Protester Nekima Levy Armstrong Who Interrupted Minnesota Church Service Is Arrested, Officials Say

A standoff between demonstrators and congregants at Cities Church in St. Paul on Sunday added to tensions around federal immigration enforcement in the state.

The Justice Department said on Thursday that it had arrested three of the demonstrators involved in interrupting a church service in St. Paul, Minn., to protest a pastor’s apparent work as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, citing the need to protect houses of worship, said on social media that federal agents had arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Louisa Allen and William Kelly in connection with a protest on Sunday at Cities Church that brought service to a stop and prompted some congregants to leave.

The demonstration was one of many furious protests across the state after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good two weeks ago in Minneapolis amid a surge of federal agents in the state.

Several protest organizers called for the resignation of a pastor at the church, David Easterwood, believing he is also the acting director of ICE’s field office in St. Paul. An ICE official with that name is listed as a defendant in a lawsuit challenging what it says are the agency’s abusive enforcement tactics.

Videos of the protest showed dozens of demonstrators chanting “ICE out!” and “David Easterwood, out now!” as they marched through the building.

Ms. Levy Armstrong is a lawyer and a former president of the Minneapolis branch of the N.A.A.C.P. Ms. Allen is a member of the St. Paul School Board. William Kelly is an anti-ICE demonstrator who was at the protest and shared footage of it on social media.

Efforts to reach all three on Thursday were unsuccessful. According to Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, they were each charged with conspiracy to deprive rights, a federal felony.

The move was a rare instance of administration officials directing the arrests of nonviolent protesters, but it was not unexpected. The officials had been broadcasting for days their intention to prosecute demonstrators.

“They’re certainly aggressively threatening to prosecute all sorts of people that are perceived as enemies of the administration,” said Rachel Moran, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis.

In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, before her arrest, Ms. Levy Armstrong, an organizer of the demonstration, said that the Trump administration was “trying to turn a peaceful nonviolent demonstration into a crime.”

Mr. Kelly, who spoke to The New York Times on Saturday while attending an anti-ICE demonstration outside Minneapolis, said that he was an Army veteran who had served in Iraq. “So I use that angle to tell them, ‘You’re not serving your country. You’re betraying your country,’” he said of immigration enforcement agents.

The Justice Department tried to bring charges against the former CNN journalist Don Lemon, who had been working as an independent reporter alongside the protesters at the church. But according to people familiar with the matter, a federal magistrate judge in Minnesota refused to approve the criminal complaint against him.

The arrests came amid a large deployment of federal agents to the state, as the Trump administration works forcefully to curb protests against its immigration policy. Since the killing of Ms. Good, 37, tensions in the Minneapolis area have run high, with an uptick in skirmishes between residents and heavily armed federal agents.

Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, called on Thursday for the release of Ms. Levy Armstrong, who unsuccessfully ran against him in the city’s 2017 mayoral race. He called her arrest “a gross abuse of power.”

President Trump said in a Truth Social post on Tuesday that he had seen footage of the protest at the church, calling it a raid by “agitators and insurrectionists.” “They are troublemakers who should be thrown in jail, or thrown out of the Country,” he wrote.

At a news conference in central Minneapolis on Tuesday, Monique Cullars-Doty, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota and one of the organizers of the church demonstration, said that the surge in immigration agents had destabilized neighborhoods across the city and that it was wrong for a minister to be associated with those actions.

“It is an abomination for someone to put the title of reverend — which means reverence, reverence for God — before his name and act as a field director for ICE,” she added.

The escalation of aggressive immigration enforcement tactics has prompted outrage from many religious leaders across traditions, who have taken a range of steps to protest in states across the country, to varying degrees.

Roman Catholic bishops have rebuked the Trump administration’s campaign almost unanimously. But the issue has created more fault lines among Southern Baptists, the denomination of which Cities Church is a part, as a right-wing contingent has expressed support for the deportation effort.

Cities Church condemned the protest in a statement on Tuesday, saying that the demonstrators had “accosted members of our congregation, frightened children, and created a scene marked by intimidation and threat.”

The church added that it would “welcome respectful dialogue about present issues” and that the Bible can provide answers to “the world’s most complex” problems. It called on local, state and national leaders to protect church buildings as “places of peace and solace.”

The lead pastor, Jonathan Parnell, said in a phone interview that he would not confirm or deny that Mr. Easterwood worked for ICE, adding that it was not his practice to comment on the employment of people at the church. He did not directly address the protesters’ comments about Mr. Easterwood, an unpaid vocational pastor there, but expressed concern for the safety of the pastor and his family and said that the church supported him.

“He’s a holy and righteous man,” he said.

Mr. Parnell also said: “You can be a Christian and work in law enforcement. That’s not an incompatibility.”

Mr. Easterwood could not be reached for comment.

The federal authorities charged the demonstrators using a statute that has roots in a Reconstruction Era law used to prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan for terrorizing Black Americans and denying them their civil rights.

The statute was rarely used after Reconstruction ended, though it resurfaced during the civil rights movement, and in recent years, it has been invoked in lawsuits against far-right demonstrators and Jan. 6 rioters.

“The statute is really about people who are specifically intending to deprive people of their civil rights,” Ms. Moran said.

James Cook, a lawyer representing Ms. Allen and Mr. Kelly, declined to offer details about the case but said in an interview on Thursday that he was taken aback by the arrests.

“We are in uncharted territory,” he said.

Elizabeth Dias, Devlin Barrett, Alan Feuer, Glenn Thrush, Ernesto Londoño and John Yoon contributed reporting.

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