of injustice’
U.S. society will be “consumed” by the “fires of injustice” if Americans remain silent about federal plans to hold huge numbers of immigrants in warehouses across the country, Rabbi Kimberly Herzog Cohen said during a clergy press conference in Dallas…
Kristi Noem is a liar
Kristi Noem is a liar, but so is everyone else who keeps propping up the Liar in Chief. I have written extensively for years about the corrosive effects of Donald Trump’s lies and how they are infecting entire populations of…