The U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced Friday that federal prosecutors have added 30 defendants to a case stemming from a Jan. 18 protest inside Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where a pastor works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Bondi said in a post on social media that 25 people were in custody and that additional arrests would follow, as she described the charges as civil rights violations connected to the church disruption.
Prosecutors say the defendants face allegations involving religious freedom: conspiracy against religious freedom and interfering with the right of religious freedom. The protest drew swift condemnation from Trump administration officials and conservative leaders after demonstrators disrupted what was described as a Sunday service, after protesters learned that a church pastor also served as an ICE official.
Bondi’s announcement comes about a month after independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort and civil rights activist Nekima Levy Armstrong were charged for their alleged roles in the same protest. MSI previously reported that Don Lemon pleaded not guilty in that Minnesota church protest case. Lemon and Fort said they were at the church as journalists covering news, and Levy Armstrong was the subject of a doctored photo posted by the White House that showed her crying during her arrest. The three have pleaded not guilty.
A livestreamed video posted on Facebook shows people interrupting services at Cities Church on Jan. 18 by chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good,” a reference to the woman who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. Prosecutors’ new filing characterizes the incident as coordinated: it says the “agitators” entered the church in a “coordinated takeover-style attack” and engaged in acts of intimidation and obstruction.
The church’s lawyer, Doug Wardlow, praised the Justice Department’s move to charge additional defendants and said the case turns on constitutional boundaries. In a statement, Wardlow said the First Amendment does not give anyone, regardless of “profession, prominence, or politics,” a license to storm a church, intimidate, threaten, and terrorize families and children worshipping inside. He said the indictment revision also adds allegations beyond the original filing made in January.
Among the added allegations, prosecutors say two people “conducted reconnaissance” outside the church a day before the protest and recorded their visit on video, including a line attributed to one person: “My thoughts are to be able to close up this whole alleyway right here.” The filing also includes a quote attributed to a protester chanting inside the church: “This ain’t God’s house. This is the house of the devil.” Prosecutors further cite statements they say reflect fear and disruption during the service, including a description of young children left wondering whether their parents would die.
Trahern Crews, who was charged in January and is lead organizer of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, criticized the latest arrests. Crews said the new actions were a “waste of time,” adding that people who were killed by law enforcement had not been arrested while “peaceful protesters” were.
The protest took place during a period of heightened immigration enforcement in Minnesota. The cluster describes that the Trump administration sent thousands of federal officers for “Operation Metro Surge” after a series of public fraud cases in which many defendants had Somali roots, and that officers used tear gas for crowd control in neighborhood clashes with residents and detained people alongside immigrants. The case is linked in the reporting to the deaths of Renee Good, 37, who was shot in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, who was killed in another fatal shooting a week after the church protest.
Minneapolis’ own assessment in the cluster says it suffered an impact of $203 million from Operation Metro Surge, with tens of thousands of residents needing urgent relief assistance. The reporting also says roughly 400 ICE officers and Homeland Security agents were expected to remain in Minneapolis by early March, down from about 3,000 at the peak, and that the operation later wound down after leadership changes. Separately, a woman who attended the church service filed a lawsuit against some of those charged, alleging emotional trauma and an inability to exercise her religion that day.