WASHINGTON (RNS) — A group of more than 50 faith leaders gathered outside the White House Friday (Jan. 9) morning to mourn the death of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by a federal agent Wednesday on a residential street in Minneapolis. The interfaith gathering also called for accountability for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

“This is what fear as policy looks like. It confirms what too many already know — that systems with enormous unchecked power can take life and then move on as if nothing has been broken,” the Rev. Abhi Janamanchi, senior minister at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, and an advisory board member of Hindus for Human Rights, said to the crowd, after describing the chest tightness and shortness of breath that he said many in immigrant neighborhoods are feeling. 

The group, assembled by interfaith organizing network Faith in Action, echoed the demands of ISAIAH, their Minnesota affiliate: that Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Good, be charged and prosecuted, that federal authorities allow Minnesota investigators to take part in the investigation to ensure its integrity and that ICE cease its operations across the country.

“ A system that relies on fear, force and death to manage human beings is not broken at the edges. It is broken and rotten at the core,” Janamanchi said. “ Stop excusing violence. Start protecting life. Abolish ICE.”

The Rev. Starsky Wilson, the president and CEO of the Children’s Defense Fund, called the crowd’s attention to the stuffed animals in Good’s car that presumably belonged to her children.

“ Those implements of comfort were splattered with blood,” he said. “We come because this terror has reached our children,” he said, adding someone must “give account for the trauma to our children.”

“ When we think of this past year in Minneapolis, we feel like it’s an attack on childhood,” Wilson said, mentioning the detentions of parents and the Trump administration’s threats to funding that supports children. 

The religious leaders, who were largely Protestant Christians, also connected Good’s death to the violence of other ICE operations and actions taken by the Trump administration, including strikes in Nigeria and the military operation in Venezuela that captured Nicolás Maduro, where the Venezuelan government has said more than 100 people were killed. At least nine people have been shot by ICE since September.

“God is not neutral about violence. God is not neutral about state power,” said the Rev. Cassandra Gould, political director for Faith in Action. “God is also not a God of silence, and neither is the church.”

Bishop Dwayne Royster, the executive director of Faith in Action, has been coming to the White House every Wednesday over the past few months. He told the crowd he kept returning to the White House because “somebody’s gotta hold Donald Trump accountable for all the evil that’s happening in this country.

“I  pray that no peace comes into that place until they do right by the people of God,” he said. “ I pray that they can’t sleep at night until they do right by the people of God.”

Faith in Action advocates in 24 states through 40 affiliate organizations, as well as 13 countries throughout the world, Royster said. 

They began to sound the alarm about the Trump administration’s planned mass deportation campaign a week before his 2025 inauguration in a Newark, New Jersey, day of prayer and dialogue hosted by Catholic Cardinal Joseph Tobin, and they have continued to carry out immigration advocacy throughout his first year.

 Through Good’s death, the Rev. Holly Jackson, associate conference minister for the Central Atlanta Conference of the United Church of Christ, told attendees that the state wanted to discourage such efforts. 

“ They want us to be scared and to give up. They want us to turn in our neighbors. They want us to cower when they come knocking on our doors,” Jackson said. “ They want us to worship a God of white supremacy and stop preaching about the dignity and worth of every human being. They want us to deny that this is a land built by immigrants where justice and equality are supposed to be for all.”

But she said, “ in Renee’s name and in the name of countless others whose lives and families have been destroyed, we cannot and we will not give up.”

Two attendees of the vigil, The Rev. Stephanie Vader, senior pastor of Capitol Hill United Methodist Church, and the Rev. Rachel Landers Vaagenes, pastor of Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, told RNS they had attended to “make hope visible” and represent their faith values.

It’s just one way the two congregations have been responding to the moment, which includes providing food, clothing and toys to immigrants, as well as accompanying them to immigration appointments, the pastors told RNS.

The Rev. Julio Hernandez, who leads Faith in Action Washington-area affiliate Congregation Action Network, spoke about the budget increase for immigration enforcement that has led to an increase in immigration agents in U.S. streets. 

In the U.S., he said, “ the less pigment one carries, the more human one is deemed to be,” and the country “ has poured billions of dollars into capturing, detaining and terrorizing those who do not fit this narrow definition of belonging.”

But he countered, “ This tapestry of prayer, practice and presence is stronger than any wall, deeper than any border and more truthful than any system built on fear.”

In one of many prayers at the vigil, the Rev. Audrey Price, the interim pastor of the United Church of Christ of Seneca Valley, prayed, “Strengthen your church for such a time as this. Strip us of the comfort that numbs compassion. Deliver us from neutrality that disguises itself as peace. Break the chains of fear that keep us quiet while injustice speaks boldly in the streets.”