Minnesota rising

A massive statewide strike and economic boycott is set for Friday

All eyes remain on Minneapolis, where the authoritarian, racist thuggery of the Trump administration continues to run head-on into omnipresent grass-roots resistance.

While Democratic leaders in Washington drone on about affordability, ordinary Minnesotans are taking to the streets, sometimes at great personal risk, to engage in what has effectively become a new civil rights movement.

And Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol prima donna, is the new Bull Connor.

The New York Times spoke to “several legal scholars and criminal justice experts” who said the conduct of federal agent in Minneapolis “evoked the attacks by police officers in Birmingham, Ala., on civil rights protesters in 1963.”

David Rudovsky, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, told the Times: “I think about the civil rights movement in the South and how Southern law enforcement reacted with hoses, dogs and lynchings.”

Times reporter Stephanie Saul liked the conduct of agents in Minneapolis to the “[i]mages of Birmingham’s police dogs sinking their teeth into protesters,” which “shocked the world.”

“The constitutional principles at risk are the same,” she wrote.

The sense of impunity is also the same.

As independent criminal justice journalist Radley Balko wrote in a Times op-ed, Trump administration officials aren’t even pretending to care about the brutality that culminated in the unprovoked shooting of Renee Good earlier this month.

“The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up,” he wrote. “They’re those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything. They’re a projection of power.”

An outraged federal judge in Minnesota last week temporarily enjoined federal agents from retaliating against peaceful observers and protesters, finding clear violations of their First and Fourth Amendment rights, particularly when agents subjected them to “chemical irritants, intimidation, including by pointing firearms at them, detention, and arrest.”

Judge Kate M. Menendez wrote:

Plaintiffs have established an ongoing, persistent pattern of Defendants’ chilling conduct. The dozens of declarations by similarly situated nonparties detail similar, if not more egregious, injuries to rights suffered at the hands of federal law enforcement officers for engaging in protected activity. And although the Court is resisting relying broadly on media reports of recent developments, it cannot ignore the almost-nonstop press reporting of continuing protest activity met with continuing aggressive responses by immigration officers operating in the Twin Cities. Taken as a whole, the record adequately illustrates that Defendants have made, and will continue to make, a common practice of conduct that chills observers’ and protesters’ First Amendment rights.

But the Justice Department is appealing the injunction, and it’s unclear how much it has affected the conduct of federal agents thus far.

As of Jan. 16^th, the day of the ruling, there was no sign of restraint -- quite the opposite. As Minneapolis Public Radio reported:

Six weeks into the immigration enforcement surge in the Twin Cities, observers say federal agents are employing violence more frequently and with little apparent restraint against citizens and noncitizens…

Anna Hall, a staff attorney at the nonprofit Legal Rights Center. “They’re acting with impunity, and they believe that they have the right to do that.”

This kind of response isn’t new to immigrants. The difference now, Hall said, is that many white people acting as ICE observers are also having their basic constitutional rights violated.

State and local officials in Minnesota are suing to end the ICE surge entirely, and the ACLU is suing specifically to end the racial profiling and unlawful arrests.

The Washington Post took notice of the extent of the resistance earlier this week, reporting:

[T]housands of civilians, many of them U.S. citizens with no deportation risk, have organized themselves into a highly coordinated campaign to thwart those officers. The sounds of car horns and whistles, megaphones and profane chants have become the soundtrack to daily life in the Twin Cities’ most diverse neighborhoods. Residents posting cellphone videos on TikTok, Instagram and X make up a collective online photo album of a city under stress.

Minneapolis resident Scott Meslow wrote for the Verge about his experiences:

The presence of ICE is not an abstraction to the people who live here. It’s a constant threat requiring constant vigilance. Our public schools were closed because the state government could not guarantee students would be safe. Many stores and restaurants, including 80 percent of immigrant-owned businesses, are not open, protecting both staff and patrons from the threat of an ICE raid. Many nonwhite Minnesotans — regardless of whether they are citizens or not — are essentially sheltering in place, skipping grocery runs and doctors’ appointments to stay at home, where ICE (theoretically) needs a judicial warrant to harass them.

There is a right-wing trope, frequently employed by Trump, that anyone who resists ICE must be a paid protestor. Of course, the reality is the opposite. Many of us have families, most of us have jobs, and all of us have bills to pay. None of that has changed, but the task of protecting our community still requires many, many unpaid hours. As a white U.S. citizen, I’m one of the “lucky” ones: ICE may still detain me, as they have many other lawful protesters, but I’m much less likely to be actively targeted. I’ve also been lucky in another sense: So far, I haven’t run into any truly bad situations with my young children in tow. But I expect that luck to run out soon.

Meslow concluded:

None of what I’m doing is enough. But all of it, I reassure myself, is better than nothing. The most heartening thing about this deeply disturbing moment is seeing how consistently and forcefully Minnesotans of all demographics have been pushing back. It has been galvanizing and radicalizing in ways I’m not sure anyone outside the city can truly understand.

A Minneapolis resident posted on Bluesky:

Minneapolis and Saint Paul have basically mobilized into a war economy of mutual aid and non-violent defense. I’ve never seen anything like it, even during Covid. People who barely vote are guarding their schools from ICE and doing the shopping for neighbors in hiding.

Even some local law enforcement officials in Minnesota are joining the resistance.

And New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote optimistically:

Faced with an angry public but committed to a rigid agenda of nativist brutality, the president and his coterie of ideologues are playing the only move they seem to have: wanton violence and threats of further escalation. They think this will break their opposition.

But looking at the ironclad resolve of ordinary Minnesotans to protect their homes and defend their neighbors, I think the administration is more likely to break on their opposition and learn, as the British did in Boston, that Americans are quite jealous of their liberties.

‘ICE Out of Minnesota’

Friday could be a seminal moment in this new civil rights movement.

Minnesota unions, religious groups, and ordinary citizens are planning a massive statewide strike and economic boycott.

The Ice Out of Minnesota website declares:

It is time to suspend the normal order of business to demand immediate cessation of ICE actions in MN, accountability for federal agents who have caused loss of life and abuse to Minnesota residents and call for Congress to immediately intervene.

Friday, January 23rd will be a statewide day of non-violent moral action, reflection: no work, no school, no shopping — only community, conscience, and collective action.

There will be a unified, statewide pause in daily economic activity. Instead, Minnesotans will spend time with family, neighbors, and their community to show Minnesota’s moral heart and collective economic power. This means:

• No work (except emergency services)

• No school

• No shopping or consumer spending

There will be a peaceful march and rally in downtown Minneapolis at 2:00pm.

The weather forecast is brutal, with below-zero temperatures expected all day Friday along with windchill temperature descending into the 30s below zero.

A Non-Traumatic Anecdote

The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported:

At 1 p.m. Friday, ABC News aired an interview with Abigail Adelsheim-Marshall, who owns St. Paul’s Mischief Toy Store with her parents Dan Marshall and Millie Adelsheim. She discussed the store’s decision to distribute free whistles that citizens have been using to alert neighbors of the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“She delivered a very strident anti-ICE message, which we’re incredibly proud of,” said Dan Marshall. “Three hours later, two plainclothes ICE agents came into our store and served us with a Notice of Inspection.”

The agents were asking for I-9 documents — which prove people are legal to work in this country — from the store’s employees.

The store posted the letter on Facebook, along with a message:

We’re still handing out free whistles. And we just got in hundreds of new yard signs.

Keep resisting, Minnesota. We love you.

Marshall told the Pioneer Press that in the first three hours after opening on Saturday, they sold 250 anti-ICE yard signs – and will donate $5,000 to local nonprofits.

Some Last Words From M. Gessen

New York Times opinion columnist M. Gessen wrote about the authoritarian decline in the first year of Trump’s second term, and then concluded:

Of course, the United States is not Russia — or Hungary or Venezuela or Israel or any of the many other democracies that have turned or are turning themselves into autocracies. But now is the time to focus on the similarities and try to learn from the ways other countries have cracked down on protest, eviscerated their electoral systems, limited their media freedom and built concentration camps. The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do — right now, while we still can.