Rev. Shannon Jammal-Hollemans and Rev. Greg Briggs (right) at an anti-ICE protest. Briggs, who leads East Lansing's Edgewood United Church of Christ, recently traveled to Minneapolis to provide "neighbor care" to immigrant communities. (Courtesy photo)

After Watching Minneapolis Protests, Local Groups are Preparing for a Surge in Immigration Enforcement

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With the eyes of the nation turned towards Minneapolis, Lansing-area residents made their way to the heart of the action between United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and those protesting their actions last month.

They didn’t just travel to Minneapolis to join protests. They learned from Minneapolis locals who organized to assist immigrant communities and draw attention to ICE operations, preparing for a sudden surge of immigration agents in the Lansing area.

Pastor Greg Briggs of Edgewood United Church of Christ in East Lansing was one of seven Lansing area faith leaders who answered the call put out by MARCH, or Multifaith Antiracism, Change & Healing, for out-of-state faith leaders. 

Briggs said that some faith leaders went into immigrant-heavy neighborhoods to give direct services to the community. 

This “neighbor care,” as Briggs calls it, takes various forms. Volunteers delivered food to families afraid to leave home, kept watch over parents and children during school drop-off and walked the children of immigrants to school. According to the religious leaders who were there with Briggs, volunteers also replaced doors that ICE agents had broken down and collected money to pay for rent and groceries for immigrants afraid to leave their homes.

“They compared it to Dr. King’s call for pastors to go to Selma [in 1965 to protest police violence against Black Americans trying to register to vote],” Briggs told East Lansing Info. “It wasn’t something I or really anyone had been planning on doing. The first few days were spent figuring out logistics: Do I have time? How do we get there? That kind of thing.”

In two cars, the faith leaders drove the nine hours to learn firsthand about the protests, to connect with the immigrant communities there and to receive training on how to support immigrants amid the federal mass deportation effort. 

But Briggs said the word “training” makes the experience sound more organized than it really was.

“The orientation helped ground the current resistance in the broader history of Minneapolis and Minnesota,” he said. “That included Renee Good, George Floyd, Philando Castile, and beyond. Much of this movement is Indigenous-led, so they connected it back to the U.S. takeover of Minnesota Territory and the largest mass execution in U.S. history — the execution of 28 Native men during Lincoln’s first administration.”

Briggs’ congregation has already had discussions about launching this same type of neighbor care in East Lansing for immigrant families if ICE operations become more common locally, but those conversations haven’t resulted in the kind of community organizing he saw in Minneapolis. 

“In my mind,” he said, “seeing what’s going on with ICE is already linked with the other justice work we already do. If we’re already buying groceries for a family, we can certainly add another one that is struggling because of the threat of ICE.”

The church leaders were on their way back to Michigan when they heard 37-year-old nurse for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Alex Pretti was shot and killed by ICE agents. Briggs said faith leaders had debates about whether they should turn back or continue home, but said that they decided to return to their communities and begin the work there.

When asked by ELi how he will translate what he learned to action here in Michigan, Briggs said that this is either a “leaderless or leader-full moment.” There won’t be one group coordinating every movement, instead, neighborhoods and communities are organizing themselves to protect people, share resources and get food to the people who need it.

The reason the faith leaders were invited to Minneapolis, Briggs said, was to take that understanding back home and learn to seek out similar dynamics in their own communities.

“What’s happening in Minneapolis isn’t spontaneous,” Briggs said. “It’s the result of practice, discipline, and sustained organizing — not isolated actions.”

A second local group rushed to Minneapolis shortly after Good was killed, and is now organizing to push back against immigration agents who come to the Lansing area. Leaders of this group spoke at The Fledge in Lansing on Jan. 29, but did not identify themselves and declined to answer follow up questions from ELi after the meeting. 

These residents have created an ICE rapid response group, learning from tactics used in Minneapolis. Members of a rapid response group go to locations where ICE agents are present to record their actions or blow whistles to let people in the area know immigration agents are on-site.

Residents used messaging app Signal to alert others of ICE activity, using the acronym SALUTE, meaning size, activity, location, uniform, time and equipment, to relay the most important information. 

At the time of publication, about 800 people have joined a Lansing-area ICE rapid response Signal group. The group has also set up a hotline residents can call to report activity by immigration agents. 

In Minneapolis, members of the rapid response group made a spreadsheet to track every make, model and license plate of cars known to be used by immigration agents, making it easier to confirm vehicles used by immigration agents. 

A key objective for residents resisting ICE actions is to waste agents’ time, one speaker at the event at The Fledge said. The more agents that are preoccupied with the crowd, the fewer people they can detain.

“Practice the things that scare you,” one speaker at the Jan. 29 meeting said.