The Burgeoning Resistance Amidst the Crackdown in Minneapolis

Since the murder of Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7, the world’s attention has turned sharply to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Good, a mother of three children, had just dropped off her youngest child at school, when she had a chance encounter with ICE and attempted to leave the area.  She was shot four times and denied medical care. Her last words captured on video were, “I’m not mad at you.” Outraged, thousands of Minnesotans took to the streets in protest. Good’s murder was followed by the ICE shooting of a Venezuelan man that also led to further militant protests on Minneapolis’ north side.

Following these events, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the former vice-presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket in 2024, made an extraordinary televised address. It was notable for both capturing the severity of the political crisis and putting forth feeble solutions. Walz told Minnesotans:

What’s happening in Minnesota right now defies belief. News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities. Two to three thousand armed agents of the federal government have been deployed to Minnesota. Armed, masked, under-trained ICE agents are going door to door, ordering people to point out where their neighbors of color live. They’re pulling over people, indiscriminately, including U.S. citizens, and demanding to see their papers and at grocery stores at bus stops even at our schools. They’re breaking windows, dragging pregnant women down the street. Just plain grabbing Minnesotans and shoving them into unmarked vans. Kidnapping innocent people with no warning and no due process.

Let’s be very, very clear this long ago stopped being a matter of immigration enforcement. Instead, it’s a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.

Walz called the federal presence an “occupation” and warned that worse was to come. Trump promised “the day of retribution and reckoning is coming.” Yet, what was Walz providing as a solution to this unprecedented crisis? He repeats verbatim the refrain of other Democratic politicians, high and low throughout the country: remain “peaceful” and “accountability is coming at the ballot box and the court.” Most importantly, Walz concluded:

We’re an island of decency in a country being driven towards cruelty. We will remain an island of decency, of justice, of community, of peace. And tonight, I come before you simply to ask: Don’t let anyone take that away from us.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, on top of ominous threats he has already made, once again, threatened to escalate the repression by invoking the Insurrection Act. This ancient federal law would allow him to deploy active-duty troops to Minneapolis, turning the rampant criminality of ICE and the Border Patrol into a full-fledged military occupation. The Brennan Center for Justice warns that the act as “the law, which has not been meaningfully updated in over 150 years, is dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse.” The latest reports are that the Pentagon has put 1500 combat troops on standby.

Trump, however, has wavered on invoking the act faced with his growing unpopularity. Most polls put his support below a forty percent job approval rating. The latest CNN poll says, “A majority, 58%, calls the first year of Trump’s term a failure.” The report revealed even deeper popular concerns across party lines and loyalties,

A 55% majority say that Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, with just 32% saying they’ve made an improvement. Most, 64%, say he hasn’t gone far enough in trying to reduce the price of everyday goods. Even within the GOP, about half say that he should be doing more, including 42% among Republicans and Republican-leaners who describe themselves as members of the “Make America Great Again” movement. Only one-third of Americans now say they believe that Trump cares about people like them, down from 40% last March and the worst rating of his political career.

Decency and waiting for the November elections in the face of this looming authoritarian threat however is unlikely to deter Trump. He is sending one thousand more federal agents to join the already 2,000 already deployed to the Minneapolis—St. Paul region, popularly known as the “Twin Cities.” Trump along with his cabinet of billionaires and former Fox News’ talking heads hold the reins of power in the commanding heights of the federal government, and they wield it with near impunity, despite his unpopularity. It is the weakness of the opposition from the Democratic Party and a handful of Republicans that allow him to get away with what he does.

Trump attacked Venezuela and killed one hundred people, kidnapped its President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, while the Democrats responded by saying they weren’t informed beforehand. A short-lived and very mild dissent by five by Republican Senators to a Democratic initiative to implement the War Powers Act to reign in Trump was easily squashed, when two flipped after being threatened by Trump. Faced with growing opposition to ICE’s reign of terror, Democratic leaders have threatened to hold up the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding. Democrats are demanding ICE and the Border Patrol be unmasked and wear body cameras. Trump responded that ICE and Border Patrol agents have federal “immunity.”

What Trump means by that is he can pardon them at will. With his pen in hand he wields vast and absolute pardon powers. Trump has pardoned January 6^th fascist insurrectionists, fraudsters, drug dealers, and political cronies, it hard to see any ICE and Border Patrol agents ever being held accountable for their crimes. The FBI led by Trump appointee Kash Patel has so far successfully sabotaged a federal investigation into Renee Good’s murder, and instead has begun specious investigations into Good’s wife and Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Six veteran prosecutors have so far resigned in protest.

Paul Krugman, the former columnist for the New York Times and now popular on Substack, summed up the dreary political situation:

Our vaunted institutions, our system of checks and balances, either capitulated quickly or were overrun by Trump’s onslaught. Big business quickly bent the knee, immediately directing its focus to how to make money through Trump trades. The Supreme Court and the Republican Congress abetted and even encouraged every fascist move.

While there have been small victories in the federal courts in Minnesota and Chicago, where some judges have attempted to curb ICE violence towards protestors, but they’ve been weak reeds for our side to hold to. Initial rulings against ICE in Chicago were overturned on appeal. Federal court rulings also are a cue for the Democratic Party controlled local and state governments to step in and police anti-ICE protestors. Broadview, Illinois, where the Illinois state police and local cops took over policing after weeks of militant protests at an ICE detention center. It is the Illinois state police that now arrest anti-ICE demonstrators. Hopes that Walz’s mobilization of the Minnesota National Guard is to protect anti-ICE protestors is misplaced. A recent post on X, formerly Twitter, by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, made this clear, “At Gov. Walz’s direction, the Minnesota National Guard have been mobilized and are staging to support local law enforcement and emergency management agencies.”

Civil and labor resistance

Minneapolis holds a special place of hatred in Trump’s heart and all Far Right bigots across the United States. It was the site of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 that ignited the national uprising against racism, the largest civil uprising to date in U.S. history, that also spread globally. The uprising was a major contributor to Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s hatred for Somali refugees is well known, calling them “garbage.” He recently ended their temporary legal status. Trump’s obsession with Minnesota Somali-American Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), he’s demanded that she be stripped of her citizenship and deported, is just creepy. Yet, the Democratic Party establishment have proved to be weak defenders of Somali community, at best, where actions don’t raise to the level of their rhetoric.

“The government of the state of Minnesota and the City of Minneapolis are offering NOTHING to stop what both the Governor and Mayor admit is a reign of terror by ICE and other Federal agencies. Walz called it an ‘occupation’; Frey famously called on ICE to ‘get the fuck out!’

So in the absence of any other force or plan to counter this reign of terror—the people of Minneapolis, St Paul, Richfield, St Cloud, and other communities have rightfully taken it upon ourselves to organize resistance to these murderous forces,” Kieran Knutson, the working president of the Communication Workers of America (CWA) Local 7250, recently posted on his Facebook page.

The fightback has impacted ICE’s operations, but revealed the role of the local Democratic party controlled police forces, according to Knutson:

While ICE has abducted and deported hundreds of Minnesotans – they have also often been delayed, prevented, and defeated in their campaign by this civil resistance. The resistance has also proactively taken it to ICE at the Whipple Federal Building, causing ICE to have to expend a great amount of resources and personnel to protect their base and detention center that otherwise would have gone towards abductions. The response by the State and City governments has been to criminalize and repress the resistance; to offer protection for ICE when the resistance and the communities impacted have confronted the Feds. The only arrests the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) has made during this campaign of terror – is of those resisting ICE.

Dan Troccoli, a public school teacher and union activist, recently told The Nation magazine’s Dave Zirin:

“Many people around the city have been going around patrolling and keeping an eye on these agents. There are estimates as high as 10,000 people that have been involved in the city in these efforts in the last six weeks. Given the legacy of the uprisings after [the 2020 police murder of] George Floyd, people in the city have been activated for years now. I would argue we were Trump’s target for that reason, but it’s not going exactly like they planned, and people need to know that.”

Among the “unplanned” events were student walkouts at Roosevelt High School following Renee Good’s murder and an ICE invasion of the campus pursuing someone—who later was revealed as a U.S. citizen—as school was breaking for the day. ICE assaulted and gassed the students. The Minneapolis Public Schools administration closed all public schools for several days. Previously existing Deportation Defense Group, based in the Minneapolis Federation of Education (MFE), one of two unions that represent teachers, kicked into action.

“This past weekend,” Troccoli told Zirin, “we had a training at one of our high schools, and there were something like 300 parents and staff mixed together, working together to try and organize in their buildings. At recent meetings of this same network of Unionists in MFE, there have been something like 60 to 70 percent of schools represented. And I would imagine it’s much higher now since Renee’s murder, with more buildings getting activated, involved, mostly out of fear and concern for their students’ safety.”

For veteran Minnesotan trade union and socialist activist Kip Hedges, “Minnesotans are also beginning to go more on the offensive. On Saturday, January 10 thousands of people poured into the streets for an ICE Out of Minnesota rally and march. The crowd was made up of high school students (some of whom had been tear gassed only days earlier at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis), retirees, union members, immigrants and community members.” A larger turnout is expected on Friday, January 23^rd, the date chosen by many Faith leaders, union representatives and community activists. “ICE Out of MN: Day of Truth and Freedom” calls on all Minnesotans not to go to work, school or go shopping.

Auxiliary Minister JaNaé Bates Imari of St. Paul’s Camphor Memorial United Methodist Church, called for Minnesotans to “leverage our economic power, our labor, our prayer for one another. What we have seen and what we have witnessed, what we have all gone through is not normal. [Renee Good was] standing up for her neighbor. Her whistle blowing was returned by bullets. We will not, we cannot let that stand. Minnesota will not continue to be a testing ground for the kind of fear and violence that is expected for the rest of this country.” The day of action very much modeled after several “A Day Without an Immigrant”events of past years.

The broad array of trade unions, community and immigrant rights groups supporting the day of action is breathtaking and points to how deep the hatred of ICE and the Border patrol runs in Minnesota, right now. I spoke to several long-time and knowledgeable activists in the Twin Cities, who are involved in the daily organizing for January 23, and asked them about their expectations. All of them believe that the demonstration will be bigger than January 10. Many thousands of workers, union and non-union, are expected to take sick, vacation, or personal days to attend the march and other actions. Talk of a General Strike has caught on as momentum builds towards January 23, despite the far more cautious and ambiguous announcements from the official trade union leadership.

We should also keep in mind, that many of the public sector unions that have endorsed January 23^rd, who are under heavy political pressure from the Democratic establishment, have also made it clear that they are not telling their members to strike. The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1005, for example, that represents Minneapolis’ city bus drivers in a recent Facebook post disappointingly told its members: “I want to clarify ATU’s position regarding the 1/23 ICE rally. The ATU IS NOT participating in the general strike. While we support the purpose of the rally, we encourage members to engage in alternative forms of protest, such as refraining from shopping or other lawful actions that do not conflict with their work obligations.”

Yet, several people told me that they would be surprised if some workplaces did walk out. Abdikarim Hassan Qazi, a Somali-American rideshare driver, told the CBS New affiliate in Minneapolis, called on his fellow drivers to shut down service on Jan. 23. “We’re facing a tsunami of hate sponsored by our own federal government. The masks are gonna come off. We’re going to hold them responsible for all their actions.” The extensive use of sick days in some workplaces may take on the feel of an actual strike, but we will have to see how things turn out on January 23, and where the struggle goes from there.

Meanwhile, education workers and students in New York City are planning on walking out and rallying in solidarity with Minneapolis on January 23, and activists in many other cities are starting mobilize, but much more needs to be done.

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