Faith leaders thought their collars would protect them. They were wrong.
The Presbyterian minister was wearing his collar. Department of Homeland Security agents shot him in the head with pepper balls anyway. The Unitarian pastor arrived at the scene in clerical dress. Federal officers fired rounds near her head within the hour. Across American cities, clergy are learning what happens when the moral authority they’ve relied on for generations simply stops working.
Faith-based resistance to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda started on Day 1 — Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon at the National Cathedral. But as Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations intensified through Los Angeles, D.C., Chicago and now Minneapolis, the organizing evolved. Rapid response networks. ICE observer trainings. Whistle brigades. Tactics shared between cities. In Minneapolis, where DHS deployed nearly 3,000 agents — close to double the city’s police force — you can’t drive through certain neighborhoods without encountering both federal presence and religious pushback.
But clergy collars aren’t de-escalating anymore. DHS mocks its religious critics on social media, calls them “imbecilic morons” and keeps advancing. Reporter Jack Jenkins has been on the ground watching one of the largest faith-based organizing movements in modern American history collide with federal power that refuses to recognize the old rules.
Pastors are still patrolling. Churches are still training volunteers. The resistance is growing more sophisticated by the week. But the fundamental premise — that religious leaders carry a kind of protective moral weight — has cracked open. What do faith communities do when their authority becomes irrelevant?
