2 more arrested in Minnesota church invasion
Federal authorities arrested two more suspects in the Minnesota church invasion, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Monday.
“If you riot in a place of worship, we WILL find you,” Bondi wrote on X.
“We have made two more arrests in connection with the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota: Ian Davis Austin and Jerome Deangelo Richardson,” she added.
Both Austin and Richardson appear in the indictment that a federal grand jury handed down Thursday.
Minnesota Public Radio reported that authorities arrested Austin on Friday.
The group of anti-ICE agitators interrupted a Sunday service last month at Cities Church, a non-denominational Christian church in St. Paul.
According to the indictment, Austin and Richardson met with Nekima Levy-Armstrong and Chauntyll Louisa Allen before invading the church.
Former CNN host and independent journalist Don Lemon told Richardson, “Don’t give anything away” while speaking to his online audience as he livestreamed the invasion.
Both defendants allegedly joined Levy-Armstrong, Allen, and Lemon in the church and the group engaged in “menacing and threatening behavior” toward those in the church service, such as “physically obstructing them attempted to exit and/or move about within the church.”
Austin allegedly “stood with other agitators in and around the main aisles in the church to intimidate the church members and obstruct and interfere with their freedom of movement, approached the pastor and congregants in a menacing manner, and, near the end of the operation, loudly berated the pastor with questions about Christian nationalism and Christians wanting to have their faith be the law of the land.”
Richardson allegedly joined Lemon and independent journalist Georgia Fort as they “surrounded” the pastor.
On Friday, Bondi announced the arrests of Lemon, Fort, Trahern Crews, and Jamael Lundy.
The week before, law enforcement arrested Levy-Armstrong, Allen, and William Kelly, the man who posted videos of the incident online under the handle “DaWoke Farmer.”
The grand jury indicted the nine defendants for allegedly violating the Ku Klux Klan Act and the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act earlier this month when they entered Cities Church in St. Paul amid an invasion of the service.
The Klan Act criminalizes the deprivation of rights, and the Justice Department has claimed the church invaders deprived worshippers of their First Amendment right to religious exercise. The FACE Act protects access to houses of worship.
The Church Invasion
Between 30 and 40 anti-ICE agitators interrupted the Jan. 18 service at Cities Church. They shouted, “Justice for Renee Good!” as they surrounded members of the congregation.
Videos of the incident show the pastor and others repeatedly asking the agitators to leave, and the agitators chanting, “Who shut this down? We shut this down!”
According to the charging document, a member of the congregation said worshippers were “terrorized, our children were weeping.” One woman broke her arm. Agitators blocked about 50 members of the congregation from exiting, making it “nearly impossible for parishioners to get out and leave.”
The document also mentions that agitators prevented congregants from getting to their children, and one of the agitators reportedly told young children, “Do you know your parents are Nazis, they’re going to burn in hell?”
Levy-Armstrong, leader of the Racial Justice Network and a former president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP, told Democracy Now that she does not regret helping to lead the protest.
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]