ICE Was Terrorizing Worshipers Long Before Don Lemon Entered a Church

WHEN DON LEMON WAS ARRESTED after reporting on the aggressive protest of a church whose pastor allegedly works for ICE, the Trump administration claimed that Lemon and another journalist present at the event had violated federal laws meant, in part, to shield churches from having their services disrupted.

The administration’s message was clear: Disrupting church services and taking away the right of others to worship freely and in peace is unconscionable. How dare protesters infringe on those congregants’ First Amendment rights! Who would do such a thing?

Well, one of the first things this White House did after Donald Trump’s second inauguration was to rescind the 2021 guideline that required CBP and ICE agents to do everything in their power to avoid conducting operations in or near “protected areas” like churches, hospitals, and schools.

It wasn’t long before agents were showing up at just those sorts of places in the apparent hope of surprising their targets. And over the past year of increasingly cruel immigration enforcement actions, a hallmark of the administration’s deportation campaign has been operating close to formerly “protected” areas to create an atmosphere of anxiety—one that has kept worshipers, documented and not, from attending church services for fear of being grabbed and disappeared to a detention center in another state without access to counsel or family. (This, it’s worth mentioning, is precisely the outcome the rescinded 2021 guidance was intended to prevent.)

According to a multi-bylined story in the National Catholic Reporter published late last year, DHS hadn’t yet raided a church building, “but immigration agents have arrested immigrants on or near church property in at least a dozen instances so far” following the administration’s move to end the protected areas policy.

ICE leadership recognizes that this is a delicate matter and has insisted that it is operating out of respect for places of worship.

“You could take the NYPD, they’re not going to go ahead and target a church or synagogue, we’re not going to do the same thing,” the agency’s acting director, Todd Lyons, told CBS News. “If we’re in a pursuit of a criminal alien or a felon and they run into a hospital or a church, we’re going to continue that pursuit. Nothing’s off the table when it comes to that. But we’re not actively targeting schools, we’re not actively targeting hospitals. That’s just—no law enforcement agency would do that, we don’t do that.”

But the public utterances don’t match the actual record. According to faith leaders, organizers, and reporting on the ground in recently targeted cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis, the administration has conducted a variety of actions on church properties in the cities they have singled out for DHS’s paramilitary occupations.

Let me take you back to Los Angeles last summer. On June 6, agents started tackling landscapers and chasing street vendors alleged to have been making dangerously delicious hot dogs and Mexican food, eliciting intense protests; the next day, Trump signed a memorandum deploying the National Guard to the city to protect federal agents, and on June 8, the troops started heading to L.A. Things continued to escalate. By June 11, federal agents were surrounding a man in the parking lot of Downey Memorial Christian Church, even pointing a long gun at a pastor. Then, on June 20, two Catholic churches in San Bernardino County became backdrops to scenes of fear and despair: Agents took a longtime parishioner near Our Lady of Lourdes Church, while other agents chased men into the parking lot of St. Adelaide Church and detained them there.

Days later, Iranian asylum-seekers were arrested in L.A., adding to the number of churchgoers taken into immigration detention despite having lawful status. A Christianity Today piece titled “ICE Goes After Church Leaders and Christians Fleeing Persecution” described how a pastor was called by two members of his church, a husband-and-wife couple, because CBP agents were going to take the husband. The wife collapsed and began to convulse on the ground; she appeared to be experiencing a panic attack. Agents barred the pastor from approaching her to give her comfort.

The pastor told the agents the couple had come to America to flee religious persecution in Iran. Terrible things could happen to them if they were deported back.

“They came here for freedom, not like this,” the pastor said. “I know you are doing your job, but shame on you. Shame on this government.”

Actions like these—operating aggressively outside churches and often targeting churchgoers—has left a deep mark on faith communities across the nation.

“You ever been in a living room with a family who’s very, very deeply committed to Christ and can’t go to church for a month, and that’s their community? And faith is what sustains them,” Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, told CBS News. “They’re telling you in the living room with tears in their eyes, ‘Pastor, I want to go, but I’m too afraid.’ What do you do?”

Similar actions by agents were reported in Chicago and in Charlotte.

In October, in the Rogers Park area, ICE agents stopped a man in front of St. Jerome Catholic Church as a Spanish-language Mass was going on inside.

“I think they’ve been casing the church,” a bystander told the local news, noting that the church’s Mass schedule was publicly posted. She added that parishioners were terrified to walk outside after the service concluded that day.

In Charlotte, a May operation at Central United Method