“This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity.”
That’s what U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche declared on Aug. 27. The next day, his department defended the bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security for spying on churches, insisting there were no First Amendment protections in the case for the congregations (including a Baptist church covered by a federal injunction).
Why a disconnect exists between his claim about stopping “a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity” and defending spying on churches was answered in the next sentence of his statement: “Our working group’s efforts to investigate weaponization under the previous administration will continue.”
While the DOJ attempts to accuse the Biden administration of an anti-Catholic bias for monitoring two rightwing priests, the DOJ is defending secretly spying on Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, and Unitarian Universalist churches — including recording in a church sanctuary and staking out a church’s building on Sundays.
The DOJ’s inconsistent attitude about the sanctity of church buildings showed up in court filings this week in the case of 38 individuals charged after a protest at a Southern Baptist church in St. Paul, Minnesota, where one of the pastors is also a local ICE leader. Meanwhile, denominational groups — that in February won an injunction protecting their congregations from warrantless DHS enforcement actions — filed a response on Sept. 1 to DHS’s arguments over whether DHS should be held in contempt for repeatedly surveilling a church covered by the injunction. The religious groups (which include American Baptist Churches USA, Alliance of Baptists, Metropolitan Community Churches, and several regional synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) are requesting a judge to force DHS to turn over documents about any surveillance at other protected churches and create new procedures to prevent additional incidents.
As debates swirl about DHS and DOJ actions in federal courtrooms in Minnesota and Massachusetts, this issue of A Public Witness unpacks the newest developments from the DOJ’s new “weaponization” report, the church protest case in Minnesota, and this week’s filing from denominational groups in the injunction case in Massachusetts.
