Last week, a woman and two others, who may have had sincere intentions, when they stood up in a church to protest the fact that the pastor of the church was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, were arrested by federal agents for doing so. The woman claimed they were nonviolently protesting in the grand tradition of America’s Civil Rights Movement; the federal agents claim they were violently usurping other people’s constitutional rights. But before deciding the rightness or wrongness of their protest, there’s another question which must be answered first!!!
Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Louisa Allen, and William Kelly were arrested for standing up and interrupting a Sunday church service at St. Paul, Minnesota’s Cities Church, chanting “ICE out and David Easterwood out now”. The leader of the protest, Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney, said the purpose of the protest was to both draw attention to ICE agent David Easterwood, one of the Cities Church pastors, and to challenge Cities Church members on the morality of having an ICE agent as one of their pastors.
According to Ms. Armstrong, when she discovered that the David Easterwood, who was one of the ICE agents named in a lawsuit alleging racial profiling, and one of the people standing next to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at an October news conference about the ICE arrest operations in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul areas, is the same David Easterwood who is an assistant pastor at Cities Church with a sermon delivered at Cities Church posted on YouTube, she was compelled to raise awareness among the congregation of Mr. Easterwood’s involvement in the immigration crackdown.
As justification for protesting inside the church and interrupting the service, Armstrong said, “To have someone in the role of a pastor also being in that role as an overseer is unconscionable. Jesus called out religious leaders for their hypocrisy, that’s part of our duty as Christians”. She purposely conducted her church service protest on the Sunday preceding the Monday King Holiday, in an attempt to link her protest to the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. Before I explain why Armstrong’s church service protest in no way reflected any link to the principles and rules of the Civil Rights Movement’s Kingian nonviolent protesting, there is a principle in the legal profession known as standing, which, in the case of Armstrong’s church service protest, must first be addressed.
The legal principle of standing means a party must have a direct personal stake and demonstrate a concrete injury caused by the action or law; they’re challenging in order to have the legal right to bring a lawsuit in court.
In terms of Armstrong’s church service protest, what standing does Armstrong or any other non-Cities Church member have to question who Cities Church decides to hire as one of their pastors??? Churches are private institutions that have the American constitutional right to dictate their own principles, rules, and operating procedures free of any government regulation or oversight (separation of church and state), as long as those principles, rules, and operating procedures do not interfere with or prohibit the constitutional rights of another individual or institution.
Armstrong’s Minneapolis citizenship does not require her to attend Cities Church, nor do any of the Minneapolis taxes she pays flow to Cities Church, Cities Church does not provide money to the federal government to fund the duties one of its pastors performs for ICE when he’s not pastoring at Cities Church, Cities Church has no role in deciding who is hired as an ICE agent, it is not Armstrong’s civil or human right for every church in Minnesota to employ a pastor that meets Armstrong’s approval, and Armstrong herself is not a member of Cities Church therefore, she definitely has no standing to protest on the private property of Cities Church, inside or outside, and very weak standing to even protest outside on the public property in front of Cities Church.
As a PK who descends from five generations of male and female Baptist theologians, I agree with Armstrong’s opinion that mainstream Christian values are in conflict with the way ICE is conducting itself in Minneapolis and St. Paul. I support her right to protest the way ICE is conducting itself, using Kingian nonviolent protest practices, with emphasis on Kingian nonviolent practices, because the protest practices Armstrong engaged in with her church service protest were an example of non-physical, verbal violence protesting, not strategic Kingian nonviolent protesting.
Putting aside the fact that Armstrong’s choice to protest inside the church made no strategic sense because, as a non-church member, she lacked legitimate standing to protest there, a fact which attracted negative, unsympathetic attention to her protest cause, as opposed to an appropriate protest location (ICE headquarters), which would have attracted positive, sympathetic attention to her protest cause. Armstrong’s choice to protest inside the church defeated the other rationale a nonviolent protestor has for intentionally placing themselves in a position to provoke and offer no resistance to being arrested. The other rationale for a nonviolent protester to intentionally provoke being arrested is to place their protest grievance before a court of law for redress.
Since Ms. Armstrong strategically chose the wrong protest location, her protest cause, a Cities Church pastor, who is also an ICE agent, is alleged to be guilty of racial profiling, will never see the light of day in her case.
Because Armstrong is charged with a single count of conspiracy against constitutional rights, in other words, Armstrong is being charged with trespassing on the church’s private property with the intent to disrupt or prevent people, who were not trespassing on the church’s private property, from exercising their constitutional right to conduct a church service uninterrupted by anyone who has no right to be present during the service. If and when Armstrong’s attorney tries to raise the issue of Cities Church pastor David Easterwood being an ICE agent as a defense, for Armstrong’s protest during the service, the judge presiding over the case will disallow it as a defense, based on the legal logic that Easterwood’s employment status or whoever the church employs is irrelevant, to the legal issue of whether a non-church member has the right to enter Cities Church’s private property and interrupt its church service.
Had Armstrong strategically chosen to nonviolently verbally protest, on public property, in front of Cities Church (meaning their chants of “ICE out and David Easterwood out now” would be loud enough to hear outside but not loud enough to disrupt the church service inside), a legitimate defense, that would be allowed by a judge presiding over her case, to any charge against Armstrong would be her American constitutional right to protest on public property her dissatisfaction with the fact that Cities Church has an ICE agent as one of its pastors.
Armstrong frequently says in news interviews, “all this is being done over a nonviolent protest”. Armstrong is wrong; her protest was very violent. Absence of physical altercations does not make a protest nonviolent. According to the philosophy of Kingian nonviolent protesting, any protestor physically preventing anyone’s program, speaking words of violence to a person, speaking words of nonviolence loud enough to prevent an activity or program from proceeding, or committing property damage is considered a violent protestor committing violent acts.
Kingian nonviolent protesting seeks for its protest message to coexist with the protest target’s program, speech, or activity, never to replace or prevent it. The Kingian nonviolent protestor’s objective is to create curiosity about their protest cause and goal in an attempt to win converts to the protest cause, not to defeat the protest’s ability to attract support by engendering anger or alienation towards the protest cause due to violent or disruptive protest tactics.
Non-strategic and non-physical but verbally violent protesting, like Armstrong displayed during Cities Church’s Sunday worship service, is the type of protesting being used to justify a growing trend of anti-protest bills that expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests. According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), as of January 2026, 23 states have enacted at least 55 laws that seek to limit how and when people can exercise their constitutional right to peacefully protest. For example, Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee have all increased penalties for blocking streets or sidewalks while peacefully protesting, with some offenses now carrying up to a year in jail.
Iowa and Oklahoma have passed laws that give legal immunity to drivers who strike protesters with their vehicles under certain conditions, such as when protesters are blocking traffic or surrounding a car. And some states have even passed laws that allow non-profit organizations that provide support to protestors or for protest demonstrations deemed unlawful to be prosecuted. All 55 of these laws are an anathema to the grand protest tradition that created America.
The act of protesting in America is older than the 250-year-old United States of America. 88 years before America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, the first organized act of protest in America was a written 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery in the then 13 British colonies of America. 85 years later when the British government imposed a tea tax on the 13 colonies, people living in the Boston, Massachusetts colony dumped hundreds of chests of tea from the British East India Company into Boston Harbor, as an act of protest and defiance against the British for imposing taxes on the colonies when they had no representation in the British Parliament, it became the ultimate act of protest that led to the birth of the greatest democracy in world history, America.
Since the Founding Fathers knew that protest is synonymous with democracy, the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, and the right to petition are included along with the free exercise of religion and the freedom of the press as the 5 freedoms granted to every American citizen in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But the freedom to protest disappears once physical violence, verbal violence, or destruction of property occurs at any meetings, sit-ins, strikes, rallies, events, or protests held by any organized group. It was too many instances of violence and destruction of property breaking out at too many Black Lives Matter protest demonstrations, which ended the effectiveness of the Black Lives Matter Movement. It was physical and verbal violence that transformed the initial nonviolent January 6 rally protest from a constitutional assembly of aggrieved citizens to an unconstitutional riot mob threatening the survival of American democracy.
A citizen nonviolently protesting the way Dr. King taught is the companion to a citizen exercising their right to vote and democracy; protesting the way Nekima Levy Armstrong did inside of Cities Church was the companion to tyranny and autocracy, which, if continued, will lead to the loss of the right to protest. American democracy, as the Founding Fathers envisioned it, and as we know it today, cannot survive without the right to protest, and the only way the right to protest can survive in the 21st century is that all protesting must be done the Kingian nonviolent way!!!