In South Minneapolis

I live in one of the south Minneapolis neighbourhoods that ICE and CBP have been pummelling for the last few weeks. This is where Alex Pretti (the observer on foot) and Renée Good (the observer in a car) were murdered by federal agents last month, and where George Floyd was murdered by local police in 2020. Mixed in terms of race, class, gender and sexuality, these neighbourhoods are black, brown and white; Somali and Latino; professional, poor and working-class; queer, trans and straight. They are also the heart of the left in the Twin Cities: all four DSA-endorsed members of the city council come from around here. In Powderhorn Park in June 2020, a hive of protesters booed the centrist mayor, Jacob Frey, for refusing the call to dismantle the police department. This place isn’t perfect, but it is a MAGA nightmare.

Lake Street runs through here, marked with panaderías and sambusa shops, churches and mosques, punk bike collectives, cafés and theatres. In January, ICE abducted several members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe from under the bridge near Little Earth, the first and now only Indigenous public housing in the country; it began as an early project of the American Indian Movement. In February, Mercado Central, a co-operative food hall with 35 Latino family businesses, started a GoFundMe campaign for $500,000: business is down by 90 per cent.

Everyone’s physical safety is at risk, and you feel it when you walk around. Things are quiet, until they are not: symphonies of whistles and car alarms alert us to ICE’s possible presence every day. Many people do not go out. Day to day, distribution channels organise, pack and deliver food, toilet paper and art kits to those trapped at home. Those who are on the streets wear colourful whistles around their necks and are on high alert. The other day, as I was standing at a street corner near my place with S, nothing visible to suggest we were on ICE watch, a woman rolled down the window of her small car and said to us: ‘I think that car behind me is ICE. Do you see the tags?’ I turned towards her but I wasn’t sure what she was asking me to do. She must have seen my pupils widen. She repeated herself and mumbled: ‘Maybe I’m being paranoid.’  I took a few steps to look. ‘It’s not ICE,’ I told her, and she looked relieved. I was relieved, too, realising the paranoia is shared.

‘We had whistles. They had guns,’ Becca Good said of the day that ICE agents killed her wife. Our opponent is tricked out with military gear, staying in Hilton hotels and renting Enterprise cars, with technological support from Palantir and Amazon Web Services. Enabled, in other words, by corporate behemoths that govern our lives in other ways, too.

They operate faster than they used to. On a sub-zero day in December, in the early days of Operation Metro Surge, in the suburb of Chanhassen, dozens of masked federal agents tried to detain two men on a construction site. Dozens of neighbours came to disrupt them. The agents were armed, masked and waving tear-gas canisters. The men climbed onto a roof, surrounded by observers. One man left in an ambulance and was later taken into ICE custody, but the other didn’t come down until hours later, after ICE had gone. Early on, there were more stories like these. Then they started using Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition app that runs on smartphones. The abductions now happen within minutes and it is much harder to delay and obstruct them.

The local federal court received almost as many habeas petitions – asking judges to order the release of those unlawfully detained – in January as in the entire period from 2016 to 2024. More important, the federal judges in Minnesota are granting the petitions and people are coming home (though not without ICE obstructing and demeaning them at every step). But then ICE started transferring people out of state as quickly as possible, often within eight hours, thwarting the local habeas efforts. Every day now, chartered deportation flights leave from the Twin Cities Airport carrying people with their hands and feet in shackles.

Observers report other adaptations. ICE have gone from wearing tactical army gear to civilian garb; I have even seen photos of agents in keffiyehs. They have changed their cars and their licence plates: from out-of-state to in-state, to blotted plates or none at all. Meanwhile, Trump’s ‘border tsar’, Tom Homan, has replaced Greg Bovino as head of ICE operations in Minnesota, an attempt to dim the lights on what will be a violent march in either guise. ‘There’s no sanctuary from federal law enforcement,’ Homan has said.  

We have adapted too. South Minneapolis is alive with community defence practices. There are patrols and rapid response networks, people stationed at schools and bus stops, parents taking shifts watching daycare centres, protests and general strikes, grief ceremonies and rides. Recently, near the park, people had pushed garbage cans into the streets that ICE have been driving down. ‘ICE OUT!’ the handmade signs said.

My friend K, who was here in 2020, said that what was most remarkable now was that you could get so many of your needs met without paying a dollar. ‘It’s almost like a parallel society being built, a form of anarcho-communism.’ The day after that conversation, a neighbourhood haunt, Modern Times, renamed itself Post Modern Times and promised to provide free meals until the occupation is over (it’s also accepting donations). Its new motto is: ‘Everyone welcome except ICE’. Meanwhile, a campaign is taking shape to organise a city-wide tenant union and to demand a moratorium on evictions.

In The Commune Form, Kristin Ross argues that ‘defence and the act of defending are more conducive to the creation of solidarity’ than resistance. Resistance, she says, ‘means the battle is already over and we have lost; our sole means of persevering is to “resist” the newly consolidated power we attribute to the other side.’ But defence ‘begins elsewhere – not with the state and its power, but rather with what it is that we hold dear.’

The Minnesota Star Tribune ran a story on Sunday about ‘makeshift checkpoints’ going up in south Minneapolis ‘to slow and track’ ICE on our streets. The cops keep taking them down. The headline – ‘Minneapolis tells residents to stop building anti-ICE barricades, but they keep popping up’ – missed the point. Is it our city, or is it theirs?