PLANTED Conference: Growing Food, Faith, and Community Resilience

By Bekah Stolhandske McNeel

Sojourners, Aug 3, 2026

Bee Moorhead was surprised by the turnout at a July 7 press conference in San Antonio calling for free and fair elections. The event was simple: a group of clergy, standing in front of San Fernando Cathedral on the city’s Main Plaza, announcing their intention to ask individual lawmakers to sign commitments to defend constitutional voting rights. Important work, she knew, but not usually the stuff of headlines.

“Faith leaders all over the country, and certainly in Texas, keep speaking up, and what comes back is, ‘Why aren’t you saying anything?’” she said. But suddenly, there were microphones and cameras. People were listening to what the group of interfaith pastors, imams, rabbis, and priests were saying about the need to protect voting rights. Something was changing.

Moorhead had launched the policy initiative and called the press conference in coordination with the national interfaith organizing group Faith In Us, which formed after clergy from multiple faiths in Minneapolis and St. Paul took a visible role in the resistance movement during Operation Metro Surge.

In January, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement was overwhelming the Twin Cities, clergy there began to call for sustained national mobilization of their peers. Faith leaders invited colleagues from around the country to come and train with community organizers and unions in Minneapolis.

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Moorhead felt it was time for clergy to become a fixed presence at the vanguard of the resistance. She aims to ensure the demands of clergy are directed at the politicians who can actually address them—asking state or city leaders to unilaterally end ICE operations would be futile because ICE is a federal agency.

On July 22, clergy announced their policy agenda at the Texas Capitol, again to a surprising scrum of media. The state could once again assert its authority to regulate and inspect detention centers, which currently operate as black boxes to all but the increasingly unaccountable DHS. It wouldn’t be much, she acknowledged, but it would increase some level of pressure.

Presence in protest

The day after Texas clergy set their sights on policy, a clergy group in Maine reaffirmed their prophetic role on the front lines of physical protest, driven by the same tragic feature of ICE’s increased activity in American cities. On July 13, an ICE officer shot and killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during a traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine, just south of Portland.

As ICE action in the city increased, Rev. Jane Field, the executive director of the Maine Council of Churches, said clergy responded in kind with increased organizing. The Portland area is home to several large immigrant communities and became the target of an ICE surge at roughly the same time as Minneapolis. ICE dubbed the action in the coastal community “Operation Catch of the Day.”

In October, Field said, a local factory asked clergy if they would come and watch over the arrivals and departures of workers, as ICE began to patrol parking lots outside workplaces known to employ immigrants. Every morning and evening for weeks, Field said, clergy would meet, link arms, and form a corridor from the parking lot to the front door for workers to pass safely.

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