DOJ and FBI arrest anti-ICE church-protest organizers under FACE Act and conspiracy statute

On January 22, 2026, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel announced federal charges against Minneapolis civil-rights organizer Nekima Levy Armstrong, St. Paul school-board member Chauntyll Allen, and at least one other person over a January 18 demonstration inside Cities Church in St. Paul. Protesters had entered a Sunday service chanting "ICE out" and "Justice for Renee Good" to confront a lay pastor at the church, David Easterwood, who also serves as acting director of the local U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office. Bondi said agents from Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI executed the arrests at her direction; the activists were charged under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and 18 U.S.C. § 241, the federal conspiracy-against-rights statute.

Levy Armstrong made her first appearance in federal court the same afternoon, where a magistrate judge rejected the government's request for a detention hearing and ordered her released, finding insufficient evidence to hold her. The arrests drew national attention, and Levy Armstrong later said the White House had circulated a digitally altered photo making her appear to be crying while handcuffed. The demonstration was one of a wave of protests across Minnesota following the fatal shooting of U.S. citizen Renee Good by an ICE agent earlier that month, amid a federal enforcement surge that placed thousands of immigration officers in the state.

These were the originating arrests in what became an escalating federal prosecution built around the Cities Church protest: a federal grand jury indicted independent journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon on January 30, and a February 27 superseding indictment expanded the case to 39 defendants. The Standing records this as the first act in that prosecution — the use of place-of-worship civil-rights statutes against the organizers of an anti-ICE demonstration, brought even after a judge found no basis to detain a lead defendant, where the charge itself functions as the punishment for protected protest.