From Minneapolis: I've Never Seen Unity Like This

or: a report from my first day in Minneapolis

When you study social movements and uprisings, there’s a pretty clear seasonal pattern you can find: people get into the streets and rowdy in the summer, and things cool off when the air cools off. This certainly was true in 2020, and it’s something you’ll see again and again reading history..

Yet there I was, driving to Minneapolis in January.

Before I decided to come up to cover the anti-ICE resistance up there, I reached out to a friend who lived there. “It’s going to be really, really cold this week. Will people still show up?”

“Minnesotans will be there,” they told me. “ICE will be miserable.”

Because, as another friend put it to me: “ICE made a classic Nazi mistake: they invaded a winter people in winter.”

The people of Minnesota have never been afraid of ice, and these days, they’re proving that they’re not afraid of ICE either.

I’m a little afraid of both, if I’m being honest. But you do what you can.

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“You do what you can” might be the attitude that got me interested in visiting Minneapolis in the first place.

I had a conversation a week or two ago with a friend who lives up here. They’d been going out to guard apartment buildings from ICE, just standing outside the door to say “no, you can’t come in here.” They’d been sitting outside hotels known to house ICE agents and writing down license plates.

This friend of mine, they’re not a person I’ve ever seen put a label to their political ideology, or known them to be much of any kind of activist. They’re just a young queer introvert. I asked what has them doing this work—which isn’t exactly safe, as the news of the past few weeks has made clear. They told me that they had always told themselves that they would be someone who steps up if it’s necessary.

This friend of mine, they’re brave. But they’re not exceptional. Minneapolis is an entire city full of people standing up to a literally murderous regime.

That’s what I came up here to see.

I’m a professional optimist, in a weird way. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways that people come together in crisis to take care of one another. And people here have come together.

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It’s a two day drive from where I live to Minneapolis, or it should be. It’s January, though, and the midwest winter doesn’t fuck around. On Monday, there was snow. On Wednesday? Snow. So I had to do the thirteen hour drive on Tuesday.

I’d thought about getting a head start, the night before, and I’m glad I didn’t—there was a 37-car pileup in Indiana, during whiteout conditions with ice across the freeway. I didn’t see it on the news, though, because there was a hundred car pileup in Michigan the same night. During one hour of my drive, I passed 32 cars and trucks abandoned in the ditch.

I wasn’t too worried, myself. The weather was clear and most of the streets were plowed and salted. I’m a bit of a prepper, and my 4WD truck has good tires, chains if I need them, and plenty of winter gear.

Minneapolis is cold in the winter, and it’s particularly cold this winter, and it’s particularly cold this week. I have winter clothes—I live rurally in the mountains, after all—but it’s one thing to have what you need to work outside in 10 degrees and another to have what you need to stand around for hours in -20. I’m fully expecting that Friday, the day of the upcoming general strike, will be (with windchill) the coldest temperatures I’ve experienced in my life.

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So I drove for thirteen hours, and picked up my colleague at the airport, and made it to where we’re staying. We talked about audio recorders and gas masks, we talked about the narratives we had in our heads about what was happening, we talked about what we’d like to learn and see.

We have a lot of big questions, and one of them is just: what’s the scale of the crisis here? It gets described like the place is a war zone, but a lot of US cities have been described as war zones in the past few years and it’s rarely been true. Just how present was ICE, and the resistance to it?

First thing in the morning, a line of cars drove down the residential street we’re on, honking their horns. It was, as we guessed and later had confirmed for us, ICE watchers tailing an ICE vehicle, laying on the horns to keep the federal occupation from operating in secrecy.

I couldn’t lace up my new fancy insulated boots fast enough, and by the time I got outside, they’d passed us.

But yes, the city is under occupation.

We picked where to stay based on wanting to not quite be in the thick of it, but it turns out all of the city, as well as St. Paul and the suburbs, are the thick of it. We didn’t have to drive more than three blocks before we ran across a crowd of people guarding a childcare facility. Imagine needing to guard a childcare facility.

Half the street corners in the city seem to have people on watch for ICE, ready to call in suspicious vehicles to the decentralized networks that monitor the movements of kidnappers around the city.

It’s ICE that moves in secrecy around Minneapolis, while the rebellion wears reflective vests and puffy coats.

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I spent yesterday talking to organizers, but the first thing a friend told me was that, unlike most social movements, there’s not “the guy” to talk to. There just isn’t a central leader, nor some central cadre. There is no vanguard leading the resistance.

The resistance to ICE in Minneapolis is strong, generalized, and sustained. It’s also entirely decentralized and leaderless (or “leaderful” if you’d like). There are roles. There is organizing—there’s so much organizing. There are so many organizers, from so many communities and identities.

This, of course, makes my heart happy.

It’s also, I’m certain, frustrating as hell for the Federal occupation of the city. They want to pick off a few people and bring them up on charges. That might still happen, but it will be a farce of a trial. If there’s a conspiracy, it’s the entire city conspiring to be free.

In the US, most of us are used to seeing protest movements as a sort of internal rebellion. Against the local police, against the capitalist infrastructure. What’s happening here is fundamentally different. This is a rebellion against what amounts to foreign occupation. If I were to guess, I would say this is the reason that the weather isn’t keeping people out of the streets. Sure, people here own a lot more snow gear than the average American, and are more used to driving on unplowed roads, but I think more than anything else it’s that this situation is simply intolerable. People are more willing to risk more.

Because their fucking families are being kidnapped. Their neighbors are being kidnapped. Kids at their schools are being kidnapped. They themselves are being kidnapped.

Yesterday, while we were driving around, we saw teachers walking with students out of the schools. When I got home to read the news, I learned why.

We don’t yet know how many people have died in ICE detention, because they sure as shit aren’t telling us. We don’t know how many people have died upon deportation, but no one flees without a reason, and people who are in the US seeking asylum are doing so because returning to their home country is often a death sentence.

So killing one of the ICE watchers didn’t stop people from watching ICE.

There is too much on the line.

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While we were talking with people outside the daycare, a Somali family put samosas in our hands. We tried not to take them: “we’re just journalists,” we told them. This was not an acceptable excuse to not take the samosas. Which were, honestly, the best I’ve ever eaten.

We talked with a 76 year old woman about what brought her out. Her father had fought fascists in Italy and France, and she knew he would be proud of her. These were her neighbors, she explained. I was a bit chilly, even in my new winter clothes, while talking to her. She wasn’t even wearing a hat.

An audio engineer I knew tangentially from the metal scene was there—just a nice small world moment—and he was supposed to be recording a reasonably important band that day, but his kid was in the local school system and there was no way in hell people would come for anyone’s kids, in his neighborhood.

People were aware of the gravity of the situation, both locally and nationally. They knew that frustrating ICE anywhere was essential to stop them everywhere. They would serve as a bulwark, if necessary.

And their numbers had surged after one of them had been shot to death.

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I talked with a bunch of organizers yesterday—well, really, everyone was an organizer—and I asked them extensively about what kind of reporting they’d like to see, about what they’d like the world to know about their efforts.

One thing that came up, that stuck with me, is that while they’re glad the media is reporting about all the terrible things ICE is doing, they want more people to know how beautiful the resistance is. I can’t paint a rosy picture of what’s happening here, because it’s not rosy. It’s not idyllic. But it’s inspiring.

I’ve been involved in protest movements for 24 years now (maybe it’s cheesy, but I picked a specific protest as my starting point) and I’ve never seen a population so united, and it’s not even close. The entire city, it seems like, is rising up against the kidnappers.

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I have more to say, but the sun is up and I’m only here a few more days, so I’ll say more later.

Of course, my actual journalistic goal is to put together some podcast episodes, but I figured I’d write these posts to collect my thoughts along the way.