The U.S. Department of Justice announced Sunday it is investigating a group of protesters who disrupted services at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where a man identified in court filings as the acting director of the local ICE field office also serves as a pastor.
A livestreamed video posted on the Black Lives Matter Minnesota Facebook page shows protesters interrupting the service by chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.” Renee Good was a 37-year-old mother of three fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this month amid a surge in federal immigration enforcement.
The DOJ’s announced investigation drew immediate condemnation from protest leaders, who said federal scrutiny should focus on ICE agents’ conduct in the Twin Cities rather than on those who protested at the church.
Federal response
DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said her agency is investigating federal civil rights violations “by these people desecrating a house of worship and interfering with 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!” Dhillon said on social media.
Attorney General Pam Bondi also weighed in on social media, saying that any violations of federal law would be prosecuted.
The church and the ICE field director
The protesters allege that David Easterwood, listed as a pastor on the Cities Church website, also leads the local ICE field office overseeing enforcement operations in Minneapolis-St. Paul. 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 Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a Minneapolis press conference in October 2025. Cities Church did not respond to a phone call or emailed request for comment Sunday. Easterwood did not lead the portion of the service that was livestreamed, and it was unclear whether he was present at the church.
In a Jan. 5 court filing, Easterwood defended ICE tactics in Minnesota, including the use of swapped license plates and the spraying of protesters with chemical irritants. He wrote that federal agents had faced increased threats and aggression, and that crowd control devices such as flash-bang grenades were important for officer protection. Easterwood 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.”
Protest leaders respond
Nekima Levy Armstrong, who participated in the protest and leads the grassroots civil rights organization Racial Justice Network, said the potential DOJ investigation was a sham and a distraction from federal agents’ actions in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Armstrong said she is also an ordained reverend.
“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,” Armstrong said. “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.”
Monique Cullars-Doty, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, said the DOJ 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.”
ICE issued a statement after the disruption. “Agitators aren’t just targeting our officers. Now they’re targeting churches, too,” the agency said. “They’re going from hotel to hotel, church to church, hunting for federal law enforcement who are risking their lives to protect Americans.”