The US DOJ today charged an additional 30 people for their participation in a January protest at Cities Church, a christian nationalist church in #SaintPaul #Minnesota, whose pastor David Easterwood is also director of the local ICE office.

[riotmuffin@ni.hil.ist]

The US DOJ today charged an additional 30 people for their participation in a January protest at Cities Church, a christian nationalist church in #SaintPaul #Minnesota, whose pastor David Easterwood is also director of the local ICE office. This is the same protest for which protest leaders and journalists covering the event were previously charged.

This is going to be a dangerous case and important to fight and prevent the precedent the Trump admin wants to set. But it's also different than other recent high profile cases like Prairieland - this protest was organized and publicized by well known #Minneapolis celebrity activists (one of them, Nekima Levy Armstrong, is herself a Reverend and also has a history of communicating and cooperating with police at protests) and was mostly attended by liberal-progressive folks rather than radicals and anarchists.

While there is never any legitimate state repression and the defendants 100% deserve our maximum support, looking at the new indictment today as posted by @UnicornRiot demonstrates that this was not an action characterized an attention to good regular security culture practices - and this is something we can all learn from. (1/3)

PDF: https://media.unicornriot.ninja/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/superseding-indictment.pdf

[riotmuffin@ni.hil.ist]

(2/3 about #Minnesota Cities Church ICE protest federal charges)

While of course cops and prosecutors lie through their teeth, they do generally want to tell (their interpretation of) the truth when listing critical and dis/provable facts of their case. Reading the indictment (which now names 39 alleged co-conspirators), it's obvious that the DOJ is going to have to convince a judge and/or jury that actions which were otherwise completely legal - such attending a church service and chanting, holding signs, standing in an aisle, and practicing journalism - constitute a criminal "interference with religious freedom." No - literally zero - alleged acts are claimed by the DOJ to be illegal, outside of this "interfering with religious freedom" reach.

[riotmuffin@ni.hil.ist]

(3/3 about #Minnesota Cities Church ICE protest federal charges)

As for the facts alleged by the prosecution, we can see that the organizers of the protest (if these listed facts are true):

--Used unencrypted text messages to communicate details, including a video of critical planning
--Had internet searches related to the action saved on a cell phone
--Promoted the event (without exact details) via instagram and facebook, on which several people now charged also indicated their attendance
--And of course, the entire protest from the off-site briefing to the end of the event was livestreamed by the invited journalists.

I didn't have to watch some of that video to tell you that most of the protest attendees wore distinctive clothing, but no mask. While this fact, and the social media posts, likely contributed to the DOJ identifying nearly all of those in attendance, it also seems likely that there may have some surveillance happening not mentioned in the publicly available documents so far.

Again, these defendants absolutely 100% deserve out support - most of them came to a simple, fairly run of the mill protest not knowing what to expect, led by activists they (arguably should not have) trusted, and now are facing federal charges. But this action could have done differently and part of resisting state repression is learning from that.