The 11 a.m. Sunday service at the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is conducted in Spanish. The Richfield, MN, church serves an immigrant population, largely Hispanic, in the suburbs of Minneapolis. The parish staff know some worshippers may be undocumented, but they welcome everyone. When federal agents showed up in Minneapolis in early December, looking for immigrants to deport, church leaders naturally wondered what it might mean for their congregation.

What happened next is part of a story that has become familiar—and has made many observers wonder if history’s darkest chapter could be repeating itself. On the morning of Sunday, December 7, shortly before the Spanish service, people noticed a black Ford Explorer with tinted windows driving repeatedly past the church entrance. Someone notified one of the local “Indivisible” groups, which had begun to monitor the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol. At the time, “Operation Metro Surge,” as the Minnesota intervention was called, involved only about 100 federal agents, and local opposition was just coalescing. A notice was posted on the Indivisible group’s Facebook page calling on community members to go to the Richfield church and find out what, if anything, was happening there. 

A handful of local folks promptly answered the call. Among them were John Biestman, a 69-year-old retired banker, and his wife, Janet Lee, 67, a retired speech pathologist. In sworn declarations filed later in U.S. District Court, Lee said she and her husband went to the church because they were horrified “that the federal government might snatch people off the street outside a house of worship.” Biestman said their goal was to “observe and document” ICE activity.  

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For years, Christian supremacist ideology was coursing through American conservatism. Now it—and its antisemitism—is out in the open, in the halls of power and scaring Jews.

In the second week of July 2024, in Washington, DC, it was hard to tell exactly where the country was headed. President Joe Biden, fresh off a disastrous debate performance but still pushing for another term, told a meeting of NATO leaders that the United States and its allies had a “sacred obligation” to defend democracies under attack. Donald Trump, days away from an assassination attempt and then his nomination at the Republican National Convention, secured a GOP platform that was more moderate than what social conservatives wanted, with a softened stance on abortion and no mention of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s controversial blueprint for a second Trump term. Trump said he hadn’t bothered to read it.

What got less media attention that week, but deserved more, was a three-day “National Conservatism” conference at the Capital Hilton Hotel a half mile north of the White House. The conference highlighted an increasingly dominant strain of conservative thought centered on the promotion of America’s white European and Christian heritage and an America First nationalism. Speakers attacked globalism and advocated for greater Christian influence in the country’s social and political institutions. Several Project 2025 contributors were there, as well as eight Republican senators. Among them was JD Vance of Ohio, not yet revealed as Trump’s choice for vice president but a clear front-runner for the position after exchanging his sober anti-Trump politics of a few years earlier for a newly combative posture defending Trump’s most controversial positions.

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