Mi 04.02.2026
In the past months there has been an occupation and overwhelming use of force in the city of Minneapolis and surrounding area by federal agents from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Patrol). At a public meeting last week, a socialist and Vorwaerts activist from Minneapolis reported on the occupation and on the ground resistance against it. This article is adapted from remarks at that meeting.
The Basics
[A quick note: there are both ICE and CBP attacking people on the streets of Minneapolis. These are technically two separate organizations inside the Department of Homeland Security, but in practice there is no real difference between how they are being used. To make things easier, I’ll just refer to both of them as ICE or federal agents.]
Anyway, over the past months there has been a growing occupation of these federal agents in Minneapolis, St. Paul and the surrounding area. Around 3.000 of these troops have come in, harassing people on the streets, at their jobs, at schools, in hospitals, and in their homes. They have been using pepper spray, chemical weapons, “non-lethal” weapons and as we have seen lethal weapons. They have been going door to door, demanding to know which houses have people of color. One friend reported that in her neighborhood, they specifically asked about Hmong and Somali families. Abandoned cars have become an everyday sight, as ICE arrests people and then simply drives off, not caring what happens to the car sitting there on the street, at the gas station, in the parking lot. Often the doors are still open or the windows are smashed. The city no longer has the capacity to tow and store all the vehicles, so they just sit there. Federal agents have abducted and detained thousands of people at this point, in a campaign designed to terrorize the community into submission.
Why Minneapolis?
There are a couple of different approaches to the question “why is this happening in Minneapolis/Minnesota?” The pretext for “Operation Metro Surge” was alleged fraud in the Somali-American community, but that obviously isn’t a reason to send thousands of armed agents into the streets. There aren’t many large Somali communities in the U.S. outside of Minnesota, which makes them a convenient scapegoat. I think the idea was that DHS could target this community, and there wouldn’t be much solidarity extended to a more recent and isolated group of immigrants, people of color who are also predominantly Muslim. But this was a miscalculation.
Resistance
What we’ve seen over the past few weeks is a community that refuses to be terrorized. In every neighborhood of the city, tens of thousands of everyday people have found ways to play a role in slowing down and resisting the occupation. People carry their whistles, follow ICE vehicles and prepare to film ICE, but they also do things like delivering groceries to neighbors who are afraid to go outside. The hotels where federal agents are staying were leaked, and noise protests take place outside of them every night. Thousands of school students have staged walkouts and protests against ICE on school days during school hours. Even more students have simply refused to go to school. Even things like intentionally pouring water (which freezes immediately) in areas where ICE agents have to walk. The whole city is involved.
The high point of this resistance was last week Friday (January 23rd), when the city of Minneapolis was largely shut down in a “Day of Truth and Freedom”. Hundreds of businesses were shut down (either voluntarily or because so many people refused to come in), and the rallies on the day had between 50,000 and 100,000 people. It’s worth pointing out that the temperature was -30° Celsius in the morning; that’s not unheard of in Minneapolis, but it’s still pretty cold.
The impulse for what was effectively a general strike was the ICE killing of Renee Good on January 7th. This killing was an attempt to scare people out of their resistance. Her last words were “that’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you”; her killer’s (Jonathan Ross) first words after shooting her were to call her a “fucking bitch”. The following week multiple ICE agents taunted protesters by asking them “haven’t you learned your lesson yet?”, implying that they would keep shooting people until the protests stopped.
How big was the “Day of Truth and Freedom”?
It’s hard to know exactly what the impact of the January 23rd Day of Truth and Freedom was. But now we actually have some polling numbers, which can let us get a bit more concrete. The organizers, which includes the Minnesota AFL-CIO, several area labor councils, as well as faith and community groups, conducted a poll that found 23% of voters throughout Minnesota participated in the day of action. Among participants, 65% refused to go shopping and 38% refused to work. While 38% of 23% doesn’t sound like much (it’s 8.79% total), that still means that something like 380.000 workers refused to work, based on numbers from SEIU local 26 President Greg Nammacher. If only half of those who refused to work are concentrated in Minneapolis and St. Paul, which is almost certainly an underestimate, that would be about 45% of the cities’ workforce. That’s an unbelievable number and shows the immense capacity of the working-class of the Twin Cities.
The reaction by ICE to the January 23rd strike and protests was to kill another person, Alex Pretti. He was a nurse and a union member (AFGE local 3669) but not known for being an activist or lefty. He simply saw his neighborhood under attack, and felt he had to do something. A week before his death, when he saw ICE was chasing a family on foot, he tried to help by blowing his whistle and shouting. ICE surrounded him, beat him, broke one of his ribs, then left him on the ground. On January 24th, he tried to help a woman who was being assaulted by multiple armed men, and their response was to pepper spray him, throw him to the ground, beat him, then shoot him 10 times.
How neighborhoods are organizing
One important thing to point out is that it’s not just activists that are taking part in the resistance. It’s happening on a mass scale. Here’s one example of what I mean: in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul (with a high Hmong population), people gather every morning to begin watching for ICE. Every day they create a new Signal group just for people who are active in that neighborhood that day. Signal group chats have a maximum number of 1.000, and every day they reach that maximum before 11 a.m. One analysis estimates that at least 20.000 Minneapolis residents take part in ICE watch Signal groups in their neighborhoods. And this is just the number of people in known groups organized via Signal, the real number is almost certainly higher. One Immigrant Rights Center alone has reportedly trained 65.000 people since December to do legal observation, direct intervention and following of ICE vehicles, which they refer to as “commuting”. Again, this is just one group that has trained 7% of the population of Minneapolis.
This level of organization on a grassroots level has confused ICE to no end. After some of the Signal chats were posted publicly by an infiltrator, right-wing activists couldn’t believe the number of people who were playing various roles in resisting the occupation, and assumed that they must be getting paid. Because they can’t fathom how a community can come together under pressure to fight for one another’s survival. But that’s exactly what happens in working-class communities and communities of color.
ICE occupation is radicalizing people into activists
The escalation of ICE tactics is turning people who have committed to “low-risk” actions into more hardened activists. For example, delivering groceries to undocumented people who can’t go outside was originally considered “low-risk”. But in the last week or two, ICE agents have started following around white people carrying grocery bags, because they think that will lead them to undocumented people.
So now the people delivering groceries – which again should be a low-risk thing – have been trained to never have a digital list of addresses. They write everything on a piece of paper, and if ICE comes to stop them, they eat it. This level of harassment is supposed to discourage people from helping, but it actually does the opposite. These are people who were probably never really “activists”, but say that they just want to help feed their neighbors. And for that, they risk assault and arrest by armed men. It violates their sense of dignity and basic rights, and that builds courage.
Many people who are active against ICE say that they aren’t protesters because they’ve never been to a protest before, but rather that they are protectors of their neighbors and neighborhoods. Anecdotally, my sister (who is not politically Left and lives in the suburbs) helps out several of her immigrant coworkers by driving them to work at a restaurant. They’re afraid to drive in their own vehicles or take public transit, but they feel safe if they’re in the backseat of a white woman’s car. I’ve also seen people that I went to high school with change pretty quickly. I’m talking about middle-aged white men who lean Republican, who use words like “illegals” to describe immigrants, and almost certainly voted for Trump. Now they are saying this government overreach is going too far, and see that they are being lied to and told to ignore what they can see with their own eyes. Trump and MAGA are alienating their own base with this occupation. ICE is now less popular than the IRS, the tax collection agency of the state.
Differences with 2020
This points to one important difference between now and the George Floyd protests of 2020: it’s much harder to separate yourself from it. For many Minnesotans, they could look at the Black Lives Matter-protests as just “people acting crazy in the city.” The implicit idea being that if everybody (including the police) just relaxed a bit, everything would be better and calmer, like it is in the suburbs. This is, of course, wrong and delusional, but it was a very real sentiment that a lot of people felt back in 2020.
The structure of many US cities, with smaller downtowns and sprawling suburbs, made this a lot easier to believe. Minneapolis (430.000) and St. Paul (310.000) together make up just under 20% of the Twin Cities population (3.76 million). So for 80% of the Twin Cities, the George Floyd-demos were a thing you saw on the news and social media. And what you saw was based largely on your personal algorithm.
In contrast, “Operation Metro Surge” is affecting a majority of the people in the Twin Cities. Most people have a friend or a cousin or someone from work or someone from high school who has been stopped or seen an abduction or a workplace raid. It’s something you see with your own eyes daily. ICE watches and legal observers are best organized in the cities, but they also exist in the suburbs. A friend of mine is a dispatcher in the southern suburb of Bloomington, and she gave me some of the best insights in early January about what’s going on. On the day of the general strike, ICE avoided Minneapolis and St. Paul, and instead did raids in the suburbs. This included Maplewood, not far from the restaurant where my sister works.
For better or worse, the question of skin color and citizenship plays a role. Many white people find it a lot easier to identify with white U.S. citizens who are victims of police violence, rather than the many other people of color and immigrants who are overwhelmingly targeted. In a state that’s still 77% white, this is a factor. It’s therefore even more important to point out that Keith Porter, Parady La, Heber Sanchez Dominguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos have also been killed by ICE in 2026 throughout the US.
Divisions in the ruling classes
A few other points I’d like to make: we are starting to see cracks within the state. Greg Bovino, commander of ICE/CBP operations in Minneapolis, has been recalled after his comments calling Alex Pretti a terrorist who wanted to massacre ICE agents. He’s being replaced by Tom Homan, who is also a terrible person. But this is still a massive admission that they’ve screwed up their tactics and a complete reversal of everything DHS had said so far, which is basically that everything ICE agents do is justified and anyone who doesn’t fully cooperate in every way is a terrorist. DHS Twitter posted the following statement after Renee Good’s murder: “REMINDER. ‘To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one-no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist-can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties”.
It’s hard to quantify, but there’s also unrest within the organizations of the DHS. The number of people loudly supporting “Operation Metro Surge” is dwarfed by the people that can only see this ending in disaster, and are wondering if they will be prosecuted for crimes. The 3.000 agents on the ground are the agents most motivated by making money or attacking people of color and leftists. They tend to be more ideologically-motivated and have connections to groups like the Proud Boys militia and the January 6th mobs.
The ruling-class in Minnesota is also starting to feel pressure from below. After the January 23rd general strike, 60 CEOs of different Minnesota companies signed a letter calling for deescalation on all sides. It’s pretty tepid and doesn’t call for ICE to leave Minneapolis, but they see the threat of strike action to their profits, and they are willing to risk opening a rift with the Trump regime to protect those profits (obviously they care little about the people being shot and assaulted and deported). It’s worth pointing out that these companies had a collective revenue of 1.19 trillion USD last year. That’s more than twice the GDP of Austria.
The failure to draw support for assaults on immigrant communities almost certainly spooks the Republican party and MAGA crowd. Mid-term elections are coming up this fall, the economy isn’t growing outside of the AI bubble, and inflation has been driving up prices. If the goal is consolidating authoritarian power, this isn’t working; they need a certain percent of Americans to consent, and they’re destroying their own base of support.
What way forward?
One of the things that has made it so difficult to report on what’s happening is the level of decentralization within the movement. No one knows how many people are ICE watchers, no one knows how many people have done civil disobedience training, no one knows how many people are helping their neighbors, and (with the exception of the one poll I mentioned above) no one knows exactly how many people actually refused to work on January 23rd.
So far, this has been a strength of the movement. ICE can’t go after “the leaders” of the movement; there kind of aren’t any. They can’t target the unions for striking, because technically no union went on strike. But this will also limit the impact of the movement at a certain point. The January 23rd day of action was largely tolerated if not supported by many businesses; what happens when that’s no longer the case? If there is a call for a general strike against the wishes of the bosses, it will be necessary for the unions to go all out to mobilize not only their members but the working-class as a whole. They’ll need a higher level of confidence to stand up to not just ICE in the streets but also their bosses at work, which requires a higher level of discipline and some kind of democratic organizational form.
This was one of the major lessons of the successful 1934 general strike in Minneapolis, which was led by Marxists. It drew the weight of the working-class against both the bosses and the state, taking the energy and enthusiasm of the movement and directing it through Teamsters local 574. What exactly that would look like today is not yet clear, but should be a priority within the movement.
I’ll finish with the words of Kieran Knutson, President of CWA local 7250 in Minneapolis. He spoke at a public meeting last week about how the struggle against ICE is related to the class struggle:
“So when we think these motherfuckers are so powerful and we go to our work every day and we have to take shit from our boss and our managers about what we’re not doing right or not doing fast enough […] it can feel like we’re weak and powerless […] But please remember: they are not the really powerful people. If they don’t show up to work, nobody fucking notices. But when we don’t show up to work, nothing fucking runs.”