The day after Rev. Robin Bartlett returned from gathering with fellow clergy in Minneapolis, the city that is heartbroken yet uprising in record numbers, another person was shot dead in the streets by ICE.
“My first reaction was guilt,” the First Church in Sterling senior pastor said upon hearing the news that 37-year-old Veterans Affairs intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents on Jan 24. “I left Friday night and after Alex was killed, the out-of-town clergy still in town on Saturday morning were asked to stay in Minneapolis if they could to help pastor to the Minnesota clergy who were utterly traumatized and exhausted and help do pastoral work in the city.”
Bartlett spent two days in the Minnesota capital along with upwards of 700 fellow clergy members from across the country who were invited there by MARCH — Multifaith Antiracism Change & Healing. They convened there that week to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations and deportations and roughly 100 of those faith leaders who kneeled at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport to pray for Delta to stop sponsoring immigration flights and stop ICE from detaining airport employees were arrested on Friday, the day she flew home.
Bartlett reported on arrival there “many of my colleagues rushed to the scene of Alex’s execution and provided care.”
“When they got there, they were trapped in a building and threatened by ICE with mass arrests, tear gas, and rubber bullets. But they stayed and helped.”
Her second reaction was another profoundly visceral emotion — “anger.”
“How dare they kill someone who was just trying to be a neighbor?” Bartlett voiced. “I know from being in Minneapolis that he wasn’t at a protest. Saturday was the day after the protest. He was just doing what people in Minneapolis do every day — look out for ICE and look out for each other. He was a nurse trying to help out another neighbor. Every day that people simply go out into their neighborhoods to get coffee or go to the gym, they are put in the position where they may be murdered by federal agents.”
She has been pastor of the downtown Sterling church for a dozen years and a town resident just as long. The house of worship is a welcoming, affirming, multi-denominational progressive Christian church affiliated with both the United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Members of the church raised $4,600 for Bartlett and one of her parishioners, Sheri Litterio, to cover their costs for the trip to out to Minneapolis “and donate to the work being done there.”
“I had to shut off the GoFundMe after a day because we had far exceeded our goal,” Bartlett disclosed. “They also outfitted me in all of the cold-weather clothing they could possibly find.”
While there she sang songs with people, attended vigils held “in every church and on every corner” for Pretti, and visited and worked with churches, mosques, and synagogues who were “organizing mutual aid to the thousands of people of color and immigrants who are too afraid to leave their homes to go to the grocery store or work.”
“We learned tactics of non-violent resistance, had media trainings, learned how to quickly tap our resources and our networks to replicate their work here in Massachusetts,” Bartlett said. “They told us over and over again what we know to be true — Minneapolis is a testing ground. They will come to us soon, and they don’t want us building the plane while we are flying it.
“They stressed that they were a city under occupation, and we found that out quickly. Everywhere we went, ICE was also present,” she continued. “You heard whistles and honking everywhere while people just went about their normal days. About half of us were bussed out to a neighborhood to see what it was like on the ground, and four out of town clergy ended up stopping the ICE arrest of a very pregnant woman. The Baptist pastor from Cleveland sitting next to me told me it was the most surreal experience of his life.”
She reported that Unitarian Universalist clergy “were unsurprisingly over-represented in a crowd of 650 clergy from all Christian denominations that showed up in Minneapolis,” numbering 200, and another 100 clergy from the United Church of Christ.
“They had to turn away another 600 because they had reached mass capacity,” she shared, adding that there were also Jewish rabbis, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and humanists, a wide variety of religions represented.
She divulged that in all honesty, she didn’t want to go to Minneapolis — “at all.”
“I am not a big fan of protests. I go to them all the time because my job is to stand with the powerless but, believe it or not, I think it is awkward standing around with signs and chanting and I am not always sure it produces actual results,” she said. “I also have no interest in getting arrested and though I am from New Hampshire, I hate the cold.”
But she felt called to go and it ended up being an incredible yet bittersweet experience in many ways, as well as eye opening
“These two days were the best training for ministry I have ever had. I learned what it truly means to engage in grounded leadership and compassionate, skillful partnership to truly love your neighbors and keep them safe.”
They were told that their hosts would train them thoroughly in non-violent resistance. They were also told they would try not to put them in harm’s way but that “they couldn’t guarantee our safety since Minneapolis is an occupied territory with 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers that are unpredictable and prone to violence.”
“Not to mention that some of our work would be outside in -40 degrees, the high was -15, but there was a still small voice in my world-weary soul that kept telling me that I had to be there. Like so many people, I had been feeling hopeless about the state of our nation, and here was something I could do to help get my community ready for when we have an ICE surge,” Bartlett said.
She conveyed that the Day of Truth and Freedom that Friday “was astounding.” They spent part of it at a Native American Christian church “learning the ways that the indigenous folks of Minneapolis have been targeted by ICE” and participated in a “sing in” with hundreds of clergy at the flagship Target store, where they demanded it become “a fourth amendment corporation and stop letting ICE use their parking lots as staging areas for raids.”
Then they marched with an estimated 75,000 plus people in sub-zero temperatures, ending with a rally at a stadium led by local clergy and organizers.
“The whole day was exhilarating and filled with hope. They are united and loving, peaceful and faithful,” Bartlett said. “So many people said that they want to continue to live connected and in partnership like this after the surge is over. ‘We will never go back to before. We want to be remembered for our dreams, not for our trauma,’ they said. The people of Minneapolis are my heroes.”
Her youngest child, a son, had told to her the weekend Pretti was killed that he felt like “protests don’t work because they don’t do anything.”
“I realized that having not been alive during the Civil Rights movement, he truly had no idea that well organized moral people can, in fact, change the world,” Bartlett said. “My kids and I watched ‘Selma’ together on Sunday night and when it was over, they said ‘Mom, we want you to go. You have to go.’ So, I went. In the end, I just want to make my kids proud of me.”
The anti-U.S. government and anti-Trump administration movement has swelled to epic proportions both nationally and around the globe since the killings of Pretti and Renée Good, the 37-year-old mother of three who was shot by an ICE agent, including in the face, during an altercation in a Minneapolis neighborhood on Jan. 7 — just two and a half weeks before Pretti met the same fate in the same city.
Concurrent vigils for Pretti organized by the Massachusetts Nurses Association held on Jan. 29 outside VA facilities in Northampton and Worcester attracted hundreds of people and the local resistance is strong. Opposition to ICE and all things Trump administration has also ramped up in the North Central Mass area in recent months in response to ongoing violent federal activity, same as across the county and world.
Locals activists including Indivisible Fitchburg members pushed back when they heard about a Turning Point USA meeting scheduled at the Westminster VFW last month, the late Charlie Kirk’s right-wing organization that advocates for conservative politics among youth. The meeting was ultimately cancelled, with the VFW sharing on social media they were not aware of what kind of organization it was.
They also spoke out against a Turning Point Education meeting scheduled at Faith Christian Church on Boutelle Street in Fitchburg but that one went ahead as scheduled. That organization is a division of Turning Point USA and according to information on its website “is dedicated to RECLAIMING the education of our children.” Multiple attempts to get a statement from church leaders via email as to why they continue to host the organization were ignored.
A large group of community members gathered in force in Leominster on Jan. 31 for a workshop titled “Community Defense in the Face of ICE.” Over 120 people attended the meeting facilitated by two women who are well versed in standing up to ICE and tangibly supporting the immigrant community and it focused on learning about rights as bystanders during an ICE abduction, how to stay safe, and what community response work looks like.
Local resident Kat Deal was one of many people who participated in the Free American Walkout held on Jan. 20 on John Fitch Highway in Fitchburg, yet another national day of action. Information about the Women’s March organized event reads as follows — “One year into Trump’s second regime, we face an escalating fascist threat: ICE raids on our communities, troops occupying our cities, families torn apart, attacks on our trans siblings, mass surveillance, and terror used to keep us silent. It is time for our communities to escalate as well.”
As Deal was leaving the gathering, she noticed some graffiti on an empty building and snapped a photo of it, words spray-painted by an unknown person that say, “Renee Good No Justice No Peace.” She has attended many protests in her lifetime, including Black Lives Matter, the Stand Up for Science rally on Boston Common last March, and the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after the first inauguration of Trump, with as many as 5.3 million people attending events across the country that day.
Deal has called North Central Mass home for over two decades and said, “like many, I am troubled by the current state of our country and the actions by ICE in Minnesota and Maine, communities just like ours.”
She joins many who are fed up with the current administration and are turning out in droves for protests and speaking out against it on every platform imaginable. When asked why she felt called to be part of the recent walkout in Fitchburg, she made it clear.
“Participating in the walkout was an important way to stand in support of our community and call for accountability, understanding, and respect for human life.”
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