With apologies to the famous poem by Martin Niemoller, no American Jew wants to find themselves writing, “First they came for the Minnesota Baptists, and I did not speak out – because I was a Jewish-American, not a Baptist,” in 2026. Yet, why should a protest last Sunday at a midwestern Baptist Church be a pre-eminent Jewish concern?
As was widely reported over the Martin Luther King Day weekend in the United States, while parishioners filled the pews at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, for their weekly prayer service, a group of anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protestors burst into the house of worship, screaming slogans and parading through the aisles to the shock of its congregants.
Cities Church does not bill itself as a political space – rather as a Baptist-aligned, Bible-driven community committed to (as its website exhorts) “Worshiping Jesus. Loving one another. Seeking the good of the cities.”
Each week, it follows the same five-part liturgy that combines prayer, song, witness, sermonizing, confession of sin, and communion, but this Sunday morning in January was different.
As anti-ICE demonstrators, followed by former CNN anchor Don Lemon (who claimed to be performing a different kind of holy witness, as a journalist), interrupted the service, chanting, “ICE Out!” and “Justice for Renee Good!”
The apparent target (although it wasn’t clear if he was actually present that morning) was Pastor David Easterwood, one of eight church leaders, who has been identified as the Acting Director of the ICE St. Paul Office.
Tensions had been building for weeks as the Twin Cities emerged as the epicentre of two major immigration-adjacent scandals – the shooting of Good in her vehicle by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in a confrontation over Operation Metro Surge (which has detained some 3,000 undocumented immigrants in that state alone) and a massive fraud scandal involving the large Somali immigrant community.
Since the murder of George Floyd at the hands of White police touched off a national firestorm in 2020, Minneapolis-St. Paul has become the symbol of a larger culture war between MAGA policies and progressive values.
But the spill-over into the sanctuary of Cities Church marks a new phase of this confrontation.
Cellphone video from the event portrayed flabbergasted (even fearful) congregants, as the presiding pastor was asked on camera: “How do you claim to be a pastor of God and be involved in evil in our community,” and “Would Jesus be understanding it?”
For their part, church leaders later responded that the identification of Easterwood was a case of “doxxing” and the interruption of the prayer service a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protections of free exercise of religion and peaceable assembly.
Protestors retorted that it was their First Amendment right to freedom of speech that was being violated and that the church was complicit in ICE crimes.
Perhaps not helping matters, the Trump administration immediately intervened by launching investigations and threatening sanctions, including naming Don Lemon, a Black man, as “on notice” for his abrogation of the Ku Klux Klan Act on Martin Luther King Day.
So why is what happened in a Baptist Church in Minnesota a Jewish issue?
Just in the first two weeks of January 2026 in the United States, a synagogue was firebombed in Jackson, Mississippi, protestors chanted, “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here!” outside a real estate fair at the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills synagogue in Queens as the NYPD passively looked on (New York Governor Kathy Hochul has now promised a 25-foot buffer zone, as if all Jews want is that antisemites chant for terror from across the street), a San Diego Rabbi was disinvited from a Martin Luther King Day event for being a Zionist, and six synagogues were targeted by a false bomb threats at “your kike institution” on New Year’s Day.
Perhaps it’s hard for many liberal American Jews to feel a sense of shared destiny with midwestern Baptists witnessing Jesus on a Sunday morning. In fact, they may feel more solidarity with the anti-ICE protestors – after all, many of our ancestors came to the United States as immigrants, although mostly legally. The killing of Renee Good might bring back old ghosts from the old country.
But what happens in a Baptist church in the Midwest doesn’t stay in a Baptist church in the Midwest. American Jews can’t only ally themselves with faith communities that are familiar and fall within their comfort zone. But if we don’t speak out for the Baptists, will anyone be left to stand up for Jewish Americans in 2026 and beyond?
Dr. Sara Yael Hirschhorn is a fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and Senior Researcher at the Comper Center for Antisemitism Studies and Lecturer in the Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies at the University of Haifa.