A BLOODY LEGACY
Minneapolis erupted onto the world news stage in 2020 when a teenager’s video captured George Floyd murdered under a cop’s knee. Five years later, we were again top of the news cycle as we engaged in a determined, decentralized, and exhausting resistance against the ICE occupation. The invasion and the resistance continue, albeit at a reduced intensity, while the newsmakers focus on images of carnage in Iran, and across the Middle East.
H. Rap Brown once quipped, “Violence is as American as apple pie.” Historically, it’s a fair characterization of our midwestern mid-sized city. The 1862 Dakota War started when starving Dakota people, denied treaty-promised rations, rose up and killed many settlers living on land stolen from them. Within six weeks, the uprising was suppressed and vengeance exacted. On a cold December day in 1865, acting on orders from Abraham Lincoln, 38 Dakota men were hanged at Fort Snelling. Remaining captives were left to freeze, starve and die. Survivors were exiled to the Dakotas. The Fort is located two miles from where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered by ICE, both present-day horrors recorded on their neighbors’ cell phones.
Harold Stassen’s 1938 campaign for governor was replete with antisemitic innuendo. The Silver Shirts, the 1930’s version of today’s Proud Boys, campaigned against the incumbent Farmer-Labor Governor Elmer Benson with the warning, “If it can’t be done with ballots now, there must be bullets later.” On a 1946 visit, journalist Carey McWilliams labeled Minneapolis as the “antisemitism capital of the United States.” Jews were discriminated against in housing, jobs, stores and even civic clubs. Jewish doctors had no privileges in the city’s hospitals and there were quotas on Jewish student admissions to the University of Minnesota. Housing discrimination was baked in by protective covenants in a homeowner’s deed, agreeing on purchase never to resell to Blacks or Jews.
Through most of the 20th century and into the early 21st, liberal Minneapolis has been one of most segregated cities in the United States. In addition to protective covenants, North Minneapolis’s large Black population was ‘red lined’ by the federal government. Construction of the I-94 Interstate hemmed in the North Side from White neighborhoods and the prosperous Minneapolis downtown district.
In 1931, Black postal worker and WWI veteran Arthur Lee moved his family into a White South Minneapolis neighborhood. Mobs, as many as 4000, surrounded and vandalized their home. They received death threats and their dog was poisoned. While police offered no protection, friends, family, fellow postal workers and other WWI veterans guarded their home.
Relations between the African American community and Minneapolis Police Department have been fraught for generations. In July 1967, a North Side demonstration protesting MPD’s excessive use of force against a few teens exploded into a riot. White-owned businesses, many Jewish-owned from the days Jews shared the ghetto, were set ablaze. The Governor mobilized 600 National Guardsmen who patrolled the neighborhood for the next month. Tanks rolled down the major thoroughfare. Relations with the Native American community and the police in that era were also toxic. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded the next year in response to almost daily police brutality
Nearly sixty years later, history was repeated in the late cold months of 2015, when MPD officers killed a young Black man on the North Side. Activists occupied the street in front of the area’s police station for 18 days. The prescient community leader and founder of the Racial Justice Network, Nekima Levy-Armstrong, warned the mayor and the police chief, “If you don’t do something, this city will burn.” Five years later, over 160 structures were torched in the riots following George Floyd’s murder by an MPD officer. Less than a mile from where Floyd was killed, Renee Good was murdered by an ICE agent. Levy-Armstrong, herself a pastor, and 30 others have been indicted for disrupting a church service during Operation Metro Surge. The head pastor at City Church is a senior ICE agent.
The pace of traumatic events escalated last year, and still holds Minneapolis in its grip. In June 2025, a right-wing gunman shot State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, who survived serious wounds. Shortly after, he killed House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband. Minnesota responded to these horrors immediately with collective action. Hortman and her husband were murdered June 14, the day of the first No Kings March in St. Paul. While the Governor and local law enforcement urged people to stay home, the intrepid and forceful Attorney General Keith Ellison attended with upwards of 30,000 people. Ellison made a powerful speech to a shivering crowd on an unseasonably cold day:
We’re gonna win. But many people who we love and are deeply precious to us are going to suffer. But for those who don’t make it to the end, the rest of you will have to carry on. You have to promise to us and to each other that you will not give up on this fight for our country.
Then in August, a deranged young man shot and killed two children at the Annunciation Church in south Minneapolis. Another thirty-six teachers and children were wounded, many with life-altering injuries. Operation Metro Surge, Trump’s vindictive siege of Minneapolis, launched on Dec 4.
GREEN AND CLEAN
Despite its oft-hidden legacy of racism and the twin traumas of ICE occupation during an unusually cruel cold snap, Minneapolis is still a beautiful and progressive city. Rivers and lakes wind through our neighborhoods. No dwelling is further than seven blocks from a park. Minneapolis and sister city St. Paul were built along the Mississippi River where fortunes were made on milling and lumber, exploiting the fertile farm lands and the nearby rich forests, to say nothing of the broken backs of millers and lumberjacks.
City fathers bought and sold parcels of land for industry, retail and housing developments. Today, only our parks offer respite and memory of what this land, rich in forest, prairie, and bogs, once looked like. Determined citizens fought the steady consumption of land for development. Early 20th century civic leaders created a park system that now numbers 6800 acres of parks, waterways and walking trails. In recent decades, environmental activists successfully led the move to replace lawn-style grass covers with native plants that now line many urban lake and river shores.
The city is home to a few hundred peace and environmental organizations, progressive non-profits and vigorous neighborhood groups. The second wave of food co-ops was born here. Environmental activists have fought and won dozens of battles: the fight against taconite dumping in Lake Superior dragged on throughout the 1970s but succeeded with a landmark court ruling, the Boundary Waters Protection Act was signed in 1978, Ojibwe treaty rights to hunt, fish, and protect the Mille Lacs waters were affirmed in 1999, deadly PFAS chemicals were outlawed in 2023 and the coalition fighting PolyMet copper-sulfide mining near the Boundary Waters continues with several successfully blocked permits and more under consideration. Minneapolis lawyers and organizations played a pivotal role in the 1998 lawsuit against the tobacco industry, releasing $6.5 billion for public education. City leaders and activists led a ground-breaking clean indoor air movement, a model for the rest of the country. Minnesotans keep vigilant watch over the health of our land, air and water,
Minnesota, long noted for its relatively clean politics, elected a small-town geography teacher as Governor and returned him for a second term. Tim Walz is an interesting character. A former National Guard Command Sergeant Major, he was elected to the House of Representatives from District 1, a conservative, largely rural southern Minnesota area. He was reelected five times and then won his first race for governor in 2018. Until MAGA completely swallowed the Republican Party, he was noted for working effectively across the aisle. Walz is progressive on most issues (mining being the big exception). He steered the state through the aftermath of the riots in 2020 and insisted on a high-level safety protocol during the COVID pandemic.
Alas, he made a politically disastrous decision to run as Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential candidate. He floundered in the debate and did little to coax the center, let alone the angry pro-Palestine left, to the polls.
The Harris/Walz ticket lost big-time, but Trump never forgave Walz. The opportunity for revenge presented itself soon after the election. Minnesota has been rocked by a massive fraud scandal involving several dozen Somali nonprofits that secured reimbursement based on false rosters. (Point of interest: a white woman led the scam.) Rumors had been circulating for months but no Democratic politician or bureaucrat stepped forward to publicly name the fraud or demand an investigation until the first indictments were handed down. Clearly many Walz appointees and their staff were not minding the shop.
Team Trump saw their opportunity and pounced. Trump called ALL Somalis “garbage” and stopped funding for vital services including Somali daycare centers. A suburban mosque was torched and a 23-year-old right-wing influencer stalked Somali daycare centers and posted a YouTube video that purported to show fraud. No centers were implicated in the investigation, but funding was withheld for weeks, creating enormous hardship for daycare staff and working parents. Smarting from ICE’s year-long humiliation at the hands of the Portland Frogs, Trump sent the cruelty brigade of 3000 ill-trained Border Control and ICE Agents to Minnesota to clean up our act. They descended on us armed to the teeth in military garb, masked, with no identification.
THE INVASION and OCCUPATION
By mid-December 2025, 3000 ICE agents (referred to by a Facebook friend as “the incel goon army”) were swarming both cities but highly concentrated in south Minneapolis. My son Max accosted two ICE agents trying to detain a small, elderly Latina with her fruit stand on Lake Street (in front of one of hundreds of stores burnt in the 2020 riots and since rebuilt). With characteristic tact, he bellowed, “What the fuck are you guys doing?” Threats and curses ensued until he pointed out that about 20 people were now filming the altercation. The creeps retreated. Had this happened a few weeks later, as the invaders grew more brutal and immune to public scrutiny, I might have been planning a funeral.
Renee Good’s son attends Southside Family Charter School, an award-winning progressive K-5 school noted for its ground-breaking civil rights curriculum. My children and grandkid attended the school where I served as Director for 20 years.
CNN tracked down the connection and ran a fairly objective article about the school. But the right-wing press and digital trolls picked up the story and the doxing began. I stared at my screen in horror as I read malicious and often misspelled rants insisting the school should be investigated and shuttered for allegedly indoctrinating children and teaching them and their parents to spot and resist ICE (something most public schools routinely did during the invasion). The school received bomb threats, the teachers received death threats and even the children were targeted. One damaged soul sent an email to the school’s website announcing intent to “shoot the children in their foreheads.” One teacher was shocked out of her sleep by the sound of angry fists pounding her door late at night.
The school shifted to online learning, took all the signs down from the space it rents and eventually moved to a secret location where the kids are being educated in obscure safety. In an early chapter of what emerged as citywide expressions of solidarity and mutual aid, parents and allies banded together to help transport, feed and support children and staff.
As the year turned, the weather took a cruel turn to bitter cold, hardening thick layers of ice on streets and sidewalks. A favorite video clip, aired on late night comedy shows and widely shared on social media, showed two masked Agents falling on their asses. Black tennis shoes and combat boots meant for sand, not snow, don’t cut it on icy Minneapolis streets.
A MORAL MOVEMENT
ICE, ice, and freezing temps didn’t stop intrepid Minnesotans from mounting an unprecedented resistance and mutual aid campaign. Thousands of people purchased whistles and masks to protect themselves from tear gas and flash bangs. Neighbors developed Signal chats to communicate quickly when ICE was spotted. People poured out of their homes with whistles, surrounded the ubiquitous black SUVs, and filmed scenes where ICE was assaulting and kidnapping neighbors. These videos have been submitted to the ACLU and other organizations for evidence in ongoing legal battles and suits.
Key immigrant and legal non-profit organizations quickly sprang into action to train us in how to respond. Along with 800 fellow resisters, a neighbor and I attended a training explaining how to witness and record nonviolently. Thirty-plus constitutional observer or rapid response trainings were offered around both cities and nearby suburbs. An estimated 30,000 attended. Iglesia Dios Habla Hoy (DHH) Church began collecting and delivering groceries to immigrant families terrified to leave their homes. What started as a drive to feed 30 families gathered steam, money and volunteers and, as of early March, delivered 1.6 million pounds of food to 17,000 families. 25,000 are registered for help.
Fear of ICE forced thousands of families into hiding. Agents often smashed car windows, severed the seat belts, tackled and cuffed drivers, then dragged them along the pavement by their arms or legs to unmarked SUVs. These brutal bloody scenes often took place in front of children then left alone in cars. People stayed home from jobs, skipped medical appointments and removed their names from mailboxes; children stayed home from school. Routines we usually take for granted were disrupted by the threat of ICE arrest and deportation.
On social media, doulas and nurses offered to help pregnant women with deliveries and post-partum care, vets offered free home visits to care for pets, a guy with a tow truck offered to rescue and return vehicles that had been abandoned, still running, when people with brown faces were pulled from their cars and taken to the now infamous Bishop Whipple Building. In my senior co-op, we collaborated with a nearby PTA and raised over $6000 to support homebound children and their families. We launched a letter-writing campaign and every Saturday, assisted by canes, walkers, and each other, we make our way to a nearby intersection to protest ICE, war, and the many threats to our democracy. We hold up homemade signs: WE’RE OLD AND COLD. ICE OUT!
Henry Bishop Whipple was an early 19th century Episcopalian leader who championed the rights of immigrants and Native Americans. He pleaded clemency for the 38 Dakota hanged at Fort Snelling and was so well-regarded by the Dakota that they referred to him as “Straight Tongue” because of his reputation for honesty and fairness.
In one of the many ugly ironies of American history, the federal immigration center is named after Whipple. The Whipple Building is the front line in the war between citizens and ICE. Thousands of demonstrators faced off with ICE for week after frigid week in “the winter of ’26.” ICE agents pelted them with rubber bullets, poisoned them with tear gas, deafened them with flash bangs and brutally arrested those who refused to leave the site. Demonstrators included dozens of local clergy who offered up their bodies, their reputations and their congregations in service of the resistance.
The Whipple Building. designed as a government office building and courthouse located at Fort Snelling not far from the VA Hospital, was repurposed as a political prison. Detainees report ghastly conditions and detentions lasting from days to weeks to months without access to legal counsel or families. Food, water, bathrooms and medical care were inadequate to handle the numbers of detainees crammed into offices and even locked inside bathrooms. Haven Watch, a group of citizen angels, stationed themselves outside the building day and night, greeting the shell-shocked detainees who emerge without IDs, phones or warm clothing. Haven Watch provides blankets, cell phones, clothing and rides to people who would otherwise try to find help and home without transportation, money or means to communicate.
Haven Watch is one of dozens of mutual aid groups that sprang up across the Twin Cities and are now helping those being targeted in small towns across the state. Using Signal chats, neighbors not only witness and document ICE incidents, but provide groceries to families hiding at home, rides to and from school, and guardian brigades at school buildings because ICE has been known to follow school buses and nab children on their way into or out of school.
ICE agents assaulted a teacher and arrested a student at Roosevelt High School in south Minneapolis. Former Governor, wrestling champion, actor, and Green Beret Jesse Ventura graduated from Roosevelt. Weathered, pony-tailed, and weird as ever, he showed up to support the school and lambasted the Trump administration, Homeland Security, and the cowardly ICE agents hiding behind masks. He correctly identified warrantless arrests as a sign of a third world country and dictatorship.
As the US descends into authoritarianism, immigrants are scapegoated for virtually everything wrong with the country. People of African, Mexican, Central or South American heritage are the primary targets. Here, they work the land, breaking their backs on our factory farms, working long, hard hours in meat-packing plants and repairing our houses and roofs.
Many Somalis also farmed or tended herds in their native land. Hmong refugees were largely a farming people and many have established farms or retail gardens in Minnesota. Forced to leave their own land after fighting on behalf of the US in Laos during the Vietnam War, many of our new neighbors now tend fields, milk cows, and work in turkey processing plants across rural Minnesota. Thousands of others work in service industries as ride-share drivers or take care of children and elders, while those whose families have lived here longer are restaurant and grocery store owners. Recent generations pursue professional careers, living what looks like the American Dream. Their prosperity does not protect them from State-sponsored racism.
Not only New Americans, but those whose ancestors lived here before 1492, were subject to harassment and abduction. Red Lake Nation in Minnesota and Pine Ridge (Oglala Sioux) in North Dakota banned ICE from their lands, but numerous Indigenous people in Minneapolis were picked up and detained at the Whipple Building or, in the case of some Dakota Mdewakanton members, held at Fort Snelling, adding another dose of historical trauma. Tribes have run campaigns urging these descendants of the Original People to carry tribal ID and are speeding up the process for “paperless Indians” to get IDs.
The Minneapolis/Minnesota resistance is a moral movement, self-organized without ideology or hierarchy, composed largely of women who arrange and support the mutual aid effort and make up the majority of protestors. In the face of State brutality, without protection from law enforcement or elected officials, an estimated 25% of Minnesotans have witnessed, organized and raised millions of dollars to pay for rent, groceries and legal bills. They have fed, transported, and protected their neighbors. The risk is great. The reward is a solidarity so tangible and transformative that it has bridged, for the moment, the divides of race, class and individualism.
A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST
Whistle blowers and cell phone warriors have inspired visual art, music and poetry. More than 32 protest songs have been penned and sung on the streets. Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis” rocked the world a week after Alex Pretti was murdered. A soulful Irish version was released a few weeks later and then a French interpretation. Billy Bragg spun out “City of Heroes” in 24 hours. Gleeful crowds chanted the profane “Get Out of Minnesota Kristi Noem!” The Singing Resistance Movement, a grassroots network of singers, serenade loudly and late into the night at hotels that house ICE agents, at Target Stores that have allowed ICE to arrest and assault people on their property, and in support of immigrant groups and organizations.
Renee Good was a poet. Had she lived past her 37th birthday, she might have given us more of the weird joy of “Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” her poem recognized by the American Academy of Poets for its interesting tension between science and faith. Her murder and her last words, “I’m not mad at you,” have inspired dozens of poems. Alex Pretti, the beloved ICU nurse who was shoved, shot and then kicked by a gang of ICE agents, inspired more. Together the two martyrs and the resistance movement they embraced have been held in poetry’s embrace by Amanda Gorman, Allison Luterman, and dozens of others.
“Ice Out: Minnesota Authors Rising Up” was organized and edited at lighting speed by local author, teacher and publisher Ian Leask. “Written in real time by Minnesota writers, poets, immigrants, activists and witnesses,” the paper copies available at its launch sold out; it’s now available on Kindle and in paperback.
After the Portland Frogs danced their way into the public imagination and have since emblazoned sweatshirts, hats, and the usual movement merch, Bernardo Anderson, a graphic artist, created The Rebel Loon, an image of the state bird crested by the Star Wars Rebel Alliance symbol, and promptly placed it in the public domain. Purchase of a hat, shirt or “flash tattoo” will support the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, the Immigrant Defense Network and mutual aid efforts.
Even more fun than watching ICE agents wipe out on our icy streets was the spectacle of resisters tossing brightly colored dildos at ICE agents, some sticking to the windows of those intimidating black SUVs. Over 40 individuals were arrested in the melee that resulted. While the vast majority of protests and actions have been nonviolent, law enforcement reported that bottles were also thrown that day. Too bad, as it would be great fun to follow the legal proceedings to determine whether or not a lime green rubber dildo is or is not considered a weapon.
NO END IN SIGHT
Trump removed “Border Czar” Bovino in late January, and ordered a drawdown of ICE agents, but there are still near 700 in the state. In his LitHub essay, “Mad Means Something,” Minnesota novelist Charles Baxter names the uneasy ambiguity we all sense: “I don’t have an ending for this essay, because the ending is not yet in sight. Mad means something, yes, but so does joy, the joy of resistance, the happiness of collective work. Sometimes a curse may become a blessing. Bless us all.”
Baxter is correct in naming the joy of resistance, but this joy is largely the providence of White allies. Without diminishing the endurance and bravery of the tens of thousands of people who have marched, witnessed, organized and supported immigrants, the experience of those held hostage in their homes is anything but joyous. Major media including Minnesota Public Radio and the Star Tribune have broadcast and printed interviews with immigrants in hiding. Their stories are wretched, with no end to the misery anytime soon. Yes, some have returned to work, more kids are attending school, a few restaurants have re-opened and some funds to cover rent for the months of lost income have been secured, but without appropriate public assistance, Go Fund Me’s won’t begin to alleviate the hardship.
Mayor of Minneapolis Jacob Frey estimated that “Operation Metro Surge cost in just one month at least 203.1 million dollars in economic and financial losses to the city.” Unlawful Detainers (court filings for eviction) were up over 30% in February. Data alone however won’t reveal the long-term damage. Kids who missed and still are missing school have fallen behind academically and are at high risk for depression and anxiety, as are their parents. Neglected medical appointments, the drain on what savings people may have, isolation from family and friends, and the claustrophobic fear endured while living in a darkened home with curtains drawn will take an immeasurable toll on the mental and physical health of thousands of our neighbors. Like the toll taken by COVID, this trauma won’t end when it’s safe enough to step outside. Like COVID, the damage will land hardest on brown-skinned people.
A teacher in Rochester, Minnesota mailed some school supplies to a child in hiding. She asked, via Zoom, if he’d gone to the mailbox to collect them. He replied, “Teacher, I’m Mexican. I can’t go to the mailbox.”
The Minneapolis resistance has been largely abandoned by state and local government. Leaders urge us to be peaceful, but insist they have no power to protect us. Mayor Frey made national news when he told ICE to “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” A boldly slick soundbite, but no enforcement followed. The local cops were never ordered to watch or restrain ICE agents at schools or hospitals and Frey vetoed a City Council resolution to extend eviction protection for an extra 30 days. (Since then, Denver Mayor Mike Johnson issued an order authorizing police to intervene and even arrest ICE agents who use excessive force or violate residents’ rights.) A Minnesota judge has refused the request to ban ICE from government buildings (where they capture people TRYING TO CONFIRM THEIR LEGAL STATUS), and Governor Walz defends protestors but did not call the State Guard out to protect them and has ignored requests to issue a statewide eviction moratorium.
LOVE vs. HATE
My all-time favorite movie villain is Robert Mitchem as imposter Preacher Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter (1955). Preacher Powell has the fingers on each hand tattooed, the right with “love,” the left, “hate.” Powell marries, then murders the hapless widow Willa (Shelly Winters) to get to what he thinks is a bank robber’s fortune her dead husband hid. Her children flee to shotgun toting neighbor Rachael (Lillian Gish) who keeps Powell at bay throughout the night until the local constabulary arrive and tote him off to prison.
In the movie, love beat hate in the form of a woman with a rifle. As Minneapolis careens hourly between love and hate, the lovers are mostly armed with whistles, snowballs and, yes, dildos. The haters have machine guns, pepper spray, flash bangs and rubber bullets. They are armed and deployed by the federal government. Our taxes pay for this horror movie.
The Minneapolis Resistance, widely shared on screens big and small, may have launched a new kind of movie that will star citizens of other cities and states as they launch their own nonviolent and creative opposition to whatever deviltry authoritarians unleash. As we face election interference, rollbacks in the rights we fought for in the 20th century, the disenfranchisement of whoever else gets scapegoated, and yet another hideous war, let’s remember the power of mutual aid to engage people who don’t consider themselves “activists,” the power of song (as opposed to tired chants that make our demonstrations sound like macho athletic contests) and the power of fun–frogs, loons, and dildos!
