Oakland faith leaders fly to Minneapolis, wage fast against ICE

Religious leaders from Oakland and throughout the Bay Area are in Minnesota this week to protest the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign and the killing of Minneapolis woman Renee Good. Other local clergy and congregants are fasting for 24 hours in solidarity.

Protesters and federal officers have been clashing for weeks in Minneapolis, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross’ fatal shooting of unarmed Good on Jan. 7 caused tensions to explode. On Thursday, the federal Justice Department arrested three protesters who disrupted a St. Paul church service led by a pastor who works for ICE.

Progressive faith and labor leaders in the Twin Cities have called for a statewide general strike on Friday — no work, school, or shopping — to demand that ICE’s thousands of officers in Minnesota leave the state, and that the federal budget not include more funding for immigration enforcement. Across the country, a “national day of solidarity” called “ICE Out for Good” is planned for Friday.

About 20 faith leaders from the Bay Area have made the trek to frigid Minneapolis to participate.

“We’re fired up,” said Rev. Kevin Mann, community minister at the First Unitarian Church of Oakland. “Everything about my faith is calling me to be here.” 

Mann spoke with The Oaklandside on Wednesday night, just after arriving at an AirBnb provided by his old high school English teacher. He said conversations within his faith community have frequently come back to Selma, where Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb was murdered by a group of white men after the civil rights marches in 1965.

The tragedy was a “touchpoint” in Unitarian Universalists’ dedication to social justice, Mann said. When he and colleague Rev. Laurel Liefert announced their plans to go to Minneapolis, their downtown Oakland congregation raised $3,000 to support their travel, said Mann. 

Liefert told The Oaklandside that she’s been singing an anti-apartheid song from South Africa called “Courage, My Friend” with her congregation. The song, with its lyrics, “You do not walk alone, we will walk with you,” is “very much about accompanying people” — a sentiment at the core of this week’s actions, Liefert said. 

The faith organizers in Minneapolis are in a training on Thursday before joining Friday’s strike and citywide march.

For Mann, the decision to participate came easily but not lightly.

“I’m a queer person of color myself,” he said. “Everyone else in my delegation is a white minister. I’m afraid they will target me, and I’ll end up in an ICE prison in god knows where.”

24-hour fast started today
A protest over an ICE agent’s killing of Renee Good in Oakland on Jan. 11, 2026. Credit: Jerome Parmer

At home, several faith communities that did not make the trip to Minnesota are participating in a “solidarity fast” from noon Thursday to noon Friday.

“We will pray and fast in solidarity here in California to resist the violence inflicted on our own neighbors, friends, and families, while also sending our prayers with our Bay Area Faith Delegation traveling to Minneapolis,” organizers wrote in a planning document.

The fast is put together by the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, an Oakland organization, along with Oakland’s Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church and Kehilla Community Synagogue, the Mt. Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church, and others. Forty-five Bay Area congregations and religious groups are signed up to participate.

There’s a long tradition of fasting in many religious practices and in political resistance, the organizers noted. 

Concerns around ICE’s actions aren’t limited to Minnesota, they wrote: “Here in California, we have experienced the use of the National Guard in an attempt to occupy Los Angeles, the increasing use of weekend check-ins at the Stockton ICE office, and the firing of 21 local immigration judges by the Trump Administration in a clear attempt to diminish access to any legal proceedings for anyone who is at any risk of detention or deportation.”

When Lakeshore Avenue Baptist Church leaders received the call to join protesters in the Midwest, “we knew many of our folks couldn’t come but still wanted to participate in an escalated way, because we’re in a moment of escalation,” said Rev. Allison Tanner.

Eight people from her congregation are fasting — some for two days.

“It’s a tool of engaging ourselves spiritually, in a form of embodied prayer and commitment to this long-term cause,” Tanner said. Minnesota organizers specifically called for solidarity fasts, she said. But the Bay Area organizers are advising people that they can take creative approaches to fasting if full participation isn’t feasible — engaging, instead, in a “social media fast” or going vegetarian for a week, for example.

The fast is a period of “reflection,” paired with concrete actions Tanner’s congregation and others have taken to respond to ICE, she said. A network of “faith witnesses” has been showing up outside of immigration courthouses to support people arriving for hearings and meetings.

“We’re not willing to sit back in fear and not engage,” she said. “We’re using our moral voice to the extent that we can.”

A number of other actions are planned throughout the Bay Area and across the country Friday, including a 4 p.m. march in Fruitvale organized by labor and community groups.

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