MARCH Multifaith Clergy Gathering at Westminster Presbyterian Draws ~1,000, Precedes ~100 Clergy Arrests at MSP Airport

On January 22, 2026, MARCH — Multifaith Anti-Racism, Change and Healing, a Minnesota-based coalition of multiracial clergy and faith leaders — convened a two-day clergy gathering at Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis. The call went out roughly a week earlier in response to the federal “Operation Metro Surge” immigration crackdown and the January 7 ICE killing of Minneapolis resident Renée Good. Organizers initially expected about 200 clergy; when more than 1,000 registered they closed sign-ups, and over 600 clergy and spiritual leaders from across the country filled the sanctuary. The multifaith convening drew Christians of many traditions alongside Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Unitarian Universalists, and Indigenous practitioners. The first day mixed activist trainings — protest songleading, church security and threat assessment, filming ICE encounters — with spiritual revival, and clergy were bused to an ICE patrol site for hands-on instruction in whistles and documentation.

The gathering fed directly into the January 23 day of action, the same day as a Minnesota general strike that organizers estimated drew 50,000 or more people and shuttered hundreds of businesses, schools, and downtown corridors under the banner “ICE out of Minnesota.” Clergy led a sit-in in the departures area of Terminal 1 at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport (MSP), demanding that airlines stop transporting detainees. Police arrested roughly 100 clergy on trespassing-related charges. Among those arrested were Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman, the Jewish and interfaith chaplain at Macalester College, who was held about two hours and charged with trespassing, and Rev. Mariah Tollgaard, senior pastor of Hamline Church United Methodist in St. Paul, who described the moment as a religious duty to stand with her neighbors amid what she called a federal occupation of her state.

Structurally, the event marks the captured-pulpits lane inverting: where the broader Capture Cascade documents clergy and religious institutions absorbed into the authoritarian coalition, MARCH represents organized faith infrastructure deployed against it — using the moral legitimacy and bodily presence of clergy as a deliberate friction point in the detention-and-removal logistics chain (airlines, terminals, transport), and converting a one-week organizing window into mass civil disobedience tied to a region-wide labor action.