Our Neighbors in Minneapolis
or: What I Saw While I Was There
A lot of what you need to know about Minneapolis is on display at George Floyd Square. Beautiful statues of giant steel fists break free from the pavement, topped by the red, black, and green flags of pan-Africanism. Memorial graffiti covers every surface in sight. The bus shelter has been repurposed into a free store, where clothes hang for anyone to take. The city has plans to transform the area to an official memorial, but it already is one, and has been for years.
People accomplish things and governments rush to catch up. That’s the way it is, everywhere.
But Minneapolis in particular knows what it means to memorialize the dead. It knows that you fight in memory of people, and for the memory of people.
I spent four nights and three days in Minneapolis last week, when I came up to cover the rapid response and mutual aid networks that seemingly the entire population of the city is involved with. I met up with my colleague James Stout (from the podcast It Could Happen Here) and was happy to be with an experienced conflict journalist.
We spent our waking hours talking to as many people as we could and trying to sort out how to deal with the cold. It was so cold that the key to my truck stopped working in the door and I had to leave it unlocked. It was so cold that the brand new car battery wouldn’t turn over my engine and one time we had to bring the battery in overnight. It was so cold that my -20 degree windshield wiper fluid froze. It was so cold that half our electronics didn’t work: James’s audio recorders and even his phone just shut off.
But it wasn’t cold enough to keep Minnesotans inside. It wasn’t so cold that people didn’t turn out, in the tens or hundreds of thousands, to fill the streets for the general strike. It wasn’t so cold that people didn’t pour out of their houses in their pajamas and crocs when they saw commotion outside, in case they could do anything to defend their communities from ICE. It wasn’t so cold that people didn’t resist what amounts to a foreign occupation of professional kidnappers. I’m not being hyperbolic, about the cold, about the pajamas, or the kidnappers.
The shortest version of what I saw is this: a few thousand federal officers are occupying Minnesota right now. They’re in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the suburbs, and even some of the smaller towns. No one wants them there—I’ve never seen a community half so united as the people of the Twin Cities.
ICE is there to kidnap black and brown people. They’re not subtle about their racism—even the local police have complained about how all of their off-duty non-white officers are being harassed by federal agents. Masked, unmarked men are simply snatching people out of their cars, throwing them into unmarked SUVs, and driving them away, often to never to see their loved ones again. People’s cars are left abandoned in the streets, sometimes still running, sometimes still in drive.
In response to this, many vulnerable people have essentially gone into lockdown. There are families that can’t leave their houses. Other people—friends, families, and neighbors—are looking out for them. The networks that are looking out for them are far and away the largest, most organized, and most successful networks like these I’ve ever seen, and they’re entirely decentralized. There is no central group or organization that is making this happen. It’s just people. People who are organized.
There are two sides to this struggle: rapid response and mutual aid. Rapid response networks organize to identify and track ICE vehicles and agents and to disrupt abductions in process. Mutual aid networks organize to get affected people food, medical care, rides, vet visits, company… whatever they need. These are two separate webs of networks. The mutual aid side is more secretive in its organizing, of course, because it is taking care of the people who cannot leave their homes without being kidnapped.
It’s strange to realize that the work people can do aboveground is harass federal agents, but the work that people have to do in secret is… feed people.
Partly because there’s no central organization, it’s hard to get a sense of the scale of these networks, especially the mutual aid networks. There are tens of thousands of people, at least, being cared for by these networks.
The rapid response network is slightly more visible. When an ICE vehicle is spotted, people follow it in cars honking and blowing whistles.
From afar, I have to admit I was skeptical about the efficacy of whistles and car horns. After a few days on the ground, I have no more doubts. I asked person after person: “does this work?” and all of them got some look of sorrow on their faces as they thought about every time they failed to stop an abduction. But all of them had interrupted multiple abductions, successfully.
Basically, ICE agents seem to back off as soon as they are outnumbered. They know they are not perceived as a legitimate law enforcement operation in the city, so they work quickly and in secrecy. Since abductions happen quickly—often stealing people in two or three minutes—the response needs to be just as fast. And it works because when people hear whistles and car horns, they start looking out. They come out of their houses.
It works because everyone knows what is happening is wrong, and everyone is willing to risk their lives to protect people.
Time after time, ICE has tried to abduct someone, only to be scared off by Minnesotans in pajamas and crocs. ICE will throw some tear gas, spray some pepperspray—and occasionally murder someone—and then run.
There are so many cliches I have to dance around while writing about all of this, but some are just unavoidable. Anti-ICE is the side of love and courage, and ICE is the side of hate and fear.
I stayed up late my last night in town, talking with a house full of queers—most of them Jews—about their experiences over the past two months. Two people told me a story that is going to stick with me. It’s a shockingly normal story.
The murder of Renee Good didn’t stop people from observing ICE. That same day, a few hours later, elsewhere in the city, two queer folks were in a car in a parking lot, observing ICE. ICE could have gone around them, but ICE wanted them to move. The two folks in the car didn’t move.
So ICE smashed out their windows and sprayed them with bear mace (later bragging to each other that they used the good stuff on the two). ICE started beating them.
They held hands.
The two recounted this story in their own ways, listening to one another as they relived what must have been among the worst days of their lives, but they both remembered, and lingered just so briefly, on holding hands. Blind from bear spray, with broken glass everywhere, while gloved fists beat them, they held onto one another.
They’re both citizens, so after hours without medical treatment but full of homophobic slurs, they were released without charges.
When they got home, their car was there. Another observer had gotten into a car full of pepper spray and broken glass and driven it home. They don’t even know which of the observers did that for them, because whoever did it didn’t stick around waiting to be thanked. Probably, whoever rescued their car went back out to try to keep helping people.
I asked people in Minneapolis what they wanted other people to know about their struggle, and one person replied: tell people about the beauty here too. The most horrific acts of the state capture the headlines—and for good reason—but there’s a specific beauty to what’s happening here.
When I ask people where all of this came from, the answer was never some specific organization or network or coalition. Organizations, networks, and coalitions are part of this, absolutely. But the core of the resistance is just neighborliness.
The Friday of the general strike, the coldest day in Minnesota since 2019, my truck wouldn’t start. We’d packed up all our stuff to head off to the direct action to shut down ICE, but my engine wouldn’t turn over. My brand new battery didn’t have the power to get the cold oil moving, not even with a jump box attached.
A neighbor came out, almost dressed for the weather, to offer his help. He wasn’t a mechanic, he just saw people stuck and figured he should check on us. If nothing else, he offered, we could go into his house to get warm.
Three different people showed up to rescue us, in two different vehicles. Someone we’d met the day before offered to lend us a car. A mechanic I’d never met drove down to talk us through our options. In the end, with a combination of hand warmers, a hair dryer, and jumper cables, we got the truck running.
If there are problems that can be solved by hand warmers, the people in Minneapolis will solve them. Everywhere we went, there were people giving out hand and toe warmers.
But this spirit of “if your car is broken by the cold, strangers will save you” was presented to me by multiple people as the spirit that animates the resistance to ICE. Some people are trapped in their houses, so other people try their hardest to help them, whether or not they’ve got enough experience, whether or not they’re ready.
I can’t emphasize the decentralization of these networks enough, and everyone I’ve talked to is fully aware of the limitations of that decentralization and also fully aware of the fact that none of this would have worked if it was all being run by this or that org, this or that non-profit, this or that ideological position. (Although a history of anarchist organizing is certainly among the ingredients that has made this particular stew possible. What a good metaphor I just came up with. I’m so good at my job.)
Both the rapid response and mutual aid efforts are hyperlocal. There’s not some city-wide network, there are barely neighborhood-wide networks. People are organizing with people on their own block, or small handful of blocks. This hasn’t been presented as a limitation, but instead an advantage. This was one of the main things that people wanted me to emphasize, when I talk to people in other cities about how to organize: decentralization is a strength and should be leaned into.
Decentralized networks are harder to infiltrate and harder to destroy. This movement is not leaderless, but leaderful, and there are no few specific people who could be arrested to stop the movement. Because it is built out of so many interlocking networks, even if a bad actor managed to disrupt an individual piece of the network (by, for example, bogging down some particular organizing group in minutiae and preventing it from accomplishing its work), the disruption would be minimal. Because the network is democratic (not in the sense that people involved vote on decisions, but in the sense that it is run by the people who are part of it rather than by some vanguard of leaders), people are listened to only when their ideas actually appeal to people.
Furthermore, democratic movements are inherently more inviting to a broader range of people, because the individuals who join can be part of shaping the culture and tactics of that movement. Someone who joins a Signal loop to stay informed about ICE activity in their neighborhood isn’t necessarily subscribing to this or that culture or political ideology.
The hyperlocal nature of the rapid response networks is actually an adaptation they developed. When ICE first arrived, they staged huge raids with hundreds of agents that took hours. There was time for people to gather, and responders could come from a comparatively large area. ICE soon learned it couldn’t operate in the open, so they moved to fast abductions. Now they just racially profile people on the street (or scan license plates for names) and snatch them, in a process that sometimes only takes 2-3 minutes. You have to be within a couple blocks of this in order to observe or interfere, so the organizing happens block by block.
This style of organizing works because the overwhelming majority of people in the city are very actively opposed to seeing their neighbors kidnapped. There is no shortage of people willing to yell at ICE.
Because there is no rigid authority within the organizing against ICE, it remains unpredictable to its enemies. Some observers are more likely to actively disrupt ICE than others. Some people who follow ICE do so calmly, some do it aggressively. People are empowered to take their own risks and make their own decisions, which means ICE can’t develop a single set of protocols of how to respond to the observers.
I really do need to emphasize the “leaderful” part of this. This is not disorganized chaos and randomness. This is, well, organized chaos and randomness. People are constantly adapting to the circumstances, changing protocols and tactics day by day, sometimes hour by hour. I have never seen a more nimble organization at anywhere near this size.
More than one person told me: the thing that you need to know about setting up rapid response networks is that they need to be decentralized. They need to maximize the autonomy of their participants. They need to be leaderful. None of this works top-down.
When I asked where this movement came from, why Minneapolis seemed to be so capable of protecting its people, everyone I spoke to pointed to a different root, though none claimed to be speaking to the only root.
An organizer from the American Indian Movement (AIM) who grew up in that movement talked about the community patrols indigenous people put together in the late 60s, and before that the solidarity between Black communities in North Minneapolis and indigenous communities in South Minneapolis.
Another organizer from the Powderhorn neighborhood told me about the arts community of that area, in particular the Mayday parades that have been happening every year since the mid-70s. “People just show up at Powderhorn Park and make puppets,” I was told. The parade is self-organized, self-directed, and legendary.
Other people told me about potlucks and barbecues. Last year, with the growing crisis of fascism, more people started throwing events for their neighbors, just to get to know each other.
Person after person talked about the George Floyd uprising of 2020 too, about the community networks people built back then. It’s not like people set up networks and kept them super active, but connections can lay dormant for years and then re-emerge. (Like seeds? Are we talking about roots or seeds? I’m so good at metaphor.)
Contrary to what every apocalypse movie tells you, people come together during crisis. Think about waiting for the bus. In some cultures, strangers don’t talk to one another, so you might be waiting for the bus in crowded silence. But as soon as the bus is five minutes late, everyone is friends, or at the very least sharing information and/or snacks.
These days, of course, people who are waiting for the bus are also looking out for the occupation forces.
While some connections between neighbors and communities run deep, most of the connections have sprung up in the past months (and especially the past couple of weeks) as the crisis deepens. People who used to know a dozen neighbors now know hundreds of them.
The other origin of this movement, of course, are the movements people have already started to confront ICE elsewhere. We all learn from one another. Maybe it all started with people from Chicago who made the trek up north to teach people about whistles.
Sometimes I just lay back and think, really think, about the fact that it’s whistles and car horns and crowds versus the modern gestapo, and before I visited Minneapolis I couldn’t really wrap my head around the idea that this could work.
But it does work. It works because people in pajamas and crocs will scream at fascists at seven in the morning and take a face full of pepper spray for their effort and just keep doing it day after day.
It’s working, and I think we’re going to win, and it’s going to be messy and nasty. But while ICE is tangled up in Minneapolis, they’re not able to exert as much force elsewhere.
Last Friday was the general strike.
Usually the motto of a general strike is “no business as usual.” But business as usual has been almost impossible in Minneapolis for months now already. The families who are hiding, the families who are being fed, they’re not and they’ve never been just “drains on society” like the right wing likes to paint them. They’re essential to the functioning of the city, and the economy of Minneapolis has been absolutely wrecked by ICE’s presence. Food service and distribution in particular has been hit hard. I talked to someone who works for a completely non-political food distribution company that joined the general strike because they’re as desperate as everyone else is to get people back to work, to get food moving into and around the city.
It’s a testament to the decentralized organizing in the city that while I talked with mutual aid and rapid response organizers, they weren’t the general strike organizers. But a strike is inherently leaderful, because it’s built by people withholding their labor. Even in the few days we were there, business after business joined the call for the strike, partly because their employees weren’t going to come in anyway.
Some social media posts say this is the US’s first general strike in 80 years (referencing, I assume, the Oakland general strike of 1946), but I’m not quite so old as you might think I am and this is my second general strike—Oakland had another one on November 2, 2011, during the Occupy protests, that was on roughly this scale.
But last Friday, tens or hundreds of thousands of people poured into downtown on the coldest day of the year (I am not done complaining about how cold it was. This is how you know I’m not a Minnesotan) to march against ICE.
Earlier in the morning, a few hundred people did their best to lay siege to ICE’s headquarters, over by the airport. Protesters have been there pretty much every day since ICE came to town, and once again, the people holding down those particular protests are different people with different support networks than the other groups doing other things.
So at nine in the morning hundreds of people showed up with banners and signs and shields and barricades and sound systems. James and I were late, because of the aforementioned car trouble. But don’t worry, we were there in time for the county police to box us and tell us we were under arrest if we didn’t disperse, without giving us any clear indication of how we could do such a thing. The cops told us to head east to some particular road, a road minor enough that no one around us had ever heard of it.
Instead, we left on the lightrail. Another argument for a robust public transit system.
Before we left, we saw the police arrest three people who had approached them, arms in the air, presumably just trying to ask for clarification on what they were being asked to do.
Meanwhile, hundreds of clergy from around the country had arrived in Minneapolis to protest and do civil disobedience to protest ICE and the deportation. We were busy being boxed in by cops elsewhere, so we didn’t see their action.
Some of the most high-profile arrests in the Twin Cities have been of people accused by the Trump administration of being anti-religious and anti-christian because they had protested at a church. But the marquee on every church I saw in the city was anti-ICE and pro-inclusion. The overwhelming majority of the arrests during the general strike were of clergy. Many of the people I spent the most time with were practicing Jews. Observant Muslims fed us sambusas while we talked to the people protecting a Somali day care. The AIM organizer spoke of the creator.
The fascists who hide behind crosses do not speak even for Christianity, let alone religion, spirituality, or the divine.
Our last night in town, we were guests of a house full of queer Jews who had story after story to tell us. Two things they said stuck with me.
Everyone compares Trump and the modern fascists to those most famous of fascists, the Nazis. It’s not actually a flippant comparison, but a sober look at history and at our possible future as a country. Many of the people we talked to had family who survived—and family that didn’t survive—the Nazi regime, and they’re not going to make these comparisons lightly.
One of our friends described how it felt to come upon an abandoned car in the middle of the street and try to figure out whose it was. This was a task they did almost daily. They had to sort through the glovebox and the console, looking for papers or notes, to find out whose life had just been ruined or ended. They felt like they were tracking ghosts. They felt like they were in 1930s Germany.
Another friend told us the stories they’d grown up with. Their family had been in Germany, in hiding for years before escaping in 1937. They’d grown up being told, again and again, that their neighbors hadn’t helped them. That the family had been alone until they’d escaped.
The person telling me this started choking up while they talked, and I started crying a little while I listened, and they told me that this time, this time, if they could have anything to do with it at all, families in hiding would know that they weren’t alone. That their neighbors were with them.
Unspoken, but written on faces of the people in the room, was the fact that neighbors, strangers, would die for one another. Renee Good already had.
The next morning, at 9:05am, Alex Pretti was disarmed and then executed in the street by masked feds. His last act was trying to help someone.
I didn’t sleep much my last night in town. James and I recorded podcasts, because that’s our job, the job we’d been sent to do, and then I slept a little and then I woke up and drove him to the airport after we put the car battery back into my truck—because, again, it was so damned cold we’d had to bring it inside for the night, then wake up and fiddle with tiny bolts in my engine well before sunrise.
There was a winter storm coming. Record snowfall. If you’re anywhere in the eastern half of the US, maybe you got it or the icy edge of it. It really is a two-day drive to or from Minneapolis from where I live, but once again I had to do it in one, because I had to beat that storm. I was going to get snowed in somewhere, and I wanted it to be with those that I love.
I’d been on the road two hours before I heard that ICE had killed someone that morning. I pulled off the highway and cried in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station.
After about forty-five minutes of soul searching and friend-asking, I decided to keep driving. As much as I love Minneapolis, it’s not my city and I don’t know it well enough to navigate it during an emergency without assistance. People had taken time away from their other work, their life-saving work, to hold my hand through the crisis that has enveloped the city so that I could go home and tell people what I’d seen. It felt selfish to turn around. It felt selfish to go home. It even feels self-indulgent to tell you how conflicted I was.
I spent the next twelve hours driving, as fast as was safe, with the storm nipping at my heels. I would get ahead of the snow and then stop for gas or to pee only to find myself back in the storm. This happened three times, and I don’t want this to be symbolism, or a metaphor. I want it to be coincidence.
But the thing is, what’s happening in Minneapolis is happening elsewhere too, and has been happening for some time now. People are being kidnapped and disappeared. People are dying in custody and people are dying on the streets. Police are killing people, ICE are killing people.
And at least as importantly, people are trying to stop it. And it’s not just a bunch of die-hard activists, nor just the families of the people most affected.
What works to stop fascism, the Twin Cities is showing us, is when everyone steps up. When everyone feels empowered, even if it’s just to blow a whistle or honk a horn or yell in the snow in slippers. When everyone understands that the work of making the world better is the work of taking responsibility for one another.
When everyone understands that we are, all of us, neighbors.
I asked people on the ground to provide me with information about where people can donate to help. I only ever share fundraisers that are vouched for by people I personally know and trust.
Rent Support for neighbors in Phillips
Rent Support for neighbors in Central
Rent Support for neighbors in Powderhorn
Supplies for Political Art Making
Protective Gear for Legal Observers
Diapers and Menstrual Supplies
Abolish Ice Shirts (the shirt I’m wearing right now as I type this)
That's my state. Thank you for the witness, the thoughtful reflection, the practical tips on where to pour resources, and yes deeply for the podcasts! (I mean, throw up some reruns when you need to but I appreciate your day job.)
Thank you so much. Watching from Europe, from afar.. we have a long way ahead of us and the hogs are out wildin, everywhere and even if we manage to crush that one, we got many more of these goons to go.
But there's so much hope in all of this and if we could all get together to be like Minneapolis, all the time, we would be able to tackle this shit in no time.
Thank you for your witness, thank the comrades in Minneapolis, thanks everyone who will make the upcoming battle easier. The right cowards in Germany are already calling for a German ICE. As of now, this still seems fairly unrealistic, but those things have a way of shifting fast these days and by now I am treating all of these proclamations as warning signs.
We will, of course, win. But it's good to see how many are kept safe. The Minneapolis Neighborhood watches make me sleep better half way around the globe.