In 1987, out gay Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel traveled to El Salvador to support refugees who were now endeavoring to return home after fleeing their country during its brutal civil war. Despite their decisions to return, the refugees remained vulnerable to the military-backed, right-wing death squads that arose during the war to silence activists and other leftist sympathizers.

Voelkel provided support as part of the accompaniment movement, which involved literally accompanying folks on their journeys home. Helping these people navigate violent threats and terror from their own government, she said, is the closest experience she’s had to the ICE occupation of Minneapolis.

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“My experience in El Salvador under a brutal, violent regime is the only analogy to masked federal agents in Minnesota, literally killing U.S. citizens and firing tear gas. Like, that’s the only analogy I have in terms of the sort of situation,” she told LGBTQ Nation. “And I’ve been part of a lot of resistance.”

Currently the Pastor for Justice Ministries and Director of the Center for Sustainable Justice at Minneapolis’s Lyndale United Church of Christ, Voelkel has been involved in progressive local activism for decades, particularly through a group called March Minnesota. The pro-queer, multi-faith organization launched in 1991 to provide religious support for queer organizing in the state. It has since expanded its focus to racial justice as well. March members have led campaigns for marriage rights, fought against an oil pipeline at the Standing Rock native tribal lands, and acted as shields for activists during a Black Lives Matter die-in at Minneapolis’s Mall of America.

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So when ICE operatives began invading Minneapolis in December as part of the federal government’s Operation Metro Surge, the years of resistance work by the hundreds of clergy and congregations involved in March meant the organization could mobilize quickly.

The “March special sauce,” Voelkel said, is to figure out how to leverage religious networks “in followership and solidarity with frontline communities.”

“Unfortunately,” she added, “We’ve had way too much practice.”

While the neighborhood patrols, whistle-blowing, and massive street protests against ICE were completely organic and “sort of just bubbled up,” as Voelkel put it, she said March organizers have been pivotal in facilitating the networks that allowed people in hiding to receive food. She said a lot of the infrastructure around food delivery is religiously based and that many volunteers get connected through March-related religious affiliations.

Two March members also founded the massive mutual aid fund Neighbors Helping Neighbors to provide rent assistance, grocery deliveries, and rides. According to its website, Neighbors Helping Neighbors has distributed $92,000 in groceries and essentials and over $780,000 in rent assistance to more than 475 families.

While Voelkel has been part of many strong resistance movements, she said she has never seen anything like the scope and scale of what has taken place in Minneapolis over the past several months.

“I am so in love with us,” she said. “They talk about tipping point moments where you sort of organize, and you try and be strategic and plan, and then something happens, and there’s this like giant spreading of the message or like the momentum just changes. That’s what it felt like in Minneapolis.”

The resistance is queer

After ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed queer wife and mother Renee Good while she was driving away from him in her car, March issued a national call to faith leaders across the country to gather in the city in solidarity. They expected a couple of hundred people at most. Almost 1,200 showed up.

“We created this sort of ‘witness, learn, do’ [so people could] go and replicate what we’re doing in their own cities and towns in anticipation of surges there,” Voelkel said. “But we were super clear that part of the witnessing and learning from us was very explicitly pro-queer, very explicitly multi-faith, and very explicitly sort of intersectional collective liberation.”

March held trainings in non-cooperation for its visitors and also took them out on patrol, where Voelkel says many watched attempted ICE abductions firsthand and did their part to interrupt them.

They trained people in singing resistance, which has been a prominent part of the city’s fight against ICE. They also brought in queer Black Minneapolis poet laureate Junauda Petrus, who premiered a poem that honors Good.

“The intersection of the arts and the artistic resistance to this moment has been really badass,” Voelkel said. “And that’s also been super queer.”

The overall resistance has also been super queer, she said, explaining the LGBTQ+ community is “overrepresented” on the frontlines.

“The fact that Renee Good was a white lesbian seeking to protect her neighbors is not a coincidence… There is this deep history of queer and pro-queer followership and solidarity with specifically the impacts of white supremacy and state violence,” she said. “There is a large movement of queer organizing that is deeply rooted in this understanding of the ways in which our collective liberation only happens if it’s genuinely collective and intersectional.”

Ripple effects

In early February, White House border czar Tom Homan announced that, after six weeks of terrorizing the city, Operation Metro Surge was coming to an end.

It was no doubt a massive victory for the unrelenting resistance movement. And while many ICE agents did indeed leave, Voelkel says it’s critical to know that the terror is far from over. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified on March 3 that 650 agents remain in the city. While it’s a massive reduction from the reported 4,000 agents that were in the city at the peak of Operation Metro Surge, it is still far more than the 150 Homan promised there’d be by now.

The tactics of the agents in the city have shifted, Voelkel said. They have largely moved to the suburbs now, which has caused a host of its own challenges for activists.

The “abject cruelty” continues, she said, and many people are also still in hiding.

There are also the massive economic effects of the operation – not to mention the collective trauma – that will be felt for years to come

Voelkel mourned the “economic devastation to immigrant businesses, to small business in general” and “the traumatic, psychological impact” of the occupation.

“Some immigrant families have been in hiding for three months. Like, what do you do with kids? It’s the same impact as Covid. You have 3-year-olds who haven’t seen other 3-year-olds… That doesn’t even begin to talk about eviction dangers. Being evicted in the winter in Minnesota is a death sentence. So like, every aspect of society you can think of has been devastated.”

The ripple effects of kids missing school, she added, are massive, not only for their own education but for the future of their institutions. Schools have seen massive long-term absences, putting them at risk of losing funding under school enrollment laws. Lawmakers and activists, however, are fighting to not hold schools accountable for the absences fueled by ICE activity.

This is not about immigration

Voelkel believes ICE’s siege of the city is not actually about immigration. Rather, she thinks the administration is testing the limits of its power and workshopping different authoritarian tactics.

“The deportations are not the end game,” she emphasized. “It is simply a strategy in the larger authoritarian project.”

“I think they’re testing strategies out in advance of the midterms,” she said. “So we’re really looking to be in community and in organizing with colleagues all over the country… We’re looking to be part of that bucket brigade of organizing and movement building and non-cooperation, both to interrupt as much as possible and to return people who have been deported, but also to stop the authoritarian takeover.”

And while she has been inspired by the strength of the resistance and feels invigorated by the involvement of faith communities, she’s also tired. She knows, however, that there’s a long way to go, which is why she is so grateful to have her religious community to lean on.

“It’s part of the reason why I feel really committed to this kind of religious support for this more marathon distance, long-haul organizing. Because one of the ways in which religious and spiritual communities have absolutely been value added to other liberation movements is that there are these community-based spaces for processing trauma and grief, but also for spiritual and religious grounding, so that the work isn’t only resistance work, whose only motivation is anger. It is a clarity of what we are for and what our imagination is about the world that could be and should be and will be,” she said

“If you study liberation movements, a clarity of what you’re for helps give people energy for the long haul,” she added.

March has held nightly Zoom spiritual care sessions for folks on the frontlines, pointing out that healing is another layer of all this that cannot be forgotten. There is fighting for the people who were deported, teaching activists across the country what was effective in Minneapolis, and then helping people heal from trauma.  

She describes it as “devastating” that the “distorted and diseased Christianity” that is white Christian nationalism is being used to justify the administration’s brutality. But she has so much hope because so many faith leaders have stood up to say it’s not how true religious people act.

“My own church community and so much of the religious resistance… I feel like have never felt more alive… It’s like, they’re attempting to do this in my name, and so many people are saying, ‘Not in my name,’” she said.

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