In February of this year, U.S. District Judge Dennis Sailor IV issued an order barring immigration enforcement activities in or near certain houses of worship, on the grounds that such activities infringed on people’s rights of religious practice and religious freedom. With that order in place, religious groups in Minnesota are now alleging that ICE was involved in operations surveilling and infiltrating University Baptist Church of Minneapolis back in May.
That timing matters. May was a period of heightened tensions in Minneapolis, following a long stretch of anti-ICE protests that were often led by, or involved the participation of, different religious groups. Against that backdrop, the allegation is that ICE was running undercover operations inside and around this church.
According to the groups bringing the case, an undercover ICE agent dropped a listening device in the church, revealing the nature of the operation. The agent was reportedly taking part in a boxing or sparring practice hosted by the church when a body-worn recording device tumbled to the floor — in other words, the agent was there pretending to be a participant in the church’s activities when the undercover mic fell out. The allegations also describe surveillance conducted outside the church.
All of this unfolds against a backdrop of accusations from the Department of Justice that members of the church, along with other Christian organizations and like-minded faith-based groups, were involved in efforts to actively impede or injure federal officers, specifically ICE agents. Now the religious groups involved are asking the courts to hold ICE in contempt for substantive violations of that February order. The story will continue to develop, and it’s the kind of case that mainstream coverage will likely track closely.
What most media accounts won’t dig into is what this case reveals about the nature of American Christian nationalism — specifically, the gap between its rights claims and its actual practice. Christian nationalism is a form of nationalism built around Christian identity, and one of its staples is the claim to be a staunch defender of First Amendment protections like freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
It is a fixture of Christian nationalist and MAGA discourse that liberals, Marxists, leftists, communists — anyone outside the MAGA coalition — are enemies of religion and specifically of Christianity. What that discourse consistently leaves out is that many of those same political and cultural opponents oppose MAGA policies and practices precisely because they are also Christian, or because they belong to other, like-minded religious groups. The Baptist church at the center of this case makes that point concretely: this is a specifically Christian community that doesn’t fit the MAGA mold, and the political right shows little interest in protecting the religious freedom or free speech of Christians — or other religious groups — who don’t fit that mold.
So in true populist or fascist form, only the right kind of religion and only the right kind of speech actually gets protected, despite the constant self-description of the MAGA right as absolute defenders of these rights, as people for whom these rights are inviolable. Yet here, when it’s the wrong kind of religion, those rights go out the window. When religious or political expression doesn’t align with the policies of the Trump administration — even when that opposition is voiced in the name of the very religion the administration claims to champion — the state won’t hesitate to bring its full force to bear, treating dissenting believers as just another category of enemy.
This is part of a broader pattern. The Trump administration has actively weaponized the Department of Justice to target anyone viewed as an enemy of the MAGA coalition or of Trump’s policies, regardless of whether that person is religious. What this case highlights is just how specific and narrow a conception of “Christian” actually underlies Christian nationalism.
That’s why this contempt effort, brought by a coalition of religious groups, matters: it represents religion striking back against an administration and a nationalist movement that claims to speak for religion as such. It underscores that religion is not one thing in this country — that America is irreducibly religiously pluralist, among the many other ways it is pluralist — and that no one can consistently claim to defend freedom of religion while simultaneously excluding and marginalizing vast swaths of religious Americans.
It shows that when this administration talks about defending religious freedom for Christians in America, it is not talking about all Christians. It is not talking about all Americans. And it is certainly not talking about Americans who belong to non-Christian religious traditions. The language is selective by design. When the right, when the Trump administration, when contemporary Republicans and the MAGA coalition invoke religious freedom or religious speech, they are always and only talking about the right kind of religious expression and the right kind of speech — and, following from that, they are only interested in defending the rights of the right kind of Americans: Christians and conservatives who support MAGA policies and the Trump administration’s approach, in this case, to immigration.
As this story develops, there are specific questions worth watching. How will the administration, and the Department of Justice lawyers defending ICE’s actions, respond when confronted with their own language about the absolute nature of religious freedom and the sanctity of free speech? Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right has proclaimed loudly and repeatedly that it stands as the defender of free speech, that this is what Kirk represented — and it has condemned anyone critical of him, at times using his own words to do so, branding them as anti-free-speech activists. That posture has played out in universities, in the private sphere, and in the courts.
So the question becomes: how will that language of defending religious freedom and religious speech come back to haunt the administration, as those same sound bites, court briefs, and official statements get thrown back at them — this time to defend the actions of religious believers, specifically Christians, who opposed the administration’s anti-immigration policies and took part in anti-ICE protests?
That’s the dynamic worth watching. My own prediction is a hopeful one: I think these religious groups are going to prevail. Looking at the language MAGA, the Department of Justice, and the Trump administration have themselves used, I think those words are going to come back to haunt them. I think this case will be a successful effort, and I think it will continue to provide a blueprint for groups targeted by the right — using the very language and legal weapons of the right against it, in service of real religious freedom, real religious pluralism, and true, authentic freedom of speech.
We’ll be following this case as it develops, along with everything else we cover at Axis Mundi Media and on Straight White American Jesus.
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