Rev. David Schwartz of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Boulder traveled to Minneapolis on Jan. 22 to join about 800 clergy calling for ICE to leave Minnesota. The next day, he joined protests at the airport and a Target store. That afternoon, he marched with tens of thousands through the city.
Less than 24 hours later, ICE agents tackled and shot Minneapolis protester Alex Pretti.
The killing shook the city and cast a sharper urgency over the faith-led demonstrations. For Schwartz, it underscored why he had gone.
“They put this together, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Native people and pagans and Buddhists,” he told his congregation that weekend, referring to the gathering organized by MARCH, a “pro-queer group of multiracial clergy and faith leaders.”
“All of us have years and centuries’ worth of disagreements with one another, but bridging every theological and political difference, we insisted, as you do, on the sacred worth in every person.”
In both his sermon and in conversations with Boulder Reporting Lab, Schwartz said he had assumed news stories coming out of Minneapolis reflected “the worst of the worst,” but after visiting and speaking with organizers, he believes that the “worst of the worst is happening day after day.”
“The idea that a person of color in Minneapolis now has to travel wherever they go with documents proving their right to be here, and produce those on demand or risk being taken away — it’s not the country that I want to live in, it’s not the country that I have lived in,” he said.
ICE’s actions have prompted a broader response from the Boulder faith community as well, including a Jan. 29 interfaith walk for dignity and justice that drew about 200 community members from more than 18 local places of worship. Mayor Aaron Brockett and at least three city councilmembers, Nicole Speer, Ryan Schuchard and Tara Winer, were also present. The walk included stops for sermons, prayer and song.
“As people of faith, we believe this is wrong,” said Amy French, who helps coordinate social action programs at St. John’s Episcopal Church. “We believe in loving our neighbor.”
“Witnessing these videos of what I feel is lawlessness, chaos, and a rejection of the rule of law — not to mention aspects of human decency — I think we need to pursue what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called ‘spiritual audacity and moral grandeur,’” said Rabbi Fred Green of Boulder’s Congregation Har HaShem, who helped organize the walk. Heschel was a Jewish theologian and civil rights activist who marched with Martin Luther King Jr.
“All of our faith traditions tell us to watch out for those who are feeling vulnerable,” Green said. “We can’t stand idly by the blood of our neighbors.”
For Michelle Basman, a resident of a Minneapolis suburb visiting family in Boulder, witnessing the walk was deeply meaningful.
“It is frightening what’s happening,” she said. “All our neighbors are collecting food and delivering [it], hundreds of people in hiding. We have a Somalian immigrant apartment complex one block from us. I haven’t seen them in two months. In the beginning, we’d go and wait there for the school bus to get there in case ICE came. Now they’re not even coming out. They’re not going to school. It’s horrible.”
Basman said when she and her husband heard about the walk, “both of us said we’ve got to come and just thank them.”
An ICE Out protest and peace vigil for Alex Pretti and Renee Good were also held this month, hosted by Indivisible and the Democratic Socialists of America, respectively.
“Our government is killing people in our streets. The pretext is over,” former Boulder City Councilmember Lauren Folkerts said during the vigil on Jan. 25, according to a DSA press release. “It’s clear this is not about immigration. What we are witnessing is about power, about increasing control and silencing dissent.”
This Saturday, Jan. 31, Boulder residents will also participate in national anti-ICE protests, including an “ICE Out” protest being held from 1 to 2:30 p.m. at Broadway and Canyon and a group memorial bike ride for Alex Pretti, leaving North Boulder Park at noon. On Sunday, Feb. 1, a five-mile “F ICE” group run is leaving from Broadway and Maxwell Ave. at 9 a.m.
The protests in Minneapolis, Boulder and across the country have been driven by increasingly aggressive tactics used by ICE agents. So far in 2026, ICE agents have killed two Minneapolis protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and six more people have died while in ICE detention, according to advocacy groups and media reports.
Agents have also detained hundreds of U.S. citizens, demanded documentation of citizenship from those who say they were racially profiled, and forced their way into homes of U.S. citizens without judicial warrants. ICE began asserting last week that they could enter homes using a more narrow administrative warrant issued internally by immigration authorities. ICE agents have also deployed tear gas and pepper spray against nonviolent protesters.
The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly denied media reports of any wrongdoing, asserting that everyone detained by ICE gets due process.
Schwartz said that while his work is in Boulder, he traveled to Minneapolis because “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“Our silence won’t save us,” he said. “Our money or our whiteness or our remoteness from there, none of that will keep what’s happening in Minneapolis from coming here.”
He believes the way Minneapolis communities have responded offers lessons for Boulder.
He described how neighborhoods there have organized patrols to alert others to ICE agents’ presence with whistles and car horns. Legal observers document ICE activity whenever agents are sighted. Others bring meals to neighbors afraid to go outside or scout ahead to doctor’s offices to ensure ICE agents aren’t waiting there.
One Minneapolis resident told him: “We’re just ordinary people. None of us were organizers two months ago. We just know how to neighbor.”
Schwartz encouraged Boulder residents to do the same, to start connecting with those around them, “because we’re going to need them in the months ahead.”
Being a good neighbor was also core to the mission of the Boulder interfaith prayer walk, Rabbi Green of Har Hashem said.
“Whether they can help with a meal, or stand on the corner, or make sure that business owners know how to protect their staff, we have people that are joining other networks to really live out the principle of ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’” Green said. “There is a feeling of a tipping point on lots of issues, and a renewed desire to play our part.”
