Resisting tyranny in Minneapolis

The people of the Twin Cities show the way for the rest of us

(Photo by Taylor Carik via Liberal Currents)

Political scientists have long wondered about how ordinary Americans would respond to life in a police state. Would they simply accept it as the new normal? Or would they resist?

This hypothetical question is no longer hypothetical. And it has now been resoundingly answered by the people of Minneapolis.

Thousands of masked thugs in paramilitary gear have occupied their city, snatching people off the street and attacking anyone who gets in their way, ostensibly under the color of law. They terrorize citizens with pepper spray and tear gas, and, in the case of 37-year-old mother Renee Good, shoot to kill.

But the people of Minneapolis have not bent the knee. They are resisting.

Wherever the invaders appear, so do citizens with whistles and phone cameras, jeering them and telling them to go away. Thousands of residents have attended protests and vigils, joined support groups, delivered food to those afraid to leave their homes, gathered outside schools to protect their children.

As horrifying as it is to watch our government’s brutality and cruelty in the street of Minneapolis, it is even more inspiring to see good people driving armed goons out of their neighborhoods, standing up for each other, expressing their humanity, and refusing to give up their liberty without a fight.

Resistance is growing even as the federal occupation appears to be focusing less on immigration enforcement and more on trying to intimidate observers, protesters, and political opponents.

The people of Minneapolis have given us hope.

Minneapolis resident Taylor Carik wrote about his experience in the city for Liberal Currents:

Many people have rhetorically asked, “If you were given a chance to fight back against the fascists, what would you do?” Many people in Minnesota have answered with organizing and observing. To their credit, hundreds of experienced and newly minted activists and some City Council members have been on the front lines trying to channel people’s frustrations and fears into action….

The growing community safety support in the Twin Cities not only includes parents and neighbors providing meal delivery and monitoring ICE vehicles approaching, it includes the contemporary versions of old school telephone trees to share much needed information. It’s also observers bearing witness to the actual violence and disregard by ICE.

It’s those of us who live here, whether natives to Minnesota, or long-time immigrants, or first-generation immigrants, or recent to the state in search of a better and more protective community, who will be the difference between a brake on or the acceleration toward domestic military police state (a surge by any other name.)

Robert Reich published a note he received from Phillip Cryan, a former student who lives in Minneapolis:

The horror, grief and fear we are all experiencing every day, watching our neighbors get hauled away by reckless, cruel, masked paramilitaries; trying to protect one another; and knowing that what they did to Renee Nicole Good could happen to any of us, is generating this: unexpected, heartfelt new connections of not just solidarity but real love. At a massive, simply-incomprehensible scale. Good people coming together in all our fear and vulnerability and care and kindness and bravery, discovering the transformative power of our love for one another.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday:

Participants say they have been propelled into action with two goals in mind: an urge to protect their neighbors, many of whom are in the country without authorization but have no criminal backgrounds, and also to push back against what they see as a violent and overreaching federal government….

Ashley Lopez, who works in education and lives in the city of West St. Paul, has become active in anti-ICE neighborhood groups only in the week since Ms. Good’s death.

“Because of what happened to Renee, I felt like we had nothing to lose anymore,” said Ms. Lopez, who has joined patrols that blow whistles and set off their own car alarms if they see ICE agents. “Why should she be the only one who put herself in danger?”

MS NOW spoke with Andrew Fahlstrom, a leader with a citizen monitoring group called Defend the 612.

Fahlstrom said he thinks the raids are meant to instill fear. But instead of driving people underground, residents continue to sign up as monitors. As of Saturday, more than 4,000 had volunteered.

“Renee Good could have been any one of us. She wasn’t doing anything different than what thousands of people on the street were doing. People are committed. People are showing up. People are taking to the streets to protect each other. I’m not afraid. I’m here to make sure that we protect each other. And that’s what we’ll do every day as long as we can,” Fahlstrom said.

There have been many organized protests, as well. Thousands of demonstrators marched through Minneapolis’s frigid streets on Saturday for Renee Good. Minnesota Public Radio reported that “Many in the crowd said they were inspired by the actions their fellow Minnesotans have taken to oppose ICE.”

Protests continued Tuesday night, including a loud gathering outside a local hotel where ICE agents were said to be staying, and a rally outside Minneapolis’s federal building, where agents deployed flash-bang grenades, making downtown look like a war zone.

Captured on Video

Videos captured by brave observers and shared on social media have frequently driven the narrative.

The New York Times, for instance, reported on Tuesday:

Images circulating on social media over the past two days and verified by The New York Times show agents approaching a car at a gas station, seeking out the immigration status of the driver and demanding that he open the door. When he doesn’t, they break the window of the car and remove him. Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol official, yells at bystanders to back up….

In another video, Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council, is seen being shoved by an agent.

Mr. Payne said in an interview Tuesday that federal agents with assault rifles and combat gear were patrolling the streets in convoys. At night they shine lights from the vehicles onto pedestrians, he said.

“This is a military occupation, and it feels like a military occupation,” Mr. Payne said.

According to Mr. Payne, federal agents scream obscenities at residents and repeatedly holster and unholster their weapons. “It’s like living in a war zone,” he said.

What Observing Is For

Sociologist Nicole Bedera posted a enlightening thread on Bluesky, explaining the profoundly humanitarian motivation of the people who follow immigration enforcements around and record them:

I’m seeing lots of people on here misunderstand the purpose of ICE watch. It’s de-escalation. And it’s grounded in the social science of violence.

Among perpetrators of violence, there is a very small share who are independently motivated to violence. But the vast majority of perpetrators commit violence to seek approval and status from others. This is particularly true among men who use violence to affirm their masculinity.

The goal of ICE watch is to surround that second type of perpetrator with people who *disapprove* of their actions.

It will make them less likely to be violent and we’ve seen that, in some cases, that includes rethinking their original plan to tear a family apart too.

The success of ICE watch interfering with ICE’s mission is almost certainly why DHS keeps sending more agents to Minneapolis.

They used to execute their raids with just a few agents. Now they need 6-12 to even begin to disrupt the social pressure to be nonviolent.

I’m just echoing others who have already said this, but it’s a good thing that it takes so many ICE agents to make a single arrest. It makes the whole operation slower and more resource-intensive.

It can be hard to see the success of prevention efforts because we can’t see inside the minds of the people who changed their behavior because of those efforts. But there are a lot of reasons to believe ICE watch is working. And it’s also part of why ICE watch is generally safer than it sounds.

Here, case in point, is video of federal agents getting run out of a Minneapolis neighborhood by residents on Monday.

A Spontaneous Memorial

This wonderful Rolling Stone article describes the scene around a makeshift memorial for Good that sprang up Thursday at the intersection where she was killed on Wednesday, “covered in flowers, candles, and handmade signs surrounding a large wooden cross.”

Early that morning, Minneapolis resident Amber Mattern, pushing her young child in a stroller down the street, was overcome with emotion. “It’s scary,” she says, eyes fixed on the growing memorial. “Our leadership is supposed to be for the people and that doesn’t seem to be the case.” She carried a handmade sign that read “Rest In Power, Renee,” which she later left at Good’s memorial. “I just want something to be done and I feel like we have to come together. We have to stand up.”…

Minneapolis’ Somali-American community, a major target of recent ICE operations, mobilized large numbers of volunteers to administer hospitality and mutual aid. All afternoon and evening, a procession of women moved through the crowd to keep people fed, hydrated, and caffeinated. A woman moved back and forth between the intersection, passing out steaming styrofoam cups of tea carefully balanced in her hands. Another woman presented a tray of freshly baked sambusas to anyone who looked hungry. “So many of us fear to take our children to school,” she tells me. “All Minnesotans feel unsafe, this is not about color.”

Protecting the Children

A lot of the organizing has centered around protecting schools:

MPR reporter Jon Collins posted on social media:

People who aren’t in Minnesota might not know that if you drive or walk past pretty much any school, there’s going to be a group of people, parents and childless, standing guard to make sure the kids are safe from feds. It’s pretty remarkable. And very disturbing.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

Organized into “sanctuary school teams,” the volunteers—many of them moms already involved at their schools—use Google documents to divvy up tasks, such as delivering groceries to immigrant families. Volunteers are on hand at drop-off and pickup with whistles to blow in case ICE agents show up.

Area students have participated in several walkouts. About 500 high school students walked out of Roseville High School Monday morning.

And the Sahan Journal reported:

Hundreds of Roosevelt High School students walked out of school Monday afternoon, days after Border Patrol agents detained a special education assistant at the Minneapolis school and deployed chemical irritants on a crowd that included dozens of students.

A Matter of Faith

NPR reported on how communities of faith “are at the forefront of resistance, organizing public witness, mutual aid and political action rooted in long-standing religious commitments.” The article described a singing vigil that wound through the streets of south Minneapolis, near the site where Good was killed:

The lyric “We belong to them, and they belong to us” echoed in the cold January air.

The procession of several hundred people included one man holding a hand-lettered sign that read “Jesus was an immigrant” and others carrying large, homemade crosses. One older woman navigated the icy streets while using a walker. Another pushed her Pomeranian in a dog stroller. Parents held the hands of their small children.

The vigil began at San Pablo Church and paused along the route at sites where federal agents had recently detained people. Organizers said they hoped to bring comfort to a neighborhood shaken by violence and cowed by fear. As they walked along the Lake Street business corridor, cars honked in support. On side streets, residents emerged onto their front porches, some wrapped in blankets, to wave or applaud.

The National Weekend of Action

All around the country, people gathered over the weekend to mourn and protest Good’s killing, under the slogan “ICE Out for Good.”

Indivisible reported that “In under 48 hours, you organized nearly 1,200 marches and vigils in all 50 states and DC for Renee Nicole Good. There are more of us than there are of them — and We the People won’t stop demanding accountability for ICE’s killing of Renee.”

There were protests in New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, even Fairbanks, Alaska, where the temperature hit -30 degrees Fahrenheit.

The Week in the Courts

• A federal judge is preparing to rule later this week on a lawsuit filed in December asking her to bar ICE officers in Minnesota from taking retaliatory action against observers and protesters. This could be huge.

• State and city officials in Minnesota filed a federal lawsuit on Monday to halt the ICE surge there entirely. “The unlawful deployment of thousands of armed, masked, and poorly trained federal agents is hurting Minnesota,” state Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement. “People are being racially profiled, harassed, terrorized, and assaulted. Schools have gone into lockdown. Businesses have been forced to close. Minnesota police are spending countless hours dealing with the chaos ICE is causing. This federal invasion of the Twin Cities has to stop, so today I am suing DHS to bring it to an end.”

• Chicago and the state of Illinois filed a similar lawsuit on Monday. “The Trump administration has unleashed an organized bombardment on the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago, causing turmoil and imposing a climate of fear,” the suit alleges. “Though Defendants describe this assault as ‘immigration enforcement,’ the reality is that uniformed, military-trained personnel, carrying semi-automatic firearms and military-grade weaponry, have rampaged for months through Chicago and surrounding areas, lawlessly stopping, interrogating, and arresting residents, and attacking them with chemical weapons.”

• A federal judge in Seattle struck down most of the provisions in Trump’s executive order on election integrity against vote-by-mail states Washington and Oregon. The judge found that Trump’s efforts violated the separation of powers.

• A federal judge in New York granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s decision to freeze $10 billion in child-care and family assistance to blue states.

Walkouts Planned

Free America is calling for a mass walkout on the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration. “On January 20 at 2 PM local time, we will walk out of work, school, and commerce because a Free America begins the moment we stop cooperating with fascism.”

FreeDC is organizing a walkout gathering from 1 to 3 p.m. at Freedom Plaza.

Minnesota labor and community groups have announced a day of ​“no work, no school, no shopping” on January 23 “to oppose the ferocious assault on the state by federal immigration authorities.”

End Notes

• From the Los Angeles Times: “Anti-ICE protester blinded by federal agent during demonstration in Santa Ana, family says.”

• In the Nation: “Want to Stop ICE? Go After Its Corporate Collaborators.”

• From New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg: “The Resistance Libs Were Right.”