After federal agents shot and killed two people observing federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota, many across the country started looking for ways to express solidarity with those peacefully resisting the surge of violent government intervention in the Twin Cities. As the local movement continues to grow, national interest in providing support is growing along with it.
As activists, organizers, and everyday citizens mobilize to protect their neighbors, Sojourners asked Minnesota faith leaders how those outside the state can offer support with time, resources, and spiritual practices.
What does it mean to bear witness? This past Friday, bearing witness felt close to frostbite. It meant weathering subzero temperatures in Minneapolis, with an even colder windchill biting my face. My body braced against the bitter cold, but my spirit was on fire. Along with hundreds of other faith leaders from around the country, I’d dropped everything to respond to a call from the city’s clergy to see firsthand how the administration’s increasingly aggressive and unlawful mass deportation efforts were impacting their community.
Clergy who arrived on Thursday attended trainings from a local interfaith group and monitored neighborhoods for signs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. On Friday, I joined an interfaith prayer service at Temple Israel while ISAIAH, a different local organizing group, led nearly a hundred faith leaders in civil disobedience against airlines that contract with ICE. We later joined tens of thousands of people in the ICE OUT of Minnesota march and a general strike supported by Minnesota unions, progressive faith leaders and community activists. I was inspired to see nearly the entire city—schools, restaurants, businesses—closed down in solidarity with the protests. One of my favorite signs, made by the Minneapolis group Multifaith Antiracism, Change & Healing, echoed Micah 6:8: “Do justice, Love mercy, Get ICE Out.”
2025 was hard. For more reasons than we can count, the collective, personal, social, and systemic weight of tragedy, death, frustration, and hopelessness has left many weary in the dawning light of this new year—at least, I feel weary. Already in 2026, we have witnessed a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent needlessly kill Renee Nicole Macklin Good. In Venezuela, the U.S. engages in an imperial war and openly admits its intentions to occupy the country. I cannot bear another year of genocide, ICE raids, complacent and inactive leaders, artificial intelligence deepfakes, social media toxicity, and trying to convince people that fascism is wrong.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the newest installment in a horror franchise that continues to demonstrate how gut-wrenching terror can invite viewers to ponder questions about politics and human nature. The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta and currently playing in theaters, will certainly make you scream your guts out, but it will also invite you to consider: What is my ultimate concern?
For those who have seen the previous three films, some of these questions will be familiar territory: Will humanity’s violence ultimately lead to a societal and environmental collapse? What does it mean to be human? Why do some humans label others as “non-humans”? But The Bone Temple is asking new questions, a lot of them revolving around spirituality and whether there is ultimately a benevolent (or malevolent) deity. Previous movies in this series—especially 28 Years Later (2025), which preceded The Bone Temple—gestured toward religion, but DaCosta’s installment puts religion front and center, and then turns things up to 11.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Thursday morning that the FBI had arrested at least two leaders of a demonstration inside Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., protesting one of the church’s pastors works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The FBI arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights lawyer and activist in the Twin Cities, and Chauntyll Louisa Allen, a community organizer and schoolboard member, according to Bondi’s posts on X. Bondi called Levy Armstrong a key organizer of the “coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.”
“WE WILL PROTECT OUR HOUSES OF WORSHIP,” Bondi wrote, adding a prayer hands emoji.
Last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt threw a performative tantrum when asked about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis. During a lengthy and frankly exhausting tirade in which she berated The Hill reporter Niall Stanage as “a leftwing hack,” Leavitt unloaded with some rhetoric about the crimes of undocumented immigrants.
“I bet you never even read about Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray or all of the innocent Americans who were killed at the hand of illegal aliens in this country,” she said. “And the brave men and women of ICE are doing everything in their power to remove those heinous individuals and make our communities safer.”
Clergy and labor leaders in Minnesota are calling for a “Day of Truth and Freedom” on Jan. 23, during which Minnesotans do not shop, work, or go to school. The “pause,” leaders say, is intended to highlight the ongoing violence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the state. “What is happening here in Minnesota is a horror that we’re living through, but we’ve been organizing in preparation,” said Minister JaNaé Bates, co-executive director of ISAIAH, a faith-based collective organizing the day’s events. “It’s not completely a shock.”
An ICE agent’s Jan. 7 shooting of unarmed mother Renee Nicole Macklin Good has become a flashpoint that sparked protests around the country. Bates said the federal agency has been escalating aggression in the Twin Cities for months. On Jan. 18, CBS News reported that there were 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents deployed in Minneapolis—five times the size of the city’s police force—making it the nation’s largest ever deployment of immigration officials. Bates said that as the community has resisted ICE’s presence through patrols, social media awareness campaigns, mutual aid networks, and accompaniment of immigrants to work and school, the Trump administration has escalated retaliatory pressure, threatening to send active-duty Army troops. On Jan. 9, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins notified Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey that her department would suspend $120 million in food assistance funds to the state, giving it less than a week to produce proof that it had not committed widespread fraud.
Faith-based refugee resettlement organizations are raising alarms that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is detaining lawfully resettled refugees in Minnesota, in an operation one resettlement official called “shameful and unpatriotic.”
“This is a five-alarm fire,” Myal Greene, president and CEO of World Relief, said in a press release. “These are not the ‘worst of the worst;’ these are innocent children and families who fled the worst wars and persecution imaginable, who were invited by the American people to become Americans under the terms of American law.
2025 was a banner year for movies nestled at the intersection of faith and justice. Many of those films that Sojourners authors covered, from Sinners to One Battle After Another to KPop Demon Hunters, will continue to be in the cultural conversation this year, especially with the Academy Awards looming.
Below is a list of films that Sojourners can’t wait to watch this year. It is by no means exhaustive; as excited as I am for The Mummy and Supergirl, for instance, I won’t know if those blockbusters have a faith angle until they hit the screen. You never know, Supergirl’s terrier Krypto might turn out to be a caped Christian pacifist. What follows, then, isn’t a catalogue of certainties, but a watchlist shaped by hope, curiosity, and the expectation that questions of faith and justice will keep finding their way onto the big screen—sometimes from the most unexpected places.
In the days after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, her final words clung to me.
“I’m not mad at you,” she said. Her eyes were earnest.