What a People-Powered Movement Looks Like
This past week has shown that you can’t leave something as important as resisting the government up to the opposition party.
Democrats in Congress, like the majority of the country, are incensed about the murder of Renee Good, the subsequent wounding and maiming of others, and the seeming improbability of forthcoming accountability for any of this. To use the most salient example, federal investigators have commandeered the Good case, are withholding evidence from the state of Minnesota, and have turned the probe into a smear job against her and whatever activism she and her wife were engaged in. Justice Department prosecutors have resigned in protest.
While state and local prosecutors try to keep the Good case alive, ICE agents are unquestionably violating their own written policies and the constitutional rights of citizens expressing their opposition through free speech and peaceable assembly. Within a matter of days, I’d gather, Donald Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act, which he has threatened many times but never initiated. This would allow him to bring out the U.S. military or federalize the National Guard to put down civil disorder. It was last used to suppress the L.A. riots after the Rodney King verdict in 1992.
My colleague Ryan Cooper has the grim details on all of this. Yet what have our Democratic representatives in Washington hit on as a response? The biggest thing is that they want to turn the FY2026 appropriations bill funding the Department of Homeland Security into a continuing resolution at current levels, unless vague “accountability measures” can be enacted.
That’ll teach him!
In fairness, that’s not the only action being taken. Some House Oversight Democrats are holding a shadow hearing in St. Paul today to give voice to victims of ICE brutality. A growing number have endorsed an impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that is doomed to failure given the numbers. These may be worthwhile efforts as far as they go. But they don’t go very far.
Democrats are pretty stuck here. Their insistence on avoiding a government shutdown has pushed them into these procedural distinctions about continuing resolutions versus full-year funding that no normal person understands. And practically speaking, ICE operated in full during the last shutdown, and they have tens of billions of dollars in reserve from the Big Beautiful Bill that they used to compensate those workers then, with plenty to spare now.
The bigger reality is that Democrats are simply not equipped to lead when the issue involves a running battle in the streets. Standing with Minnesota, or any of the other siege locations of the Trump second term, has been a rhetorical rather than actual practice. (Somehow, if John Lewis were alive, I have to believe that gap would have narrowed.)
Even those in the direct line of fire have been less than steely-eyed. In response to ICE running roughshod over the largest city in Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz decided the best use of his time was “a direct appeal to the President” to “turn the temperature down,” while admonishing the citizens of his state to not “fan the flames of chaos. That’s what he wants.” In fairness, he also called on Minnesotans to go out and film ICE agents, to maintain a record. But I don’t know what’s worse, the idea that Trump will listen to reason or that he’ll respond to silent compliance by sending his goons home.
Yet as disappointed as I am by the official set of Democratic responses to these outrages, I am doubly convinced that they don’t really matter.
THE BATTLES WAGED AND WON by the civil rights movement only ended in the halls of power. They began with people deciding to refuse to submit to a grossly unjust status quo. Organizers spent years honing their techniques to contest whites-only restaurants and segregated buses, while the loose collections of people in Minneapolis, like Los Angeles and Chicago and Portland before them, have had hours or days to formulate strategies. And today’s organizers aren’t trying to make a point or a spectacle; they are primarily trying to save the lives of neighbors who would be consigned to an unbearable fate if ICE were to operate unimpeded.
They have learned from other rapid response groups from around the country. Mutual aid operations have popped up around them. They have been put up against the wall and chosen a side. The videos of them in action show ordinary people figuring out how to frustrate and slow down an occupation on the fly.
Even without as weighty a strategic thought process yet behind this active resistance as in the 1950s and ’60s, you can see its successes in both real and political terms. ICE is unpopular and growing more so, and since murder didn’t achieve their objective of pacifying the citizenry, they are frequently outnumbered on the streets and confounded by the impracticality of shooting everyone in their path. Lives have been saved, and operations have been made harder to pull off. It looks horrific, but I think anyone can say that the alternative of compliance would be far worse.
Civil rights organizers took a long time to build power and convince the public of the basic righteousness of their struggle, contending with racism and the knee-jerk distaste a lot of people have for protest and disorder. But while this is a divided nation, the majority, especially among the younger generations, already stands with today’s resisters in the streets. The median voter wants to see an orderly immigration process and criminals removed from the country, but wants the abductions, kidnappings, and terror campaigns to end. Conservatives clucking that riots in cities, regardless of who provoked them, will rebound badly on the rioters is a perennial boast that doesn’t have any grounding behind it. People know what they’re seeing, and they know who’s responsible.
Politicians can do a great many things, but usually in reaction rather than action. It’s the determination of ordinary people putting their bodies on the line that can move them to react. There’s only one way to stand up to a radical occupation by armed thugs, and the people of Minneapolis are already engaged in it. They are activated and in no mood to back down. They are not weighing the political considerations and whether their behavior will tick polling in one direction or another. They are seeing wrong and trying to make it right, even as the wrongs are committed by men with guns. In this as in most things, the people will lead the way.
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