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The Advocate

Everyone Will Call the Seven Clergy Arrested in Vermont Either Prophets or Trespassers. Read Employment Division v. Smith. It Calls Them Both, and That Is What Protects You.

Seven clergy knelt in the doorway of the building that helps ICE pick its targets and said their faith required it. The Free Exercise Clause has never excused a blockade, and that is exactly why it can protect a sermon.

Everyone Will Call the Seven Clergy Arrested in Vermont Either Prophets or Trespassers. Read Employment Division v. Smith. It Calls Them Both, and That Is What Protects You.

Strip the case to its principle and it is not complicated. The First Amendment protects what you believe without limit and what you do with conditions. That line was drawn in 1879, redrawn in 1990, and it has not moved for anyone since. On Friday morning it was drawn again, in handcuffs, in a doorway in Williston, Vermont.

At about 7:30 a.m. on September 4, seven faith leaders knelt in the entrances of a building that houses the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, one of three facilities that help Immigration and Customs Enforcement decide where its agents go. They sang. They prayed. They read the names of people they said had died in ICE custody or in ICE encounters. About three hours later Williston police and Vermont state troopers handcuffed them, carried at least two of them out bodily, and charged all seven with unlawful trespass.

The Rev. Rebecca Girrell, a United Methodist pastor who serves United Community Church in Morrisville, put the claim as plainly as it can be put. It was imperative on her, as a faith leader, she said, to proclaim that human beings are not targets and that God is a God of justice and of love. The Rev. Karen G. Johnston, senior minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, said her values called her to refuse cooperation with what the center does, and she refused.

So here is the question the arrests actually pose, and it is not the one the cable segments will ask. If a pastor's faith compels her to block a door, does the Free Exercise Clause stand between her and the trespass statute?

It does not. It never has. And the reason it does not is the same reason it can protect her sermon on Sunday.

Begin with terms. A neutral law of general applicability is a law that does not mention religion and applies to everyone regardless of it. Vermont's unlawful trespass statute is as neutral as a statute gets. It does not care whether the person in the doorway is a Quaker or a Teamster. In Employment Division v. Smith, decided in 1990, the Supreme Court held that such a law does not need a religious exemption to survive a free exercise challenge, even when it burdens sincere religious conduct. Justice Scalia reached back to Reynolds v. United States, an 1879 case about a Mormon polygamist, for the sentence that still governs: to permit conscience to override a general law "would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land."

Two more pieces of ground, because people will reach for them. The federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which restored the strict test Smith abandoned, does not apply to state prosecutions at all; the Court held that in City of Boerne v. Flores in 1997. And the opening the Court found in Fulton v. Philadelphia in 2021, that a law is not generally applicable if it lets officials hand out exemptions case by case, does not help here. Nobody gets a permit to sit in that doorway.

Now concede what should be conceded. Girrell is right that the loudest Christian voice on immigration is not the only one, and she is right that faith obliges witness. Churches have won real cases against this administration this year. Dozens of religious bodies have filed at least twenty two lawsuits challenging its immigration policies, by Religion News Service's count. In August the Fourth Circuit left in place an injunction limiting immigration arrests at some houses of worship, and this desk covered that ruling. Those victories were real.

None of them came from a doorway. Every one of them came from a courtroom. That is the turn, and it is the whole piece.

The Free Exercise Clause protects the sermon, the vigil on the public sidewalk, the church that declares itself a sanctuary, the pastor who sues. It protects those things precisely because it refuses to protect the blockade. A clause that exempted conscience from trespass law would have to decide whose conscience counted, and the moment a court starts ranking consciences, the sermon is no longer safe either. The law that cannot excuse Rebecca Girrell is the law that cannot be turned against her.

If that sounds abstract, name the other doorway. In October 2020 Lauren Handy and a group of pro-life activists blockaded an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C. They were convicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Handy received fifty seven months. On January 23, 2025, President Trump pardoned her and twenty two others convicted under the same statute. A pardon is mercy, and mercy is the executive's to give. It is not a holding that the First Amendment had been on their side. It had not. The court that sentenced Handy and the troopers who cuffed Girrell were applying the same principle, and the reader who cheered one and wants the other punished owes the principle an explanation.

The liberty I claim must shield the person I disagree with, or it shields no one.

There is an older tradition that understood this better than either side's press releases. Martin Luther King Jr., writing from a Birmingham jail, defended breaking an unjust law only when it was done openly and "with a willingness to accept the penalty." The penalty was the point. It was the argument. A conscience that demands to be exempt from the law it defies is asking for a permit, not bearing a witness. The Williston seven, to their credit, did not ask for a permit. They asked to be carried out, and they were.

Whether they ever see a courtroom is a separate question, and it belongs to the county prosecutor, not the Constitution. WCAX's archive records twelve trespass arrests at the same building in July and a decision by the county's prosecutor in February not to pursue an earlier group. We have not verified those earlier cases beyond the station's own reporting. The building, RNS notes, is private property with tenants that have nothing to do with ICE, which is why the charge is state trespass and not a federal count.

What can a reader do with this? Know where the line runs before you reach it. The sidewalk is yours. The sermon is yours. The lawsuit is yours, and this year it has been winning. The doorway is not yours, and if you take it anyway, take it the way King said to, with your eyes open and your name on the citation.

Catherine Bock, 78. Jessica Derise, 54. Rebecca Girrell, 47. Elizabeth Gleich, 36. Karen Johnston, 58. Earl Kooperkamp, 69. Susan McMillan, 65. Those are the names Vermont State Police released, and they will be on a docket somewhere. Pray for them, and pray for the people who work inside the building they blocked, who also go home to families.

The Advocate runs free so it can be sent to the friend who thinks the Constitution is on his side in every argument. Send it. If you want the desk behind it to keep going, membership is how.

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