The Residents of Minneapolis Are Fighting for All of Us

For as long as Donald Trump has deployed his ICE brownshirts in the “Democrat” cities he so despises, Americans have been out in the streets, confronting his masked goons and making sure the rest of the world sees what’s going on. One of the first witness videos I saw was in Washington, D.C., in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood where my father grew up. A woman espied three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents loitering in the area, harangued them, ran them off their roost, and then followed them around until they finally piled in their car and drove off.

ICE confrontations have necessarily evolved since then, as agents have become more wantonly violent. The New Republic has been chronicling the community response to ICE, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis. But one thing we haven’t done, and which I feel compelled to do, is simply say this: I think the people risking their lives and livelihoods to protect their neighbors are the best of us, and I feel like we all owe them a debt of gratitude.

I’m thankful for all the people who’ve filmed ICE agents slipping and falling on Minneapolis’s icy streets. Fascism is more a set of aesthetics than it is a legible system of political beliefs, so it actually matters that we make fun of these jabronis—humiliation pushes our lines forward. Creativity is needed, as well. I’ve thrilled to the sight of Minnesotans gathered outside the hotels harboring these hoodlums, banging on drum kits late into the night. And ordinary citizens seem very composed and ready to protect their city. One especially inspiring sight came this week when ICE agents pounded on the door of the Wrecktangle Pizza shop in Minneapolis’s Lyn Lake neighborhood: There’s a “tweet tweet” blast on a whistle, and suddenly scores of people swarm the sorry ICE agents and run them off.

While we should be rightly delighted by these sights, they might be occluding a darker part of this story. The murder of Renee Good has engendered a righteous fury in the people of Minneapolis, but if my friends there are any guide, it’s also sparked genuine sorrow and spiky, persistent fear. People that I know normally to be rocks of confidence are communicating a despair that I’ve never heard them express.

In my group chats, I’ve been told about restaurant workers who’ve disappeared from their workplaces. Those friends of mine with kids have had to go to exhausting lengths to protect them. One told me about how his daughter’s preschool had to close because the Methodist Church that hosted it was tipped off that ICE would be executing a raid on its property that day—the day of the church’s food pantry. And the reason ICE was rumbling Wrecktangle Pizza, I was told, was because the chain raised $85,000 to help area restaurants cope with the strain of their agents’ presence in the city. ICE knows who the most vulnerable Minneapolitans are, and also the ones who’ve done them the most damage, and they are targeting both, with state-of-the-art surveillance technology and the tacit permission of the Trump administration to terrorize.

Minneapolis truly can be likened to a city under siege from a foreign threat. As The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently reported, the Trump administration’s plans to deploy as many as 3,000 ICE or Customs and Border Protection agents to the Twin Cities would make the occupying force “equivalent to five times the manpower of the Minneapolis Police Department.” Moreover, they report, it would be “close to the total headcount of sworn officers among the region’s largest 10 law enforcement agencies and equals nearly one agent for every 1,000 of the Twin Cities’ 3.2 million residents.”

This is an important side of the story to tell for many reasons, not the least of which is that ICE cannot deploy enough people to put every American city in check. So for the moment, Minneapolis is really taking it on the chin for most of the rest of us. The reason the streets of my own dense liberal enclave are not ringing out with shouts and whistles is because Trump’s “day of reckoning” isn’t being fought here—yet. When this fight does come to our own neighborhoods, we will have Minneapolitans—like the Chicagoans, Portlanders, Los Angelenos, and Washingtonians before them, among others—to thank for cheering our hearts, deepening our knowledge of how to fight back, and making these ICE deployments more costly.

The people of the Twin Cities feel isolated and alone; local officials have lamented that they are literally outgunned, and politicians in Washington have offered little respite beyond the occasional galaxy-brained idea. We owe a debt to the people of this besieged city. We should take some time to comfort friends and loved ones who are under fire. We should share their stories, good and bad, widely, with an eye toward building a repository of evidence that a future federal government can use to prosecute lawless ICE agents and those who gave them marching orders. In the meanwhile, to everyone putting your bodies on the line in this fight, you have my thanks. And to the ICE agents out there causing violence and mayhem, let me say—from the heart—get fucked.

For those interested in ways to help the people of Minneapolis, there are a number of organizations to which you can donate. Unidos MN has been helping to train Minneapolitans to observe and report on ICE activity and run the city’s rapid response hotline. Take Action MN is constructing a hub for mutual aid groups in the city. Families Helping Families has organized 120 parents to do grocery and rent relief, student transportation, school patrols, and more. Isaiah is a multiracial organization of faith communities that has organized rallies to remember Renee Good. There are a number of national civil rights organizations operating in the city, including the Immigrant Defense Network, the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee. There are a number of legal aid organizations, as well, including the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, and the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.