Trump and ICE Turn Immigration Into Church-State Power Struggle

Minnesota Episcopal Bishop Craig Loya was 300 miles from home when he first heard the news that Renee Nicole Good had been fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. 

Inside a Benedictine monastery in Schuyler, Nebraska, Loya was gathered with a dozen of the Episcopal Church’s 150 or so U.S. bishops when the outside world broke in. Within hours, he issued a statement from the retreat, circulating safety guidance for congregations preparing for encounters with immigration officials, invoking the tyrant King Herod the Great as a symbol of state violence. “The Herods of the world, and their fear driven campaigns of terror, are ever with us,” he wrote.

Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three, was killed by ICE officer Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis after federal agents confronted her while she was in her vehicle. Local officials reported she was shot multiple times as she attempted to drive away. Her death was later classified as a homicide by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become the sharp edge of the administration’s immigration crackdown. The agency now commands more funding than any other U.S. law-enforcement agency, with tens of billions in new multiyear appropriations layered on top of its annual budget; an expansion of power that has coincided with a rise in violent and fatal encounters now drawing national scrutiny.

Congregations across the country, many of which often function as food distribution sites, legal referral hubs, and support centers for immigrant families, now find themselves in the immigration enforcement crosshairs after the Trump administration last year rescinded long-standing guidance discouraging immigration actions near places of worship.

Days after Good’s killing, at a rain-soaked vigil outside the New Hampshire Statehouse, fellow Bishop Rob Hirschfeld, who had been with Loya at the monastery, escalated his warning.

“We are now, I believe, entering … a new era of martyrdom,” Hirschfeld said. “I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire … to get their affairs in order, make sure they have their wills written. It may be time, not for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”

What Hirschfeld described is a strange, complex, and intensifying power struggle between American religion and the federal government — a clash between faith traditions built around care for the vulnerable and a state apparatus designed to target the vulnerable. Immigration, specifically, has become the point where those competing moral frameworks now collide, forcing a real-world test of the boundaries between church and state.

The Paradox of Trump’s Religious Liberty

Eleven days after the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, protestors disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul with chants of “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good.” 

The protest came amid heightened ICE presence in Minnesota following Good’s killing. It was directed in part at Pastor David Easterwood, who has been identified in court filings and news reports as the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s St. Paul field office. In October, Easterwood was seen alongside DHS Secretary Kristi Noem at a Minneapolis press conference. He is also named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed earlier this month by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which challenges the department’s enforcement practices and alleges constitutional violations tied to recent operations.

Days after the protest at Cities Church, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced federal agents had arrested three people in connection with the disruption: Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and ordained minister; Chauntyll Louisa Allen, a member of the St. Paul school board; and William Kelly, an activist. Federal officials say the three were accused of obstructing access to a house of worship, a violation of federal law.

Demonstrators say they were protesting ICE, but the Trump administration quickly framed the protest as a “coordinated attack” on the church itself. In a press release published Friday, DHS said Armstrong, Allen, and Kelly were facing federal charges “for their attack on churchgoers’ religious freedom,” referring to them as “ringleaders” of the “St. Paul Church Riots.”

That characterization was echoed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, the White House, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in a coordinated social-media response pledging to “protect our pastors” and “our houses of worship,” stating the United States was “settled and founded by people fleeing religious persecution.”

A judge has since ordered Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Louisa Allen, and William Kelly freed from federal custody. 

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration, increasingly aligned with Christian nationalism, has gone to bat for religion. But where they swing isn’t always consistent.

DHS last year rolled back long-standing “sensitive locations” protections they claim “the Biden-Harris Administration abused … to indiscriminately allow 1.5 million migrants to enter our country.” The protections, dating back as far as 2011, discouraged immigration enforcement in places of worship, declaring migrants would “no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches.” 

That reversal prompted swift lawsuits from multifaith coalitions, including Mennonite Church USA and multiple Christian and Jewish groups, arguing it turns houses of worship into potential enforcement zones. In a separate case brought by Quakers, Baptists, and Sikhs, a federal judge in Maryland issued a limited injunction barring ICE from carrying out warrantless enforcement actions in or near the plaintiffs’ houses of worship. The judge found that the administration’s rollback of longstanding “sensitive locations” guidance risked interfering with the groups’ ability to worship without fear.

Still, in recent months, the administration has taken a series of steps that draw religious institutions closer to federal power. The White House has revived and expanded its Faith Office shortly after Trump retook office last year, giving religious leaders a formal advisory role across multiple agencies. In September, Trump launched an “America Prays” initiative, announcing the move during a speech at the Museum of the Bible.

The Justice Department, meanwhile — which declined to comment for this story — has intervened in state and local disputes involving churches, framing such cases as threats to religious liberty. Last year, they intervened in Washington state after lawmakers passed legislation requiring clergy to report child abuse — even when learned in confession. The Trump DOJ effectively joined forces with the Catholic Church in opposing the law, helping pave the way for a federal judge to block the law before it could be enforced.

“The Justice Department will not sit idly by when States mount attacks on the free exercise of religion,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, arguing the law forced priests to choose between “their obligations” and “criminal consequences.” 

Last week, DHS issued a new rule easing visa return requirements for foreign-born religious workers, calling pastors, priests, nuns and rabbis “essential to the social and moral fabric” of the United States.

At the highest levels, the Trump administration has sought to integrate religious leadership into its broader political vision — so long as religion doesn’t interfere with its immigration crackdown.

Just one day before the protest at Cities Church in St. Paul, Border Patrol agents detained two Latino men outside the entrance of a small Christian church in Compton while a worship service was underway inside. The men had been painting the building when agents arrested them, according to a video posted online. Congregants halted the service and rushed outside, confronting the masked agents with cameras. “They’re coming into a place where we preach the word of God,” someone is overheard saying. 

At the same time, clashes between clergy and the state have escalated nationwide, with immigration emerging as the key flashpoint forcing religious leaders into open confrontation with federal power. As a result, religious institutions are responding as organized civic actors rather than moral commentators.

After the Good’s killing in Minneapolis and warnings from nearby New Hampshire, the Diocese of Maine has begun preparing clergy, convening prayer services, briefing pastors, and adjusting church ministries to help immigrant congregants. In Portland and Lewiston — both sanctuary cities with large African immigrant populations — churches are escorting people into food pantries, delivering supplies to families afraid to leave their homes, and coordinating with legal advocates as arrests mount. “ICE is here,” one diocesan official tells Rolling Stone.

In Minnesota last Friday, police arrested about 100 clergy members at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport after they staged a faith-protest against deportation flights. The demonstrators were later released with misdemeanor citations, according to the Associated Press. 

Similar confrontations have unfolded elsewhere.

Last June, the Rev. Tanya Lopez, senior pastor of Downey Memorial Christian Church in Los Angeles County, said masked immigration officers detained a man in the church parking lot and declined to show identification when she asked for proof they were federal agents. In September, a viral video showed the Rev. David Black, a First Presbyterian pastor, being struck in the head by a pepper ball during a protest outside an ICE facility near Chicago. Weeks later in Alameda, California, the Rev. Jorge Bautista, a United Church of Christ pastor, was struck in the face by what authorities described as a “pepper round” as officers cleared protesters blocking access to a U.S. Coast Guard base, according to Religion News Service. In November, at an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, at least seven faith leaders were arrested during a protest organizers said drew roughly 100 clergy and religious representatives opposing “Operation Midway Blitz,” a Chicago-area enforcement effort. Video from the scene showed police pulling the Rev. Michael Woolf, an American Baptist minister wearing a clerical collar, from the crowd and arresting him after allegedly forcing him to the ground.

But religious communities have begun to push back. 

The Catholic Diocese of San Diego has mobilized parish networks and interfaith partners to accompany immigrants during court hearings and ICE check-ins. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a rare warning denouncing “indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and “dehumanizing rhetoric and violence.” Even Pope Leo XIV has weighed in, calling the treatment of migrants in the United States “extremely disrespectful,” urging Catholics to reject dehumanizing rhetoric while insisting that immigration enforcement be carried out with dignity and humanity.

Bishop Rob Hirschfeld, the New Hampshire Episcopal bishop who urged clergy in his diocese to “get their affairs in order,” sees this moment as a crucial reckoning for a church long accustomed to moral authority without personal risk. 

“For generations, the church didn’t interfere…” he tells Rolling Stone. “We are a church full of intellectual, cultural, and social elites. We seem to have our hand on the levers of political power, economic power, and prestige. There was a sense of comfort that was allowing us to sleepwalk. To be blunt, it was like, ‘pick up your cross and relax.’” 

“I think that separation of church and state is weaker than it has been in a really long time,” says Rabbi David Segal, Policy Counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC), a watchdog for these kinds of issues. “You see a lot of clergy stepping out very publicly, saying this is a faith issue for us, that we are going to be on the front lines of this, that this is a threat both to our places of worship and also to our practice of religious freedom.”

It would seem that, under Trump, religion now finds itself in a paradox: welcomed as a source of power; punished as a practice of resistance.

‘A Fundamental Tension’ of American Identity 

Taken together, these confrontations suggest that the conflict unfolding between immigration enforcement and religious institutions is not only legal or political, but cultural at its core. That what is being contested is not simply policy, but competing visions of national identity, and the moral obligations that flow from it.

“I think what we have right now is a collision of interpretation; diffuse, separate and stark, differences in how we interpret Christianity. One is so clearly the god of Christian nationalism, and the other one is the God that’s going to show up with disreputable people, people who don’t look like me.” 

Segal puts the divide more bluntly.

“As we think about Christian nationalism, some people define it as the worship of power rather than the worship of God,” he says. “It uses the language and symbols of Christianity, but for political ends, to increase and shore up power for certain elements of society.”

That collision, he says, helps explain why immigration has become such a volatile fault line.

“Immigration is a flashpoint because it hits at a really fundamental tension about defining the story of what America is, and who it’s for,” Segal says. “Is it a nation of immigrants? Or is it a white Christian nation that needs to be protected within that identity from an onslaught of dangerous outsiders?” 

The consequences, Segal argues, extend beyond immigration policy into the basic practices of religious life in America. 

“It’s attacking fundamental social arrangements of how people show up for each other, pray together, and serve their neighbors. It’s a pretty basic repeated command in the Hebrew and Christian Bible to love the stranger, to welcome the stranger, and to love your neighbor. It’s not hard to make the argument that that is legitimately part of people’s religious practice.”  

But in today’s America, where loving the stranger has become a political act, the fight over immigration has become a proxy battle over whose moral vision will shape public life, and whose will be treated as a threat. 

Alex Ashley is a journalist and writer based in Los Angeles and Seattle. His reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, NPR, and other national outlets.