We’ve been keeping an eye on the Hercules Gymnasium…there’s this Lichtenfeld kid, already a champion wrestler, takes a particular interest in street fighting. Understands that there are no rule books, this isn’t sport, it’s Nazis who are out to kill us, and the less well-mannered we can be about it, the more effective.
–Thomas Pynchon (2025)
Soul power is the dynamic force that popular freedom struggles generate and unleash when we, the too long oppressed, begin to show up in undistracted fullness to our lives… Soul power, ultimately, is for the nurturing and defense of the commonweal.
–Edgar Rivera Colón (2025)
Minnesota community groups were organizing against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Operation Metro Surge long before ICE veteran Jonathan Ross killed Renee Nicole Good in South Minneapolis.
Good’s murder turned those burgeoning organizing efforts into a resistance movement. From huge demonstrations to squadrons of newly trained legal observers, daily food shipments to tens of thousands of families sheltering-in-place from ICE, and the first general strike in the U.S. since 1946 or 2006 (depending on who you talk to).
Here in St. Paul across the Mississippi River, I remained largely compartmentalized between deep outrage and the quotidian necessity of completing work most of us are still obligated to do at this nasty juncture of fascism and ecological collapse. Of course, hundreds of immigrant and Black and Brown people were on their way to fulfilling exactly that obligation—somehow feeding their families in a free fall of an economy–when ICE thugs ripped them out of their loved ones’ lives.
Fascism, like climate change, is recorded on someone else’s camera elsewhere until one day—hopefully not your last—you’re filming it yourself through a smashed lens. My shock was delivered on my social media feed in a photo of a car cut in half on Snelling Avenue off the I-94 exit, a few blocks from my house. The caption offered little detail and I didn’t know the person who posted it.
So I walked up to the spot where I thought the crash took place. At first I didn’t see anything across the street. There was no car. But upon crossing the road onto the grassy median, I saw pieces of plastic and metal scattered exactly at the spot.
I subsequently found a video of the immediate aftermath a driver, with others honking his horn in alarm, had posted onto the iceout.org map of ICE incidents. The clip showed the observer’s car, now run off the road and sawed near-in-two. ICE agents ganged up to arrest her and, without medical attention, folded her up into an ICE van.
Reports indicate that ICE units are purposefully smashing observers’ cars to serve as rationale for a deadly response to observers’ “weaponizing” their cars. Exactly what Homeland Security contended Good had done. A Nation report from 2014 reported U.S. Border agents in Texas, of which Ross was one at the time, “intentionally stepped in front of moving vehicles to justify shooting at them.”
As much as Ross lost his misogynistic temper—“fucking bitch”—rather than feared for his life, his choice to step into the path of Good’s car to create a threat of his own making may have been exactly part of his training he also taught others. In a coincidence too convergent to be mere serendipity, Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd five blocks from Goode’s death, also trained fellow officers.
It’s as if the liberal shibboleth that more training is needed knowingly misses the point, perhaps to the extent that these deaths are as much a part of the political class’s kayfaybe of staged infighting, piling body upon dead body outside the ring.
What seemed later in the day, five blocks south at a gas station I regularly pick up my newspaper, ICE agents, tiny Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino with them, ripped out a Honduran immigrant from his car and George Floyded him unconscious, a knee on his neck. The guy looked dead in the video. ICE agents put this next limp body into a car. Twenty-seven-year-old Orbin Mauicio Henríquez Serrano wasn’t killed, but apparently suffered serious injuries.
A second observer at the gas station was also gang-tackled by some nine agents for no reason than mouthing back at one as he filmed the encounter with his phone, shades of the murder of Veterans Administration nurse Alex Pretti to come.
I went back to the iceout.org map. The first incident up around I-94 was tagged at 2:30PM. The second at the gas station at 2:40PM. The time stamps underscored that ICE is driving through the Twin Cities on sprees of violence and mayhem—at Bovino’s presiding and in full view of the press.
The gas station is just two blocks away from where St. Paul acting ICE field office coordinator David Easterwood serves as a pastor at the Southern Baptist Cities Church. The gall of a slaveholders’ gospel centered on beating up one’s neighbors inspired Black-led protestors to interrupt a service at the church to federal charges under a law protecting houses of worship from the KKK.
The “reckoning and retribution” President Trump promised Minnesota—my neighborhood now included—hasn’t worked out for the administration, however.
The murders and mayhem, the agonizing disappearances, the collective punishment in freezing Minnesota’s food stamp program, and the threats of indictment against the governor, the state attorney general, and Minneapolis’s mayor for failing to cooperate have yielded little in the way of positive results for the administration. Indeed, quite the contrary.
I have mixed feeling about historian Heather Cox Richardson. Her silence on Gaza has been tellingly inexcusable, underscoring Ta-Nehisi Coates’s warning that if liberals can’t draw the line at genocide, they can’t draw the line at democracy. But let’s allow her these opening points about the Minnesota moment:
Something big happened after Jonathan Ross…. First of all, the administration surged many more agents to Minneapolis and it had to pull them from other operations…
Second of all, people in Minnesota didn’t back down. Rather than being afraid and that fear making them stay away from situations where they would encounter federal agents, more and more and more people came out.
The Trump administration, Richardson continued, doesn’t enjoy majority support and must use intimidation to induce the kind of anticipatory obedience it needs for the next stage in its creeping fascistic coup. Instead, in a matter of weeks, national public polls have flipped to more Americans in favor of abolishing ICE.
At a press conference, Bovino copped ICE is losing in Minnesota, but his attention appeared focused on a playing field far smaller than what’s actually in play:
So, what we seen here that is a bit different here is the organization of some of the groups. The groups are a bit better organized. They’ve got some excellent communications. And that coupled with a very poor response from the mayor and the governor—those two things coupled together make that a difficult operating environment at times…
It’s the collusion and corruption between elected officials and these anarchists that are intent on creating violence for law enforcement.
In Robert McNamara style, Bovino belittled the unnamed opposition who are defeating him. Like his narcissistic bosses, he shifted his failures onto local Democrats.
You can see Bovino’s frustration the next day, he himself setting off gas canisters upon the courts’ reversing an injunction against such tactics. Although Trump’s private Freikorps has shown little but contempt for the laws they ostensibly enforce. As one internet wit put it, ICE agents are likely to have much longer criminal records—even before the latest operations—than all the people they’ve snatched up combined.
At the press conference, Bovino offered a telling contrast that only underscored the Minnesotan reaction:
I just came from Operation Catahoula Crunch there in Louisiana, in which state and locals, including the governor, the mayors, the police chief, worked in close concert for us to do what my colleague here Marcus Charles said, and that’s to remove violent offenders—bad people and bad things—from the street. And in doing that, I had one—one—act of violence against Border Patrol, one notable act of violence against Border Patrol in a month. Here, I’ve lost count. I’ve already lost count.
No word on how the thousands of working people without criminal records—and children as young as two—ICE has violently removed figure into those efforts to remove violent offenders. What’s clear is that under Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller’s program, the real objective is to collect as much hay as possible in the name of finding the few offending needles.
To contrast the nature of Minnesota and Louisiana by their officials’ willingness to assist efforts in extrajudicial violence misses all the other means by which to compare the two states.
Minnesota typically tops many of the lists of U.S. states’ social organization, well-being, and health, while Louisiana routinely slots in toward the bottom. My parents, disease ecologists Deborah Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, showed right-to-work states like Louisiana suffer worse public health across acute and chronic conditions.
The comparison in this direction is nothing against Louisiana. There are wonderful people there. Our Pandemic Research for the People (PReP) team wrote last year of phenomenal environmental justice campaigns pursued in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s 20th year commemoration. One of PReP’s first dispatches highlighted mutual aid efforts in New Orleans during the early COVID-19 pandemic.
The point here, however, is to offer a starting hypothesis that states that host greater room for working people to organize in unions and community groups are likely also in better positions to scale up organizing against federal-level fascism.
On the other hand, as our PReP working group discussed last year, liberal states are also better able to undercut radical efforts by appropriating (and watering down) bottom-up programs in ways about which activists working in more conservative states are under no illusion.
It was Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley who defeated Martin Luther King’s efforts to bring the civil rights movement North. It was Democratic governors who President Obama’s DOJ organized to violently repress the Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Dakota Access Pipeline movements. It was in the final days of the Biden administration when reporter Sam Husseni was physically carried out of the Pentagon briefing room by armed guards for his persistent questioning of the U.S. role in the Palestinian genocide.
The virulence with which Minneapolis residents characterize Mayor Jacob Frey around this genre of betrayal—from police reform post-George Floyd riots to refusing to protect Minneapolitans from “fucking” ICE—is no urban myth. A recent march in Minneapolis spoke exactly to that problem, demanding Frey and Minnesota governor Tim Walz step up against ICE.
Indeed, the country’s parliamentarian institutions, as Richardson continued, have all rolled over this past year: Congress, universities, law firms, and media organizations—up until working people intervened on their own across the country.
Should people’s resistance movements require a certain scale of operation to succeed Minnesota-, LA-, and Chicago-style, wider decades-long organizing across issues helps provide such efforts the initial conditions needed to suddenly scale up.
Modeling of such community resilience has been developed over fifty years, starting in ecological settings before being applied in public health.
Resilience is a multivalent concept. Yes, there have developed poorly aligned connotations of individual psychological sturdiness, but in the scientific literature, it’s more a population-level measure used to characterize how quickly or expansive an ecological or epidemiological danger propagates through or is staunched in a population.
Communities with resources political and social can buffer against many of these threats enough to keep them from propagating through the community. The approach has been used against the racist and capitalist attacks that destroy communities by root shock and population displacement.
Over the last decade, however, and speeding up after last year’s LA fires, there’s a part of the discursive left—for whom terms mean as much historical origins—that has attacked the concept. Their objection is that neoliberals and their NGOs have pushed the notion of resilience to avoid correcting the structural disparities that drive bad public health outcomes in targeted communities. The onus or blame, the argument continues, is put on the communities for their conditions—that funding should be put into these communities only to the extent they can better suffer their exploitation.
But a particular philanthropic misappropriation of a concept that was originally—and continues to be—developed to defend communities under attack shouldn’t be grounds for the idea’s eradication. The resilience concept was long-developed in conjunction with communities.
Such objections are a characteristic misstep in dismissing the grand narratives around which disparate peoples might choose to organize themselves together. Just because eugenicists and Nazis appropriated Charles Darwin doesn’t mean in a world of evolving viruses we should abandon the concept of natural selection Or—another example—students using m-dashes aren’t necessarily using ChatGPT to cheat on their paper.
Now with Minnesota fighting back, community resilience appears unwittingly re-embraced by some of its very detractors.
Community resilience isn’t utopian. It’s never sufficient. Nor does history end in resilience’s pursuit. Certainly at the city level, the Twin Cities remains a divided nation. The murder of George Floyd underscored these disparities, including the country’s largest racial divides in urban employment and home ownership.
At the personal level, Minnesota has a well-earned reputation for insularity. An old joke is that if you want friends in Minnesota, you should make them in kindergarten. Under Minnesota Nice, it takes hours to realize you’ve been insulted. I now take in stride that some invitations to coffee are no such thing unless specific days and times are also discussed. The Nice can be crueler in its objectives. Some of the Jantelagen set find existential jouissance in a roundabout comeuppance slipped into the back.
It isn’t just white people. A Somali who moved here from out-of-state complained recently how hard it is to integrate into the Somali community in Minnesota. Who says Somalis haven’t assimilated?
To be sure, that’s an unfair summary, as there’s a lot more going on—from individuals on up. At the neighborhood level, community institutions and third places such as cafes and festivals are prime nodes where the “weak” ties among neighbors and acquaintances—as opposed to the “strong” ties of family—are built up into extensive loose networks that can better buffer public health threats. Including, we now learn, a violent federal occupation.
At the level of the ongoing clash, such expansive relationships permit faster and more flexible responses. The scale of generosity and the operationalization of agape have been astonishing. Neighborhood groups—NGOs, houses of worship, pizza places, and sex shops—are helping deliver free groceries to tens of thousands of families sheltering-in-place from the ICE threat.
As widely written about, the anti-ICE movement adapted rapid response teams to respond to ICE raids. The anonymous CrimethInc. collective reports:
Over the past month and a half of occupation, volunteers in the Twin Cities have continuously updated their rapid response model, arriving at a dynamic and resilient system…
During the months preceding the surge of ICE agents…observers would submit sightings with varying levels of substantiation to an admin on a mass text system. As soon as admins could intake, reformat, and verify the reports, they would blast it out on the system and people nearby would converge. This seemed to work for turning people out to major operations, like a raid on an apartment complex, but began to falter as ICE experimented with faster, more lightweight operations.
When ICE switched tactics, the response networks evolved:
Then, around December 1, the raids essentially stopped, and the influx of agents began a campaign of door knocks and snatch-and-grabs. The previous model was immediately rendered obsolete, because the window of time to intervene shrank to a matter of minutes…
[A] new system began with a large-scale chat for Southside [Minneapolis] reports, where anyone can drop an alert of any kind. As ICE operations accelerated in volume and speed, the open, more nimble chat grew in members and became a space that attracted those who wanted to do more than simply record ICE operations. People integrated the existing whistle program to alert targeted people about ICE’s arrival and to harass the agents, then increasingly got in the way—blocking ICE vehicles with personal cars, using their bodies to block agents, using crowds and car patrols to intimidate small groups of agents into withdrawing.
The chat’s growth undercut its nimbleness, so it was spun off by neighborhood, “some of which have gotten as small as a four-block radius. This allows people to see reports directly relevant to them and respond to nearby sightings quickly and effectively.”
The networks are supported by counter-surveillance at the ICE’s Whipple Building headquarters at Fort Snelling between Minneapolis and St. Paul, the former site for a concentration camp for Dakota tribe members and where Dakota chiefs Little Six and Medicine Bottle were hung.
Whipple Watch keeps track of the ICE convoys making their way out, cataloguing license plates of exiting vehicles, and alerting the rapid networks ICE was on its way. ICE started to swap out its plates daily, but unlikely getting out ahead of the Watch’s surveillance.
The networks are run on the encrypted messaging system Signal by dispatchers who vet information, relay reports on their channels, deploy street patrols, and assist patrols upon confronting ICE. Information about ICE convoys driving through network areas are relayed one network to another. Among other tasks, a data collection team maps out daily ICE hotspots on interactive maps.
Other channels vet and train volunteers. Some channels are centered in school systems, faith communities, and grocery delivery systems for immigrant families. Many are translated for Spanish-language forums:
What might look from the outside like an over-formalization of chats for different kinds of information, or else like too little structure in the completely open calls that all patrollers for a given zone join in simultaneously, coheres into a highly effective, self-organized, and well-maintained communication ecosystem. Information moves reliably across scale through the chats and dispatchers, and patrollers quickly adopt cultural practices that enable them to avoid talking over each other and to relay information in a clear and organized manner. Volunteers self-select into shifts of varying lengths, deciding what routes to run based on their knowledge, skill, interest, and availability.
No wonder right-wingers are trying to infiltrate the chats or that Kash Patel’s FBI is attempting to follow the Atlanta Cop City playbook and crack the Signal groups with RICO charges.
The system the chat groups undergird as much reflects as helps form the community resilience at the heart of a daisy chain of neighborhoods under attack.
ICE itself has tactically pivoted to trying to infiltrate and attack response groups.
Community reporter Lee Stedman soberly asks his audience to stop focusing on just what ICE is doing, but also on how they’re doing it:
They’re changing their tactics and strategies rapidly now more than ever and finding ways to blend in. Finding ways to operate faster in an attempt to outmaneuver us and otherwise be able to use new suppression tactics to bait people out…
A majority of agents are no longer concerned with wearing face masks whatsoever. They’ve traded them out for baseball caps and sunglasses, beanies and sunglasses, beanies with pom-poms on the end of them, especially for female-presenting agents. They’ve started switching in the clothing they’re wearing from tactical gear to hoodies with canvas or utility jackets over them, puffy jackets. They started wearing colored buffs from North Face, from REI. They’ve switched to wearing blue jeans and khaki. They’re minimizing the amount of camo they’re wearing, tactical gear, or grayscale-like coloration within their clothing.
It’s important to note all these things because they’re trying to blend in with the Midwest. Not just prepare for the cold weather, but blend in as all of us.
From clothing to other signifiers:
They’re starting to disguise themselves as Uber drivers, maintenance workers, construction workers, student drivers. They’re contracting out with local businesses. That way they can use their vehicles… They’re using handicap parking passes. They’re starting to load more things on their dashes. They’re using high visibility vests. They’re throwing Gatorade bottles, stuffed animals, whatever they can up on the dash to make it look like a civilian vehicle…
The stuffed animals are a particularly ugly detail, given how many were poking out of Renee Good’s glove box upon her death. The deceptions multiply, Stedman continues:
They’re starting to wear orange whistles on them too, blending in with the crowd. We know already that they’re in our rapid response chats, but it looks like they’ve started to infiltrate themselves within places protests are happening and responder teams that out on corners.
They could be starting to send us false information, but we do know they’re starting to use the information that we’re sending into the chats in order to be able to quickly move to different locations and otherwise continue to play this cat-and-mouse chase.
Local schools have identified ICE efforts to draw families out of their homes by sending fake notices and emails in the schools’ names about helping them deliver free food packages. Schools have responded that such packages would only be available through school social workers. ICE agents are now showing up in the reflective jackets of crossing guards at school drop-off time to snap up children and families.
ICE is infiltrating social relationships in other ways. It’s called upon Silicon Valley to beta-test its Curtis Yarvin apps to support operations here.
ICE and Border Patrol are using the Mobile Fortify app to scan the faces of observers and bystanders—citizens included—to pull up data on them from a variety of federal and state databases. Pretti was registered in one weeks before his death. WEBLOC allows ICE to track the phones of whole neighborhoods without a warrant. Palantir is now working on the ELITE app with which ICE will score whole neighborhoods—house-by-house—for possible deportations.
One can see how the rapid response teams’ successes and accumulating ICE intelligence have led to the increasing punishment agents have meted out on legal observers, from warnings to beatings, Good’s murder by one ICE agent, and Pretti’s firing squad.
“[ICE agents have] also aggressively escalated their violence against observers,” CrimethInc. continues:
Patrollers who follow ICE too closely or for too long will often be boxed in so that between four and ten officers can surround the car, beat on the doors, yell, film, and threaten them with arrest. Patrollers who have blocked ICE with their cars have been rammed, have had their windows busted in, have been pulled out to be detained or arrested. People have been put into ICE vehicles, driven miles away, then thrown out of the car.
Agents have taken people out of their cars, then driven their cars several blocks away and left them running in the street. Recently, agents have been pepper spraying cars—sometimes trying to fill the interior of the vehicle in order to force people out of it, other times just using the chemical weapon to brightly mark the cars for further harassment and targeting.
CrimethInc. fills in the escalation up to Good’s murder:
Recently, ICE agents threw a tear gas canister out of their vehicle while driving on the highway to try to deter someone from following them. Agents have not only followed patrollers home, but have identified the driver or vehicle following them and led drivers to their own home addresses as a form of intimidation. Patrollers shared with us that agents have beaten them, have tried to run them over, have driven directly at their vehicles head on, held them at gunpoint, shot out their tires, and dragged them out of moving vehicles.
Yet, there’s something we shouldn’t lose in this terrible soup. One rapid responder on my social media feed noted ICE’s failure of imagination beyond the tactical:
I keep coming back to Bovino’s talk about Minnesotans having excellent communications and honestly the more I think about it, the more I realize how unprepared they are for any resistance of size.
Our communication is fine. It’s not bad, but nobody using it would describe it as excellent. It’s a bunch of people who cobbled something usable together in a pinch. Anyone can do it.
In some ways, this rapid responder and Stedman are saying the same thing: there’s room to grow in both thinking and practice.
The problem for the now-demoted Bovino and border czar Tom Homan to follow is—like the Nazis they admire—they’re constrained in their thinking to the level of expanding the mechanics of the goon squad they’ve deployed across a city (or several cities at once). No matter how large the operation, their thinking is still embodied at this scale.
The administration suffers from similar limitations that suggest, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie describes, a failure of strategic planning:
I don’t think that this incursion, this operation in Minnesota, is actually very successful for the administration. That in terms of a larger strategic goal of trying to bring public support around to their attempts to remove as many immigrants as possible, this is a clear failure.
And the fact that it is producing real energy for if not the radical reform of ICE, then its outright abolition amongst not just ordinary people but lawmakers as well…is another sign that this is just a strategically misguided move [beyond] inflicting lots of terrible pain and violence on ordinary people.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s refusal to whip votes for defunding ICE indicates the lawmaker option is unsurprisingly a present dead end, although the murder of Alex Pretti appears to be galvanizing Senate threats to vote against funding DHS. The administration certainly grasps the growing disgust, sending Vice President JD Vance to tell lies about Goode and the ICE kidnapping of five-year-old Liam Ramos.
As our PReP team asserted in July, it was always going to be a race between outraging the public with its increasingly draconian policies and “operationalizing enough of the police state it’s practicing on immigrants to put down any such objection.”
But, Bouie continues, what in fact are the administration’s strategic goals in Minnesota?
I don’t think they have one and…the absence of an end stage they’re working for, the absence of a victory condition, is why they are—for however much violence they are going to inflict—why they’re going to lose…
Inferior forces have won plenty of wars because they had a clear view of the strategic picture in mind… And Minnesotans know what they want. They want ICE out. And that’s why I think they’re going to win.
Others identified the administration’s strategy at the national level, harking back to the interstate differences we explored earlier. “Why is ICE in Minnesota?” historian Timothy Snyder asks an audience,
Because Minneapolis and Minnesota have functioning welfare states. Because Minneapolis and Minnesota are parts of the United States that work. They’re parts of the United States where people are able to live more or less free lives.
That is why ICE is there. To try to prove that doesn’t work. To try to destroy it. To try to create an image of chaos where things in fact have been functioning before.
Tell that to George Floyd’s family or the thousands of Black and Brown people in the state with some of the widest gaps in social markers in the country. But differences within state can co-exist with differences across states, however much all U.S. states suffer in comparison with the rest of the industrial world.
Still other observers find Minnesota a splinter stuck squarely in the right-wing’s Freudian id. There’s an almost libidinal obsession with somehow saving the Third Precinct from its Shermian fire during South Minneapolis’s 2020 “March to the Lake” upon Floyd’s murder.
Social media educator Liz the Developer observed Minnesota also serves as an ICE logistical cheat. The state doesn’t offer Second Amendment practitioners the right to “stand your ground”. Unlike other states, gun owners confronted by anonymous armed mask men here have a “duty to retreat”. Although the Castle Doctrine still applies upon busting into a house, as one Hmong homeowner made clear in East St. Paul: ICE agents beat a hasty retreat off his porch.
Based on conversations with organizers, rapid responders, people within the medical field, the press, and the National Guard, community reporter Stedman summed up matters more in our PReP direction:
Everything that’s happening right now seems to all be a part of an orchestrated plot that’s been in the works for a long time now.
The Twin Cities wasn’t chosen for Operation Metro Surge because of deportation efforts… They chose the Twin Cities because of the aftermath of Floyd. Because of the way in which the community responded and the amount of frustration and disdain toward the government and law enforcement that came out of it.
That history and community resilience converge:
They knew the reaction from the community would be intense because people are very emotional here and are very traumatized by what previously happened and that this community is so well organized that they show up in mass…
I think they chose this location because they could create a volatile situation in here and it would be their best chance to be able to incite some amount of violence or reaction from the state that would justify the formal use of martial law and thus Insurrection Act.
But it isn’t just about short-circuiting the midterm elections:
[W]e’ve reached that point where they’re pulling up the curtain, where they’re trying to be able to justify the use of military personnel and federal agencies in any community in any corner of the country that has political opponents that they otherwise want to suppress, detain, or silence.
The stumble Minnesota represents in administration efforts to turn the swastikas in their heads—and plans for everyone—into on-the-ground strategy is accompanied by poor operationalization. KARE11—the NBC affiliate here in Minneapolis—interviewed one man who was held for multiple hours in the U.S. Citizen or USC pens at the Whipple citadel. He described the squalid disorganization there:
There was one point they were looking for one particular gentleman. Probably about 15, 30 minutes, they kept circling, going, we have no idea where this man is. It’s not a big facility. It’s relatively small. You’d be surprised that they would lose an individual in there. And [they] kept coming and asking us if we knew where they were.
And then during interrogation, there were questions like—I remember specifically being asked—do you know who detained you? You know the arresting officer? That’s—that’s—no, I don’t know the arresting officer. Well, what did he look like? Did he give you his name? No, he didn’t give me his name. Everybody’s got masks on. I can’t see.
It’s completely obvious these guys are not set up, not prepared, and have no idea what they’re doing in this moment and it’s very chaotic.
It depends on what they’re set up to do. Activists have reported finding Black, Brown, and immigrant detainees—crowded together in the non-USC pens—released injured in the local woods around the Whipple compound in the middle of the night sometimes with no clothes and always without their phones and IDs taken from them: “One of the people had a cracked skull.” That’s a message to the greater community.
These are, after all, the worst of the worst of agents guided by an ethos the locals are “domestic terrorists,” a legally fictitious category the White House made up in September.
ICE and Border Patrol are now filled with rapidly and haphazardly hired lost sons and otherwise unhirable losers mixed with killers who never left Afghanistan. One commentator offered a telling picture of what that locker room of men wearing brown shirts likely looks like. Men who clapped upon Pretti’s murder. Chasing their $50,000 bonuses on the payday loan model. Their identities leaked. Destroying evidence. Stealing flowers left for the people they killed. Following people with shopping bags. Excoriated by Vikings fans. With no sleep and no places to piss.
Leaked memos indicate DHS’s panicky efforts to recruit experienced agents to volunteer for the Minnesota operation. Few such agents want anything to do with this mission and Bovino’s bloviating couldn’t bluff that over.
Atop the disorganization at the platoon level that Pretti’s murder represented and as reported by KARE11 at the Whipple black site, there’s the cruelty at the departmental level.
ICE stopped paying for contract medical staff to attend to detainees at a time ICE agents are trying to reach quotas by scooping up people off the street undocumented or not. The quotas, the shitty hires, the violent abductions, and the lack of medical care may account for the increasing death toll in ICE detention centers. Also a message.
The rot at ICE’s core doesn’t mean Stedman’s wrong about the deployment’s tactical evolution or the necessity of responding accordingly. It’s that should the community engage in the group cognition needed, including at the broader level of strategic planning, neighborhoods and towns can get out farther ahead of the limited bounds of ICE planning.
Distributed horizontalism can have its limits, if it merely reflects back the tacticism of its opponent. At the same time, any emerging leadership that helps turn the widespread network into more conscious strategy risks proverbial decapitation by targeted arrests.
The same, of course, could be said of ICE. Except ICE also suffers the limits of its manpower. While the Nazis survived repeated deaths in its leadership, its decline on the Eastern front—attacking, as Margaret Killjoy quoted a Minneapolis local, another winter people in the winter—occurred in all those unsustainable losses in troops.
Demoralizing outsiders, which Minnesotans excel at, has its place. But whistles and insults and noise demos have their limits. Biting off fingers is an albeit gothic approach, but we do appear inching digit by digit toward the bloody red line Trumpists think they want in the Insurrection Act.
Trumpists need to be careful what they wish for, however. That red line might be as much for the American people, especially as Trump’s base continues to erode from the cuts to government programs, the Epstein papers, and, by DHS attacks on Pretti, the Second Amendment crowd. “As the hardcore libertarians and gun cultists peel away,” English professor Franklin Ridgway posted on social media,
we will see that more and more MAGA is more or less what the supporters of Louis Napoleon were: A heterogeneous rabble of the most mediocre petty bourgeoisie, a semi-respectable layer of semi-swindlers. Amway dealers, timeshare dupes, car salesmen, jackleg preachers, online influencers, crypto imbeciles. In short, the MAGA core is a social layer too antisocial to be productive and too incompetent to steal big.
Concurrently, the vehemence with which the internet has met the neoliberal political class’s efforts to redirect the rage in the streets has been just as demonstrative of a social identity’s collapse in the face of a moment of its own making. The Obamas’ statement against ICE operations that President Obama supercharged when in office—while ordering up its infamous night raids and giving Tom Homan a literal medal—was met with the seriousness of his annual music and book lists.
Constituents in the thousands ratioed Senator Amy Klobuchar on the tone deafness of her Hockey Day pronouncement that “Yes it’d cold in Minnesota—but we embrace it.” Others excoriated AOC’s call for bringing out the National Guard.
The administration risks more than losing more of its dwindling support. The kind of military occupation evoking the Insurrectionist Act isn’t a Trumpist signature. They haven’t outgrown the cruelties of the thug, even while occupying the highest political offices in the land.
Hitler, no more than a Gefreiter by training, suffered something of the same limitations. When against expectation England and France declared war upon Germany’s invasion of Poland, after failing to do so for Austria and the Sudetenland, Hitler turned to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop—who would hang at Nuremberg—and asked, “What now?”
“Hitler was fundamentally a daydreamer who rarely considered the details of how to achieve his goals,” author K.A. Nelson explains, “and what second and third-order effects they might entail.” The danger any opposition needs to assimilate is that Trump is experienced in the chaos of those effects. It’s a feature of his strategic arsenal, not a bug.
We find ourselves in a mode of thinking we’d all prefer avoiding, but has long been under study and practice—Che, Mao, the IRA, Clausewitz, Baron de Jomini, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Alexander, the Greek city states, on and on, arguably in one fashion or another as far back as our early hominid ancestors.
Our colleague mathematical epidemiologist Rodrick Wallace has developed a wide-spanning modeling program around the nature of embodied cognition across levels of biological and cultural organization and conflict—from how the immune system responds to evolving pathogens to human warfare. His work may offer a framework to help us continue to think through the Minnesota moment.
To begin, the community resilience we discussed above around Minnesota’s capacity to respond to Operation Metro Surge is intimately related to the group cognition we also touched on.
Such cognition is the capacity of institutions and communities to cogitate through multiple problems, devise combinations of solutions, and enact these solutions on a changing social landscape and, in this case, against a thinking opponent. The larger the community connected by the “weak” ties of neighbor and acquaintance, the larger the “brain” to think and act as a community, but also the more the energy and maintenance needed to regulate that capacity in the face of environmental noise and determined opposition. Too little regulation and the group hallucinates or flails. Too much and the group panics or fails to act.
The right reaction—not too little and not too much—is difficult to tune at a time when atop the raids to home and workplace, the accelerating class war is undercutting people’s capacity to socially reproduce even their own households. As a nurse testified to the Minneapolis city council, weeks before Alex Pretti’s murder:
I feel like in Minneapolis, I’m a sitting duck. I don’t feel safe at home. I don’t feel safe at work. Kids aren’t safe at school.
I was born in Minneapolis, and I’m scared out of my mind because I have skin that is not white, and that is not fair.
She continues in shades of her Gazan counterparts:
I am a nurse. There’s a public health emergency because nurses aren’t showing up to work. Because we’re freaked out, because when we advocate for our Black and Brown patients, what happens when ICE comes into our hospitals? We are making plans on what we are gonna do because we are in ethical dilemmas on what is the right thing to do. What happens when they start pulling people out of ICUs when life is not sustainable? Outside of the hospital, where is our moral code?
And, here, the limits of financing a resistance, despite the rightist wish the 50,000 marching in -40 wind chill during the general strike were paid protestors, who’d stop their organizing once the money, the only reason to act, was cut off:
“I make $80,000 a year,” the nurse continues,
$20,000 more than what the average Minnesotan makes, and I put my mortgage in forbearance this week because it’s not sustainable. Mutual aid is not sustainable anymore.
Such desperation may inspire individual donations from across the U.S. for local groups. It might also induce the abandonment of the ideological grounds that have kept so many Americans tied to the neoliberal program and its more authoritarian decedents like the shipwrecked clutching a raft. Without overprojecting the present moment—Minnesota is no insurrection from the vantage of the target’s side either—first experiments in parallel governance may be a next step in meeting community and household needs.
To get back to Wallace, any effort to spur such a pivot in group cognition in the face of a resource-rich opponent—however drunken a giant it may be—will require grappling with military theorist John Boyd’s notion that the fighting field is “dominated by change, novelty, and uncertainty, making evolution and adaptation necessary.”
Beyond the specific strategies and tactics involved, there are multiple means to do so. One can take a more Western cultural vantage, as we are largely wont to from left to right stateside. One can find causality in the objects of things and, adapting an informational formalism, change the behavioral message going through the social channel.
The subcomponents of a group embody the channel through which such messages are sent, the rate at which intel about the conflict is collected and shared, and the material resources the community—to return to our overextended nurse—can be provided. The social “noise” within the channel or imposed from without can be buffered, but also forces the repeated reorganization of the channel. The broader or more flexible the community channel, the faster the message can be sent in the face of noise, consistent with and in communication with the cultural grammar of the local region.
One can also follow a more Eastern cultural perspective, finding causality less in the objects involved in the conflict—personnel, resources, tools, geographic features, etc.—and more in the field of relationships among the objects. From this vantage, one can change the societal channel through which the chosen behavioral messages are transmitted.
Ideally, one operates in the two traditions in combination—changing the message and channel of the group both. And in doing so, one can engage in the kinds of synergistic adaptation that change the “rules of the game”—and associated strategies and tactics—in ways the opponent doesn’t understand until too late when you’ve already changed the rules again. The difference in reaction time can be widened:
[A] materially weak opponent can successfully challenge the materially superior agency by placing unbearable shadow prices on that agency’s own material, communication, intelligence, and flexibility resources.
Examples from WWII, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and peasant struggles from civil society to armed conflict show even successful bottom-up campaigns are nearly never easy nor without their steep costs to the communities under attack:
[They] may depend more than merely more of the same: among possibilities, careful but flexible strategic planning, greater intelligence in [the opponent’s] strategy and operations, decentralized execution, and the element of frequent acute surprise.
Less reaction and more initiative in action.
Such cognition can be pursued on multiple frequencies during a conflict. One might continue to engage in public actions as part of a dialogue with the greater population—marches, interviews, memes, etc.—while sending other messages via underground work neither videotaped nor posted online that changes the conflict’s state of play.
People can feel the ground changing underneath their feet, as occurred in step phases in Minnesota, first upon Good’s death, the general strike next, and then Pretti’s murder. All in a matter of weeks. Out of conditions emerging in the decades.
It’s worth taking another spin through these possibilities, if only to practice this mode of thinking.
Clausewitz landscapes in conflict—including the fog of war, the friction of play, and a skilled adversary—are embedded within culturally bounded and place-specific tactical, operational, and strategic doctrines. It’s why the Pentagon hired anthropologists to decode Afghanistan albeit to ill effect.
ICE commanders know nothing about the places they’ve been invading. A raft of “Why Minneapolis?” expositions have understandably been pursued given the Twin Cities’ early relative success in resisting ICE. But one could as well ask the same of each failure to resist, including the Louisiana Bovino embraced. Although what counts as success or failure might also differ from place to place.
Following philosopher Alain Badiou and physicist Lee Smolin, the unity or totality of a system is actualized only in the particularities of specific times and places. As well as, we learn from the critical geographers, in a net of relational geographies. What’s happening in Minnesota is influenced by what happened in ICE’s LA and Chicago campaigns and influences what’s now starting up in Maine.
The same can be said inside Minnesota. Both ad hoc groupings across neighborhoods and the permission they have to take on-the-ground initiative might be best woven into doctrines of resistance found folded inside a growing sense of unity across a resolute population. Such initiatives arise out of loose, flexible, redundant, and decentralized command, even as such a strategy-in-progress might regularly fail upon contact with the enemy—up until it perhaps doesn’t.
The best way to arrive at such hard-won success appears to involve repeatedly changing the rules of what qualifies as the conflict. But to what lengths? How far Minnesotans who identify under a specific cultural archetype are prepared to bend themselves is an open question. Are they willing to evolve in a direction in which they might not recognize themselves? Can peaceful protest mix with targeted property destruction? Political theater in the day and grittier work in the night? The city, suburbs, and rurality, each operating on their own wavelengths together?
CrimethInc. thinks Minnesota found much of this balance:
What sets apart the Twin Cities rapid response network and its surrounding ecosystem is not strict adherence to a particular structure. It is a clear analysis of their conditions, a willingness to adapt, and the courage to fight back as [ICE] violence increases.
They’ve engaged in what Rodrick Wallace describes as “the extended dialog with an adversary able to make its own [behavioral] statements from its own—and often markedly different—tactical and operational alphabet.” As CrimethInc. continues:
The people of the Twin Cities have paid close attention to their opponents. They know how ICE agents deploy, where ICE agents stage, how ICE agents dress, drive, and react. They live in a relatively small and densely populated urban area, walkable in many parts, gridded for easy navigation by car. People are connected to their neighbors, building on the connections that remain from past movements and uprisings. The mayor of Minneapolis is trying to maintain the liberal veneer of his administration; police are unlikely to deploy as reinforcements for ICE operations. These are concrete and observable conditions that have directly defined the design and implementation of resistance here.
The adaptability described by military strategists is tailored neighborhood-to-neighborhood here and in this ongoing dialogue with the adversary:
Those embedded in the model are committed to agility and adaptability as conditions change. The city has neighborhoods with distinct demographics and characteristics, so the expansion of the model was built to vary from one neighborhood to the next.
After the raids stopped, ICE deployed almost exclusively from one main location with limited entrances and exits, so organizers invested heavily in counter-surveillance there. When ICE operations switched to fast, random street abductions and door knocks, the only possible way to predict where they would act was to identify ICE vehicles as they approached, so people shifted focus to identifying ICE vehicles on the roads and staying on them. ICE needed to rely on surprise and ambush tactics, so responders employed noise—whistles and honking—to quickly give warning across distance. ICE officers don’t like to operate when outnumbered and don’t like to be surrounded, so patrollers amass cars and form impromptu traffic jam blockades.
Stedman reports shameless ICE has most recently pivoted to targeting schools and daycares the clearly “worst of the worst” attend.
Burbling in the background, however, is the possibility that the objective of ICE operations isn’t to “win” each theater, but to help the administration pursue a national strategy of bludgeoning opposition territories into submission under the serial abuser model—by a Trump Derangement Syndrome of confusion, distraction, distrust, and exhaustion. All the while normalizing fascism in the streets as both a form of daily living and a mode of governance by order and imposition rather than consent and albeit dubious tolerance.
Functioning well was neither Trump administrations’ plan. Disrupting opposition is the name of the game. Asset-stripping neoliberal empire in both finance and politics.
The problem is losing theaters rocks the fascists’ world. As Richardson remarked, it drains it in resources and cultural currency. It also demoralizes personnel. As in Afghanistan, it diverts ground units into publicity traps of their command’s own making. It pushes neutrals off the political fence. And it bulks up a resistance that continues to learn from its victories as much as from its defeats.
The lessons are found on-site. “Few of these conditions,” CrimethInc. continues, “could have been predicted in advance. The only way to adapt effectively was to nurture an open, invitational culture that encourages taking initiative and welcomes self-organization.”
Wallace observes that such decentralized command can best pivot about the opposition’s own movements as field units make the earliest contacts with the opposition. That kind of local action needs to be integrated with an understanding of the broader intent of the resistance—whether that of a more centralized command or more horizontally arrived upon strategy. Including decisions not to act—letting opposition units, for instance, pass into long-laid traps beyond.
It helps the present strategy is a simple objective shared across political platforms: “Fuck ICE. ICE out.” Except for Governor Walz and Mayor Frey, to whom we shall return, even now part of the wing of the political class that helped build ICE into what it is today.
All such efforts—top-down to local field decisions—are bounded by culturally agreed upon (or tolerated) premises felt along path-dependent trajectories that delivered Minnesota to its historical moment. Wallace’s models converge on the notion that the richer the mix of such embedding doctrine and local initiative, the more robust the distribution of possible responses in hand.
“We cannot overstate the importance of the courage pouring into the streets of the Twin Cities,” CrimethInc. finds here in people power allowed its field of play:
It can be easy to write off rapid response networks, because we know that simply filming and observing this accelerating campaign of violence is not enough. Many networks across the country have demobilized themselves before they even got going by trying to rigidly control what their participants could do, despite widespread willingness to escalate.
Trainers often preach non-interference; some rapid responders police each other in the streets for throwing projectiles or even for yelling. In some cases, this comes from a self-preservationist fear about repression targeting the NGOs involved in rapid response. In other cases, it shows up as a well-meaning but misguided focus on “safety” that is simply paternalism, deciding what risk levels are appropriate for other people.
CrimethInc. finds examples of such overcautiousness in the Twin Cities too, but,
the fight here is defined by those who push the envelope. People use their cars and bodies to block agents and de-arrest targeted people. They throw snowballs and rocks; they kick back canisters of tear gas. They cover cars and agents with paint and break the windows of their cars. They don’t stop screaming in the faces of abductors when they are hit, pepper sprayed, or shot with rubber bullets.
They are witnessing the masked abductions, undisclosed disappearances, and record-breaking deaths of this new emboldened ICE, and they are willing to take real risks to stop them. They are experiencing the retaliative violence, and they are more, stronger, and braver in spite of it.
There’s now a struggle over what victory here might look like.
Much ado was made of the call Minnesota governor Tim Walz shared with Trump after Pretti’s murder, perhaps taken at the Governor’s Residence, a mile away from Cities Church and the gas station where ICE almost snuffed Orbin Mauicio Henríquez Serrano. That it served as Trump’s off-ramp if not retreat upon plunging polls.
But the call reminded me of a similar phone conversation:
Marching the country back to work [during a deadly pandemic] almost certainly was the substance of Biden’s call with Trump in early April [2020]. Despite the contrary characterizations of the chat—Trump got Biden’s approval or Biden told Trump what to do—the phone call effectively offered the political class the imprimatur it needed for sacrificing hundreds of thousands it refused to protect here in the United States, much less the world. The publicly announced back channel aimed to assure the bourgeoisie their interests would be served across party lines.
Post-call this time, Walz continued to wield sharp rhetoric on camera:
I’m not interested in a more efficient Metro Surge. I’m ready for them to get out of here. I think that’s what Minnesotans are talking about. [The call] was progress. Look, I never got a call from Bovino or Noem… We need a return to normalcy by [getting] these ICE agents out of here.
But he offered other takes, bordering on out-and-out collaboration:
I’m gonna give them the benefit of the doubt… My hope is that Tom Homan is different…that he is a true law enforcement professional…
If you really want to get the worst of the worst, you coordinate with [local law enforcement], you coordinate with our [Bureau of Criminal Apprehension], and you pick these people up when they’re not suspecting it, in the middle of the night when they’re not suspecting it.
Work with Homan, the guy who initiated Border Patrol’s cruel separation-of-families policy, met with Proud Boys, and promised earlier this year he’s “bringing hell” to the sanctuary city of Boston? The guy who Trump’s DOJ refused to prosecute for accepting bribes from FBI agents masquerading as corporate contractors looking for work in Border Patrol’s deportation industrial complex? As if any of this has to do with the minuscule numbers of the undocumented in Minnesota.
Contrary to Times columnist Bouie’s nigh-euphoric notions that ICE was heading to a dismantling and Stephen Miller, not just Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, was in professional danger, community reporters observed upticks in post-Bovino ICE raids in the Twin Cities and fielded receipts showing local ICE hotel stays extended to May. The DoD has handed over a new base to DHS over at Fort Snelling. Trump is back to calling Pretti an “insurrectionist”.
“In other words, the national narrative is a lie,” local correspondent Stedman concludes. “They’re trying to cut off the rest of the country from being able to understand what the reality of the situation is here in Minnesota.”
How to reconcile all that’s swirling about? It’s all very much in motion. And very Eighteenth Brumaire in its complexities. Shouldn’t “ICE out” be as simple an end game imaginable?
I believe the subtext if not the substance of the call Trump and Walz shared, like its April 2020 predecessor, circled around how to put down the growing power behind the general strike.
Capital-led governance at this end of the U.S. cycle of accumulation is too important to allow the people to participate. The rabble may arrive at ill-suited ideas, with the capacity to act on them. I believe the raids are now also about dismantling the rapid response teams in neighborhoods—perhaps germinating into communes—that never voted for Frey, extending out into regional suburbs and rural towns.
“None of the institutions you put blind faith in are going to save you from the other institutions you put blind faith in,” filmmaker and local activist D.A. Bullock puts it, “You are starting to understand abolition, you are starting to understand why centrist pabulum is nonsense and it might get you killed.”
An unidentified driver harangued Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara to that effect as he walked along talking with a 60 Minutes reporter: “How dare you let this happen here! You should be [bleep] ashamed. You should be [bleep] sick. [Bleep] pig.”
And the chief didn’t disagree, probably in part because his department is riven by rightist members of a police union that openly applauded the ICE occupation of its own city: “I’ve been very publicly saying, this has been a risk for several weeks. I’ve been trying to get anyone in a position of authority to understand that tragedy was imminent.”
But we can see positions of authority have arrived at an answer. As community reporter Toussaint Morrison points out, when asked on another TV show a week later whether ICE should leave Minnesota, O’Hara refused to offer a simple “yes,” instead talking about the important role ICE plays.
In the other direction, everyday people on their own—and in community—are figuring out a lot of the deets big picture and small around their local officials’ abandonment, if not betrayal, as they develop a Minnesota-specific resistance Trump and Walz and Homan and Frey prefer to be dismantled block-by-block.
In active collaboration with everyday movements, there’s a science for the people to help figure out better ways to “serve and protect” communities, if we’ll allow the wry reappropriation.
That is, against the liberal custom that studying the impacts social determinants have on public health without changing the system’s prime directives is enough, a science embedded in more of a collective health can assist bottom-up efforts to bring about a better world on the terms millions who’ve been abandoned by government and philanthropist alike demand.
As the models we’ve explored here, and as Stedman’s description of ICE’s tactics implies, Minnesota communities—indeed, across the U.S.—might converge on more than reacting to ICE’s bad behavior. The game theory of our social circles of punishing bad actors in tit-for-tat fashion isn’t enough. Communities must jump out ahead in a more tat-for-tit way to get ICE’s 3000 here running a step behind unto their ejection.
As our team wrote in 2022 of the long history of the rural context:
Peasants across the globe have innovated asymmetrical strategies opposed to [agribusiness] fait accompli, from the very first enclosures of the common field… In some contexts, these strategies transitioned into military action or were undertaken simultaneously.
The realization that the tactical melds with the structural—how society should be run—can’t be overemphasized to grave bipartisan fear:
During the Guinean war on Portuguese colonialism, the PAIGC under Amílcar Cabral, trained as an agronomist, supported the return to autonomous resource management severed from the colonial export economy.
How might these possibilities be operationalized in Minnesota, Maine, or elsewhere? What does a Free Minneapolis look like? Let’s leave that to the people’s brigades perhaps being born out from behind every door ICE kicks in and every child snatched up. The nurse’s mortgage will still be eating away at her even upon ICE’s exit. That kind of trajectory is, of course, much more tenuous. There’s no sense in larping that possibility.
If “ICE out” is the immediate objective, however, what to do? “Our best chance of beating them,” Stedman suggests, “is to outnumber them and outpace them and make sure that every time they adapt, we adapt quicker.” The stakes, after all, are high: “This isn’t just an immigration enforcement operation. This is infiltration and preparation for a full-scale suppression effort.”
How to do so all depends. CrimethInc. concludes that communities shouldn’t copy the Twin Cities model, but learn from it:
Being ready for the incoming surge of ICE enforcement in your city—and mark these words, it is coming—means studying the terrain you are fighting on and getting creative. What works best for your city likely won’t look exactly like these daily observation units at their headquarters and mobile patrols of rapid responders. It will require a thorough analysis of how best to use your strengths and exploit their weaknesses in your specific circumstances. Start studying, planning, connecting, and experimenting now.
We look to the Twin Cities, not to replicate the details, but for their clarity of analysis, swift and decisive action, agile experimentation, deep care for each other, and infectious courage.
One Maryland group explained why it doesn’t use whistles during rapid response:
When tactics center the responder instead of the impacted person, harm follows even when good was intended…
Dropping whistles from the response is an effort to fold in with the strategic aims of preventing escalation and aiding documentation of an ICE operation and reducing hyper-vigilance and trauma.
Whistles also have less utility in more suburban and rural environments and areas already inundated with noise, like the industrial zones in which many Black and Brown communities are situated.
Maryland, in turn, doesn’t think their way is everyone’s. The variation Minnesota and Maryland bring to their efforts neighborhood-to-neighborhood and to adjustments in tactics in time can help thwart the administration’s planning at the national level:
Different regions across the country use different tactics. Some may have consulted communities, some may not have. This guidance [we’re sharing] is local, specific, and community-led, rooted in the lives reality of people facing ICE violence here.
Victory—such as it may be—may come in a variety of shapes, from abolishing ICE, driving it out, surviving the occupation, or minimizing its victims. The utopianism of a better world has its place alongside transient demands. But the spirit of rebellion—to which even or especially Walz and Frey object—is the sole path forward under whatever tact the resistance takes.
“Don’t come to Minnesota because you will fuck around and find out,” said one community member at a press conference upon the release of Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Allen, and other Black leaders who disrupted the right-wing Cities Church in St. Paul:
We are not cowards. We stand in unity. Yes, we don’t always agree. And yes, there are racial tensions. But what you see is the community standing together. Of many nations, ages, sizes, backgrounds, colors, we are standing together and we are not afraid of you, Trump.
The Trumpist moment is an attempt to automate a 19th century Bittereinderism to save some sectors of capital as the empire’s reach retracts. As is apparent as the speaker continues, people feel it to their bones:
We will continue to fight. We will not go back to slavery. You will not take us back to Jim Crow. Our ancestors fought too hard and bled too much and died too long for you to take us back as a nation.
In this version of capital’s reset, racial dynamics of the antebellum are to be imposed upon everyone in what Cornel West called the “niggerization” of the whole of the population. The speaker connects these dots in a way that gets the Trumps and Walzes to jump on the phone together:
You see that they don’t care who they kill. They’re killing white women. This is not a color line anymore. This is about the haves and have-nots…
And so, our group at Pandemic Research for the People observed last year, we arrive at the empire’s third rail:
Collective choice is so important a process that capitalists keep other people from engaging in it by diverting or dividing them or sending in lawyers and police to break up meetings or protests they didn’t convene or don’t control. The wealthy know we have the numbers and they don’t want us talking together on any regular basis except through their proxies.
Minnesota’s moment follows in the wake of recent decades’ work in Occupy Wall Street, Day Without Immigrants, Black Lives Matter, and the mutual aid of the pandemic showing talking together—and acting together—is our only way out to liberation on the other side of ejecting ICE. Liberation that may also serve as the very path to ending the occupations.