Seven Vermont Clergy Arrested Blockading the NCATC, the ICE Targeting Center in Williston

Seven faith leaders were arrested in Williston, Vermont on September 4, 2026 after blockading the entrances to the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center (NCATC) — described in the reporting as one of three major facilities that help ICE agents hone their enforcement operations. They began blocking the entrances at about 7:30 a.m. and held them for roughly three hours, singing, praying, and reading the names of people killed in ICE interactions or who died in detention.

Those arrested: Catherine Bock, 78, of Burlington; Jessica Derise, 54, of Williston; Rebecca Girrell, 47, of South Burlington; Elizabeth Gleich, 36, of Middlebury; Karen Johnston, 58, of Colchester; Earl Kooperkamp, 69, of Bradford; and Susan McMillan, 65, of Colchester.

The target is the point. This corpus records clergy arrests at detention facilities — Broadview in November 2025, the Minneapolis airport in January 2026 — where the protest stands between agents and the people being taken. Williston is different. The NCATC holds no detainees. It is analytical infrastructure: the place where data becomes a target list, upstream of every field operation it generates. Blockading it is a claim about where the machinery actually lives.

That distinction matters for how this timeline reads enforcement generally. A raid is visible, local, and attributable; the targeting that produced it is none of those. The corpus documents the inputs at length — the Palantir contracts, the LexisNexis data flows, the ELITE app, the voter-file and ITIN acquisitions — and the NCATC is where those inputs are converted into names and addresses. Seven people sat down in front of that building and read the names of the dead, which is an argument about causation made physically.

Note who they are. The arrested range in age from 36 to 78; several are ordained, including an Episcopal archdeacon and priest, and Rev. Rebecca Girrell of the United Methodist Church. This is the same constituency recorded in the 400-clergy Ash Wednesday letter of February 2026 — faith leaders acting in their institutional capacity rather than as private citizens, which is what makes the arrests newsworthy and also what the participants intend.

Sourcing note. The count of seven, the September 4 date, the Williston location, the NCATC as the target, the 7:30 a.m. start, the roughly three-hour duration, the reading of names, and all seven names with ages and towns are carried by Religion News Service and corroborated by the National Catholic Reporter, WCAX, and Episcopal News Service — all tier-2, no tier-1 outlet covers this, though four independent outlets agree on the specifics. The “one of three major facilities” characterization is the reporting’s and the other two are not identified; what the NCATC does is described in general terms and no primary agency document about its function was consulted here. The charges are not recorded in these sources beyond the fact of arrest and a court appearance. A second ledger capture of this event gave the count as six, which is resolved here as seven — that capture appears to have followed a headline separating one priest from “six others.” The arrested are protesters detained by choice in an act of civil disobedience, not harm-subjects, so no victim-index row is created.