St. Paul church protest: 2 more arrests made in MN

(FOX 9) - Federal authorities arrested two more men on Monday related to the anti-ICE church protest in St. Paul last month.

Arrest made in church protest

What we know:

In a tweet on Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Ian Davis Austin and Jerome Deangelo Richardson had been arrested for the demonstration at Cities Church on Sunday, Jan. 18.

Both Austin and Richardson were named along with seven other defendants –  including attorney Nekima Levy-Armstrong, journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, and St. Paul school board member Chauntyll Louisa Allen – in an indictment handed up last Friday by a grand jury.

Big picture view:

All nine defendants are accused of violations of the FACE Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. The FACE Act protects against using "threat or force" to prevent someone from exercising their right of religious freedom at a place of worship. The KKK Act bars anyone from conspiring to deprive another person of their constitutional rights.

The case will prove to be a landmark use of the FACE Act. The act has two components to its law: one part that protects reproductive clinics and another that protects places of worship. Since its passage in 1994, it doesn't appear the Department of Justice under any past administration has ever brought a criminal case under the FACE Act for a violation of the religious freedom component of the law. The first use of the religious freedom component of the FACE Act appears to be a civil lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice last fall for a protest at a ceremony for a late rabbi in New Jersey.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon noted this back in September during a news conference, saying she believed it was the "first time in history" the FACE Act had been used to prosecute an attack on a house of worship, noting that past administrations had only used the FACE Act.

It also comes after President Trump issued two dozen pardons for people convicted for protests at reproductive clinics under the FACE Act.

Cities Church protests

The backstory:

The indictment accuses Austin and Richardson of being among the group of between 20 to 40 protesters who disrupted Sunday mass at Cities Church on Jan. 18.

Demonstrators were protesting a pastor at the church, David Easterwood, who also serves as the acting field office director for ICE in St. Paul. Videos posted by protesters and captured by journalists show protesters chanting and confronting the lead pastor, and some worshipers. While it didn't appear that Easterwood was at the Sunday mass, the church's lead pastor, Jonathan Parnell, was there and tried reasoning with protesters to allow the service to continue to no avail. Ultimately, the church was cleared.

Dig deeper:

The indictment lays out a scary narrative of events, with members of the congregation fleeing the church in fear of their safety, with prosecutors writing that "young children were left to wonder, as one child put it, if their parents were going to die."

The indictment accuses all nine defendants, Levy-Armstrong, Allen, Lemon, Fort, Richardson, Austin, William Kelly, Trahern Crews, and Jamael Lundy, of conspiring together to disrupt the service. Prosecutors outline how the protesters advertised the protests on Instagram beforehand, then met at a shopping center the morning of the protest to plan before heading to the church. That meeting was captured on Don Lemon's YouTube livestream, who rode along with the protesters as he documented the event.

Authorities say some members of the protest were directed to enter the church in an "undercover capacity" before the second wave of protesters showed up.

Kelly, who goes by the username "DaWokeFarmer", is accused of confronting one member of the congregation and her children and yelling at the children: "Do you know your parents are Nazis? They're going to burn in hell." Prosecutors say Lemon even noted in his livestream that some of the congregants leaving the church seemed "frightened" and "scared."