#david easterwood

[onlytiktoks]

[itsmythang]

Civil rights lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong calls for Pastor David Easterwood to resign over his dual role as a religious leader and alleged acting ICE director in Minnesota.

"Someone help me understand how it's possible to hold both roles with integrity, with honor. Because the gospel that I believe in, the foundation says that we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The anti-ICE protest at a Minnesota church was a justified rebuke of the pastor's cruelty

A St. Paul church disruption exposed the moral bankruptcy of ICE, conservative Christianity, and right-wing media

Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist:

For months now, ICE has been going to churches to terrorize immigrants—or anyone they suspect deserves to be deported. They’ve arrested people on church property. A lawsuit against the agency said ICE goons “seized a man in front of a church near Los Angeles and brandished a rifle at a pastor in the process; detained a grandfather in the same city who was dropping his granddaughter off at a church school; arrested a man outside a church in Oregon; and carried out arrests on two Catholic parish properties in Montclair and Highland, California.” That’s why many pastors in immigrant-heavy areas have told worshipers to stay home rather than attend worship services. The Republican Party had made it virtually impossible for those church members to feel safe in their houses of worship. That’s also why a group of about three dozen activists in Minneapolis—where an ICE agent murdered an innocent woman, Renee Good, earlier this month—interrupted services at Southern Baptist-affiliated Cities Church in St. Paul on Sunday morning. They stepped into the building to yell “ICE out!” and “Justice for Renee Good!”

That’s not just a random church; that would have been pointless. This was a church that employs David Easterwood, the acting director of a local ICE field office, as a pastor. It was a peaceful protest that was organized by the Racial Justice Network, Black Lives Matter Minnesota, and Black Lives Matter Twin Cities. And what occurred inside the church is nothing compared to the actual harm that ICE agents have inflicted upon the city’s residents. But the same Department of Justice that refused to investigate ICE agent Jonathan Ross, despite mountains of evidence of his crimes, is now pretending the church protest was the gravest possible sin.

[...] (The right-wing mob is furious that former CNN anchor Don Lemon was aware of the protest in advance and documented it online. Naturally, they also want his head on a platter.) The protesters didn’t desecrate a house of worship by demanding justice and peace for the people in their community. Easterwood desecrated it when he decided threatening immigrants with deportation was an extension of his faith. The people in that church were far better served listening to the protesters than anything they would have heard from the pulpit. As one Reddit user noted, another word for what the protesters did is “prophecy” because they spoke “the truth of God… to the people of God who need a corrective word.” There are going to be critics who say this was not strategic. That it plays into the right-wing persecution complex. That it fuels a narrative in conservative media that protesters are against Christianity. But if you know anything about right-wing media, you know that those narratives were written long before anything happened. They will use anything to justify the story they want to push no matter how insignificant it is.

The Christians in that church dealt with a minor inconvenience. It’s nothing compared to the horror that’s been inflicted on the entire lives of people in that community, in part because a pastor at that church is personally leading a group of law-breaking, armed, government-backed mercenaries. [...] If protests are forbidden in houses of worship, then surely ICE raids on church property are illegal, too, but that obvious hypocrisy wasn’t addressed by the Trump administration. Neither was the fact that this ICE leader who has a side gig as a Christian pastor has no business telling others how to lead a moral life.

[...] The protest inside the church ended after about 20 minutes, but the Trump administration, in an effort to distract from their own incompetence and cruelty, is now using the incident as proof that even more Trump-aligned agents need to pour into the city. But make no mistake: This wasn’t some attack on Christianity. This wasn’t an attack by the godless. This was a protest against cruelty and plenty of Christians participated and endorsed it. One local Lutheran minister wrote online, “You cannot worship a Savior on Sunday who was crucified by a violent State, while the rest of the week acting as a violent agent of an unjust state force who is killing and targeting Americans according to hate.” That’s why it’s deeply ironic that the president of the SBC’s North American Mission Board promised to “provide protection” for their churches if Minnesota leaders “won’t contain lawlessness.” The lawlessness is coming from inside the SBC church, sanctioned by people like Easterbrook, not from the Christians and allies trying to help the “least of these.” That doesn’t mean the protesters won’t be charged with something, though. The Department of Justice says the protesters violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) which protects access to places of religious worship. But that law bans anyone from obstructing, desecrating, or preventing access to houses of worship. The protesters didn’t do any of those things. They came inside and chanted their slogans… then left. (Keep in mind that right-wing protesters have done exactly that to LGBTQ-affirming churches without any complaints from the Justice Department.)

The anti-ICE protest at SBC-affiliated Cities Church in St. Paul, MN is morally justified due to the fact that David Easterwood, who is one of the church’s pastors, is an acting ICE field director. It is also justified due to ICE terrorizing congregants at places of worship across America.

[tearsofrefugees]

DOJ investigating after protesters disrupt service at St. Paul church where ICE field director is pastor

"Any violation of federal law will be prosecuted," Attorney General Bondi posted in an online response.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

A Kentucky church was the target of actual violence in 2020. Trump's DOJ did nothing.

If you needed hard evidence the DOJ's heavy-handed response to the church protesters in Minnesota was politically motivated, this should cli

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:

Two weeks ago, the Sunday service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, was upended by a group of protesters opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s heavy-handed crackdown in the Twin Cities. Specifically, they were upset that one of Cities Church’s pastors, David Easterwood, doubled as a field director for ICE in the Twin Cities. In almost no time at all, Donald Trump’s White House went into DEFCON 1. The head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, claimed the protesters were “interfering with Christian worshippers.” Three of the protesters, including Black Lives Matter activist and ordained minister Nekima Levy Armstrong, were arrested on Jan. 22 for violating the FACE Act, a federal law that bars physical force that interferes with access to abortion clinics and places of worship. Dhillon’s boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, thundered on Twitter, “Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Armstrong and friends would answer for orchestrating “the Church Riots in St. Paul, Minnesota.” A week later, after a magistrate judge and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ixnayed a criminal complaint against CNN host-turned independent journalist Don Lemon for covering the protest, Bondi took the unusual step of empaneling a grand jury to indict him. Stanford Law professor Matthew Seligman told Greg Sargent of The New Republic that having a grand jury indict someone after having an arrest warrant rejected by a judge is “highly irregular.” Had Bondi been “faithful to the law and the facts,” Seligman said, she would have let the matter drop. The fact that she didn’t, to his mind, suggests “a politically motivated prosecution.”

Lest you think this is hyperbole, the chief judge of the United States District Court in Minnesota, Bush 43 appointee Patrick Schiltz, took the unusual step of writing a letter to the Eighth Circuit saying that there was “no evidence” Lemon committed a crime, and that the government’s claims that the government’s rationale for urgent action “makes no sense.” Translation—to Schlitz’ mind, the government had no case at all. All things considered, I can only agree with Sargent—Lemon’s arrest has nothing to do with protecting the sanctity of freedom of worship and everything to do with an effort to “excite and titillate Trump and MAGA.”

[...] But to my mind, the strongest evidence that this is politically motivated comes not from something that Trump’s White House did, but what it didn’t do. Back in 2020, during the peak of the initial COVID surge, an incident took place in Kentucky that was far, far more egregious than anything that happened in St. Paul. And yet, in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, the Trump 1.0 Justice Department did absolutely nothing.

On Easter Sunday 2020, a number of churches around the country decided to throw their doors open for in-person services. They did so in defiance of a litany of stay-at-home orders and bans on mass gatherings that had mushroomed within a few days in late March and early April. More importantly, they did so in defiance of common sense and common human decency. By this time, the science and anecdotal evidence had put it beyond doubt. Even if you took every conceivable precaution, the virus was spreading so fast that large gatherings of any sort were reckless at this point. But none of that mattered to Jack Roberts, pastor of Maryville Baptist Church in Hillview, Kentucky, a suburb of Louisville. Roberts had vowed that he would sooner go to jail than shut down his independent KJV-only church. Never mind that by then, a number of superspreaders could be traced to the doors of churches, including at least two in Kentucky. True to his word, he held a full schedule of in-person services, with people coming from other states to attend. Never mind that Gov. Andy Beshear had made clear that anyone taking part in an indoor mass gathering on Easter weekend would have to self-quarantine for 14 days. Never mind that Beshear had pleaded with him to change course and only have outdoor services. And never mind that the Bullitt County health department had ordered him to shut down in-person services immediately. Once Beshear got wind that Maryville was having in-person church, he dispatched Kentucky state troopers to take down license plate numbers and forward them to county health departments. In hopes of throwing them off the scent, quite a few worshippers covered their license plates. Roberts was one of them. As bad as this was, how somebody—or a whole lot of somebodies—responded to this blatant disregard for public safety was far worse. When Roberts pulled into Maryville’s parking lot, he discovered nails, tacks, and screws scattered around the parking lot. While the nails were clearly visible as the sun rose, they were swept up by the time Sunday school began.

[...] There is one important difference, though. Whatever quibbles you may have about their tactics, Armstrong and her colleagues did not abandon the way of peace. The people who scattered nails in the Maryville Baptist parking lot indisputably did. For that reason, I thought that within days, there would be an investigation, and the people who did this would be tracked down. But unless I missed something, this faded into the ether. Contrast this with the heavy-handed response to Armstrong, Lemon, and friends. Chanting merits shock and awe, but scattering nails in a parking lot gets crickets. This does not compute—at least not in a normal world. It’s more than valid to question the state level response (or lack thereof) to what happened at Maryville Baptist. After all, one would think that people who find it acceptable to scatter nails in a parking lot are not the kind of people you can leave out there. But the silence at the federal level is particularly deafening compared to the response to Cities Church. I have to wonder—is Trump using this to try to dunk on one of his biggest gadflies in this saga, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz? It’s hard not to conclude that’s the case, especially when you throw in the highly unusual way Lemon was indicted.

Maryville Baptist Church in Hillview, Kentucky was subjected to an act of violence that was worth of a DOJ investigation back in 2020.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

ICE crossed the line in Minnesota—not the people who stormed a church

You can question the protesters’ tactics, but they were responding to blatant provocation by ICE.

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:

Let’s be clear. Roughly 99 percent of the time, interrupting a worship service, regardless of the religious tradition, is not acceptable. It’s inappropriate at best and a pogrom at worst. It initially appeared that what happened at the Sunday service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, was firmly in the former category. Near the tail end of the service, activists from the Racial Justice Network and Black Lives Matter Minnesota poured into the sanctuary in hopes of confronting one of the pastors, David Easterwood. They had unearthed evidence that he was the head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in the Twin Cities. ICE has been under fire for heavy-handed enforcement actions in the area, some of which cross the line into illegal and inhumane conduct. For instance, a Border Patrol agent was recently seen putting his knee on a man’s face—the very same manner in which George Floyd was murdered. Around the same time, a federal judge tore into ICE for seizing a Liberian refugee even though he was complying with an order to check in with immigration authorities.

The protesters have faced sharp criticism, with the critics arguing that whatever their grievances were with Easterwood, it was not acceptable to interrupt a worship service. In response, one of the leaders of the protest, Nekima Levy Armstrong, an ordained minister, has argued that it is grossly inappropriate for someone overseeing the kind of tactics ICE has used to be a pastor. At first, I was inclined to believe that Armstrong and her colleagues were in the wrong. As anyone who has known me for any period of time knows, I have a subversive streak that has only faded slightly with age. But at the outset, I thought this was a bridge too far. Initially, I wondered why they didn’t crash Cities Church’s switchboard or inbox, or make him (in)famous by plastering his picture alongside his ICE profile on social media and on the streets. That I would have had no problem with those tactics tells you how far I’m willing to go. After all, you’re talking to someone who burrowed into a hypercharismatic campus ministry to get evidence that they were deceiving people. But disrupting a church service? At first glance, I thought all that did was piss off normies.

But my calculus was dramatically altered when I learned about an incident that may be ICE’s most outrageous stunt since the start of its present surge in Minnesota, or at least the most outrageous since the death of Renee Good. Sometime after the service, a brace of ICE agents barreled into the St. Paul home of ChongLy “Scott” Thao and hauled him out. Thao, a Hmong from Laos who is a naturalized American citizen, was wearing only boxers and Crocs, and had a blanket draped over him despite temperatures that were bitterly cold even by Minnesota standards. The high that day was only 14 degrees. The 56-year-old Thao recalled that his daughter-in-law told him ICE was at the door. He went to see what was going on and found several ICE agents with guns drawn. They quickly cuffed him. According to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security, ICE was looking for a pair of sex offenders at Thao’s address, and Thao refused to provide his ID when they asked for it. But Thao claims they only asked for his ID after they cuffed him. In a statement, the Thao family adamantly denies knowing the suspected perverts ICE was targeting

Thao also says his granddaughter offered to give the agents his ID, “but they don’t want to see it no more.” They then hustled him out, with only his grandson’s blanket as cover. It was only after they photographed and fingerprinted him that they realized he was a citizen that they let him go several hours later. Thao fled to this country with his parents in 1974, during the latter stages of the Laotian civil war. They barely escaped the Communists taking over the country a year later. It’s hard to blame him for being shaken up. According to St. Paul mayor Kaohly Her, the Thaos have lived in that house for two years, and the suspected sex offender “does not live there anymore.” Her, a longtime family friend of the Thaos, was “livid” that ICE would treat the Thaos this way. This hit home personally for Her as well. She is a Hmong herself; she was born in a refugee camp and came to this country in 1977, two years after the Communist takeover. However, it says a lot that ICE’s failure to conduct basic vetting isn’t even the most outrageous part of this story. Even if you accept ICE’s account, there is no defending how Thao was treated. Dragging someone out of their house in only underwear and sandals is cruel and degrading. Doing this to someone in a Minnesota winter borders on reckless endangerment. Even if Thao didn’t identify himself, he still had a right to be treated with basic human dignity. The fact that ICE did this to a U. S. citizen makes it exponentially more outrageous. And yet, in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, ICE and DHS have not even tried to apologize to Thao.

This incident alone proves that the environment created during the ICE surge in Minnesota is intolerable. Even if you’re an immigration hardliner, you should not be okay with ICE acting in a manner that appears devoid of basic humanity. As we have learned time and again in cases of local cops betraying their badges, depraved and inhuman conduct like this doesn’t happen unless someone fosters an environment that makes it possible. But as if we needed any convincing, another outrage happened in nearby Columbia Heights on Tuesday. When Adrian Alexander Conejo Ramos brought his five-year-old son, Liam home from school that afternoon, masked ICE agents swooped in and took them into custody. The father fled, but was quickly chased down. According to Columbia Heights superintendent of schools Zena Stenvik, after the agents caught Adrian, the agents ignored another adult’s request to let them care for Liam. Instead, the agents asked Liam to knock on the door to see if anyone else was home—as she put it, “using a five-year-old as bait.”

[...] All things considered, Easterwood and Cities Church have a lot of explaining to do, and in short order. To be sure, Armstrong and her friends could have found a less drastic way to get that explanation. Crash the church’s voicemail and inbox, plaster Easterwood’s photo from the church Website next to his ICE profile and make him (in)famous. In my view, a pastor whose day job is working for ICE while these abuses are happening is almost as egregious as a pastor who is either a sexual predator or coddling a sexual predator. But showing up at his church in hopes of confronting him? Unless they tried other ways to engage him to no avail, the only way this should even be considered is as an absolute last resort. For most of this week, the right has condemned the protesters in some pretty stark terms. The protesters have been condemned as evil, as a mob. The rhetoric really ramped up when Armstrong and some of her colleagues were arrested on Thursday. In announcing the arrests, Attorney General Pam Bondi thundered on Twitter, “Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Armstrong would face justice for orchestrating “the Church Riots in St. Paul, Minnesota.” It didn’t take long for the marching orders to flow to Capitol Hill. For instance, Congressman Keith Self of Texas likened Armstrong and the protesters to Hamas livestreaming their initial attack on Israel almost three years ago. So let’s see if we’ve got this right. Our leaders are more outraged over people disrupting a service than a man being dragged out of his house in the cold in only his underwear, or a five-year-old boy being used to lure his relatives out of their house? What’s wrong with this picture? A lot, to put it mildly.

[...] That is how I see this situation at Cities Church. It’s more than valid to question whether Armstrong could have found a less extreme way to hold Easterwood to account. But she was not the one responsible for the provocation. She was responding to provocation caused by ICE. A bright line was crossed. But it wasn’t by those who entered that church. It was by an agency that, under Trump, has engaged in conduct that breaks the law, the Constitution, and every standard of common decency that is known.

Darrell Lucus is 100% correct on the Cities Church protest in St. Paul, MN last Sunday: ICE, not those storming the church, were in the wrong.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Don Lemon Responds After Being Put 'on Notice' By Trump DOJ Following Minneapolis Church Protest

Don Lemon has been threatened with legal action by Donald Trump's Department of Justice following a protest at a Minneapolis church on Jan.

Meredith Kile at People:

Don Lemon has responded after being put "on notice" by President Donald Trump's Department of Justice. On Sunday, Jan. 18, the independent journalist shared video footage from Cities Church in Minneapolis, during which demonstrators interrupted a service in protest of David Easterwood, a pastor and local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. “This is what the First Amendment is about, the freedom to protest,” Lemon, 59, told viewers. “I’m sure people here don’t like it, but protests are not comfortable.” That video went viral, with online critics accusing Lemon of instigating or organizing the protest. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon posted to X about Lemon's involvement, writing, "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! Nor does the First Amendment protect your pseudo-journalism of disrupting a prayer service. You are on notice!"

Dhillon, 57, then appeared on The Benny Johnson Show on Monday, Jan. 19, where she threatened to invoke multiple different acts to prosecute Lemon and other protestors. One, the FACE Act, protects against attacks or intimidation against people "lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship." Another, the Ku Klux Klan Act, also known as the Enforcement Act of 1871, makes it a crime to deny any group or individual of "any of the rights, privileges, or immunities, or protection, named in the Constitution." The act, which was created in reaction to post-Civil War attacks by the infamously violent hate group, gives the president broad authority to enforce it, including deploying federal troops and suspending habeas corpus.

The DOJ’s attempt to investigate former CNN anchor Don Lemon over his reporting on the Cities Church protest in St. Paul, MN is an anti-American farce.

[cinemaocd]

OK so we know about Julie Li, the ICE attorney who melted down in court. So you know she kept telling her bosses that they were in violation of court orders when they kept ignoring her when she would come and tell them people who shouldn't have been stopped, let alone arrested, should be released IMMEDIATELY.

Guess who her immediate boss is?

This guy:

David Easterwood, "acting Field Office Director" is also the Rev. Easterwood, the pastor who was the focus of anti ICE protests at his church.

So according to the transcripts of the Li meltdown, this man has ignored many Federal Court orders and is the person who should be dragged into court to provide documentation about why the orders were violated or be in contempt of court.

The church by the way, is the Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention and is standing by him and pushing the "sanctity of Worship" law, being critical of Tim Waltz for not bending the knee to them.

THis church lists as their number one mission as Church Planting, which specifically targets immigrant communities to try to heal their "spiritual lostness" and encourage the formation of Baptist churches in their community. They are very open about the various communities in which they are active. How in the WORLD is someone who is a pastor for this church also working for immigration enforcement at this level. In this exact place where they are abducting members of the various communities that this church is TARGETING for expansion...

Here's my script for contacting the Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention:

Hello, I'm a resident of Minnesota and I'm concerned that your church is protecting a man who has repeatedly violated Federal Court orders in his position as Acting Field Office Director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. A federal judge has characterized his actions as "unlawful" and "unconstitutional." In other words, you are harboring a criminal. I'm also concerned that with your church's stated missions in MN and WI immigrant communities, the very places targeted by Rev. Easterwood's employers, that church records could be used to locate potential targets for ICE enforcement or to pressure immigrants into joining the church out of fear of retribution.

Dr. Trey Turner, Executive Director Email: [email protected] Phone: [phone]