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Lessons and Resources from Minneapolis This is a memo, written in haste, about the ongoing conditions of the ICE and military occupation of Minneapolis. For context, the author is a former Minneapolis (Mpls) resident who lived and organized in abolitionist, labor and migrant defense movements for 8 years who is in close contact with organizers on the ground in Minneapolis. The information here is compiled from firsthand accounts and has been vetted by four comrades in the Twin Cities (TC).The memo is not meant to be exhaustive and merely offers one starting point for others to record and share best practices and lessons. The memo covers four things: 1) What the conditions are like in Minneapolis right now, as a possible reference point for what may unfold elsewhere 2) How community is responding 3) Reflections on what we might learn from rapid response and ICE watch organizing in Minneapolis 4) Resources and trainings from Minneapolis 1) Conditions in Minneapolis What is unfolding in Minneapolis in “Operation Metro Surge” is nothing short of a federal occupation, an invasion by a poorly trained paramilitary force of ICE troops who are heavily armed, masked, and mobilized in nearly every neighborhood in the Twin Cities. There are 2,800 armed and masked federal agents in Minneapolis right now, with Noem promising to send 1000 more. It is at a scale that is unprecedented thus far. They have been abducting people off the streets, many of them US citizens, based on the color of their skin or perceived ethnicity. All over the city, large SUVs with tinted windows, full of masked ICE agents are cruising through neighborhoods and back alleys, looking for people to snatch. Friends of friends have witnessed ICE agents stuffing people into these cars in front of their houses. To give you a sense of how bad it is, a friend witnessed two children under the age of 13, out walking their dog, get abducted and placed into a van in the middle of the day. Their friend got pepper sprayed for trying to stop it. No part of the city is immune; not the primarily white, affluent neighborhoods, not the uptown commercial district which got tear gassed yesterday, nowhere. From accounts gathered from friends and trusted sources: ● Rapid-response community safety groups and immigrant rights orgs estimate there is violent federal escalation happening in their communities every 15 minutes, based on the verified reports they’ve received since last Monday. Targets: ● Businesses: ICE agents are cruising areas with immigrant-owned businesses, and kidnapping patrons and employees alike. This week they abducted two US citizen employees at a suburban Target, one who was begging them to allow him to go get his passport to show them. In another episode, someone with a passport in their pocket was abducted. Lawyers have advised shifting from Know Your Rights to Know Your Risk trainings; even they realize there is no rulesbased order to rely on anymore. ● Schools: ICE is targeting schools and school buses, and especially ESL schools. They pepper sprayed teenagers and abducted two school staff members at a high school up the street from a friend’s house on Weds. They have abducted whole groups of children from bus stops. The Minneapolis Public Schools are still in person, but are offering optional online learning for the next 4 weeks so that children who feel unsafe coming to school can shelter in place. While that has helped, several parents reported that during their kid’s hybrid classes, they have watched other kids’ apartment buildings raided on screen. ● Hospitals and Clinics are experiencing raids. Patients are scared and are canceling their appointments or just not showing up. Kids are missing their checkups and vaccines, folks aren’t getting their cancer care, etc. ● Immigrant neighborhoods, subsidized housing, mobile home parks, and other affordable housing. These have been the primary targets. There is, for eg, a plan to raid the towers, a massive housing estate for Somali refugees this week. ICE agents have been casing several mobile home parks. The main targets are areas of high housing density, known immigrant neighborhoods. Somali refugees who have staus under the UNHCR process (a very high bar to hit) are getting abducted and deported despite valid work visas Racial Profiling: ● ICE is going door to door in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, asking residents where their immigrant neighbors live (Asian, Latino, and Somali have been the explicit targets). Yeah. Read that again. ● ICE is increasingly picking up Native Americans— targeting folks based on skin color alone. The irony is not lost on anyone. ● ICE brutality: They are arresting and beating legal observers; some have had their arms broken, many are being pepper sprayed, even 50 feet away from people they are abducting. Folks are showing up at local hospitals, brought in in ICE custody, with severe injuries that are absolutely inconsistent with mechanism of injury reported by ICE. (Eg: patient appears to have been beaten unconscious, while ICE agent says he slipped and fell.) ● They are smashing windows in cars and homes. They are chasing down cars with drivers they perceive as Somali or Latino, smashing into those cars, and pulling people out and abducting them on the street. Last night after shooting a man in the leg on his doorstep, they flash bang grenaded one car, and teargassed another with six children in it. There are abandoned cars, all over the place: at gas stations with their nozzles still attached. On the side of the road. Doors open, abandoned. It is unclear whether families know when their relatives are abducted; Minneapolis groups are full of people reporting their relatives missing. ● Shifting ICE tactics: Some reports suggest tactics have begun to shift. There have been reports of ICE vehicles sporting free Palestine stickers, placing soft toys on their dashboards, using Subarus, changing their license plates; and hanging handicap symbols on rearview mirrors; ICE agents wearing civilian clothes and no identifying vests, and more ICE agents being recruited who are Black and brown folks. *There is no confirmed verification about these new tactics at this point of writing* ● These ICE agents do not have warrants. There are 2,000+ agents and they are simply hunting for anyone that’s not white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a green card holder, they will kidnap you first and ask questions later. ● Right wing militias have descended on the city from the outskirts of the Midwest. They did so in 2020 as well, lighting fire to cherished old bars and intersections. Their stated role this time is to protect ICE agents and “prevent riots from happening again”. A large right-wing rally to “stop Islam from invading Minneapolis” has been called for Jan 17. ● Processing: Many of the abducted are getting processed at the Whipple federal building and being shipped out of state as soon as they are processed. Once buses or planes leave the state, it becomes very difficult to stop the deportations, and this is part of ICE’s strategy. ICE has also just announced that they will be placing ICE agents on sky bridges at the Minneapolis-St Paul airport. 2) Types of community response in Minneapolis: - The community response is at an extraordinary scale. Many people have the muscle memory of neighborhood watches formed during the George Floyd uprising and have revived old systems and signal chats. Normal people with boat shoes are coming out of their houses using baking pans as armor. The primary forms of organization are as follows: Large intakes of newly politicized people are getting trained via Non-Profit coalitions: - Training and integration into rapid response groups is being systematically led by a few well-run non-profit organizations who are tapped into the neighborhood groups. These Community orgs have been leading know-your-rights sessions for months, often to packed venues. Their intake right now is at about 1000 people per night. People who have never been remotely politicized before are getting trained. These large organizations then direct newly-trained people into autonomous neighborhood groups based on their assessed risk level. - Minneapolis is distinctive in its organizing infrastructure because it is a small enough city that there tends to be more community-labor coalition crosspollination than I have witnessed in other places. This has been especially useful as large catchments of newly-politicized, middle-class white people have looked for ways to plug in: they go to the large organizations that have a longstanding reputation for doing immigrant work (CAIR, Unidos MN, Immigrant Movement MN, and the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee - a FRSO front org I was involved in for some years; notably, DSA is not really on this list and not really where the majority of people go). A significant number of faith based and interfaith organizations (ISAIAH) are involved. These orgs have a couple of centralized trainings that they have been running nightly; the friend who leads them reported 1500 on the night that Renee Good was killed, and hundreds every night since. These are two of the primary trainings being used: - Basic 101 ICE Watch training - for anybody and everybody new to movements - STAC Base Ice Watch Training - from PRP/STAC - Minneapolis is also unique because of its demographic composition: It has one of the largest state populations of people Indigenous to North America, some of the largest refugee populations (primarily Hmong and Somali), and one of the most active populations of people descended from enslaved Africans. These are people who have borne generations of imperialism and state violence, and are some of the most risk-taking and trauma-tolerant ICE responders in the city. The autonomouslyorganized neighborhood defense groups are thus incredibly diverse and driven from and by refugee and immigrant working class people defending their own communities and neighbors. These neighborhood networks, mutual aid, and school defense networks have also taken on a life of their own far beyond the non-profits, and are doing intake and autonomous trainings of their own. It’s all hands on deck, and people are getting tapped in from all directions. Autonomous formations: - Safety Brigades: Mobile teams of volunteers that are dispatched to locations where ICE presence has been reported in order to verify those reports. If they witness an active operation, they document, report it to a hotline, and send out an alert to the neighborhood signal group. Drivers are following ICE vehicles, blaring their horns in warning. Some are doing bike patrols following guidelines started by Chicago: - Siembra Safety Brigade Orientation - Copy of PRP Building Community Defense Networks (MN) - Bike-Patrol-Guidelines-(copy).pdf - Neighborhood rapid response groups: Largely autonomously-organized by neighborhood. Every neighborhood has one. Friends say every single neighborhood has upwards of 400-2000 neighbors in their chats, trained and ready to mobilize when a rapid response call is put out. These RRNs try to get out ahead of ICE arrival to warn immigrant neighbors to stay in their homes, but most of the time, are responding when ICE agents have already appeared to intervene. In many cases depending on tactical comfort with risk, these RRN volunteers pull abductees away from vehicles, chase ICE out by showing up in droves with a mass response, and in most cases, recording and reporting. The scale of this mobilization is astonishing; it is enough neighbors trained that when ICE appears, people have been capable of mobilizing in a matter of 1-12 minutes. Whistles are being distributed by the thousands (by the local Ace hardware and by a queer sex store!), carried on keychains and worn on coat zippers, always at the ready to be blown in warning if ICE is spotted. - Here are best practices for neighborhood or area patrols that are being shared in these groups - - It’s notable that there is now (unlike during George Floyd) an astonishing willingness across the political spectrum to embrace a diversity of tactics. In neighborhood response groups, most people show up to block doors and restaurants, swear at cops, blow whistles and make a lot of noise, but others have exercised their second amendment rights, and de-arrests are very common. When another person was shot last night in North Minneapolis, responders set off fireworks under ICE vehicles, graffitied and damaged them, and took equipment, documents and cameras, all while being tear gassed. A comrade’s very normie sister said yesterday: “You can’t draw a box around resistance. I support everyone doing anything to get ice out.” The ground has shifted for regular liberals in the face of fascist state violence, and very quickly. - School guards: Neighbors get out of their houses in the early morning to stand guard at schools and daycares to monitor arrival and departure. There have been yellow alerts and lockdowns two days in a row at Edison high school (an ESL school) because of ICE sightings. ESL schools have been especially hard hit. Parents and neighbors are standing guard outside schools, organizing carpools, and escorting kids to and from school on foot. - Stationing at vulnerable locations: Safety brigades are also stationing at vulnerable locations that are more likely to be targeted by ICE or Border Patrol to help deter them from coming. This includes apartment buildings and neighborhoods, immigrant-owned businesses, large shopping centers or Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot parking lots, and more. Since November, Siempre Safety brigade has spent extended periods of time in these places, building relationships with neighbors, to help them feel more secure. - Business safety brigades: Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. Neighbors stand guard in front of the locked doors of neighborhood immigrant-owned restaurants, burrito joints and bakeries, so the employees can focus on their jobs. There have been many organized efforts to patronize immigrant-owned restaurants to keep places in business and to keep white people in the restaurants to respond if ICE comes. - Native-led community defense: as during the GF uprising, AIM members and native organizers have formed a coalition called the Indigenous Protectors Movement. They stage out of the AIM center’s coffeehouse, are coordinating supply donations, and are leading armed patrols of predominantly native neighborhoods, including Little Earth, a subsidized housing complex that houses primarily native people. - The role of the police: Interestingly, Minneapolis police have been escorting school buses so that kids can get to school safely. Many on the left remain critical of the MPD, but others have been taking on the “enemy of the enemy is my friend” position on the MPD’s role in these times. It’s worth noting that the police chief most recently brought in after the GF uprising was explicitly given the charge of relegitimizing the MPD, and has done so by preaching the importance of de-escalation trainings. There is lots to think about here for abolitionists. - Mutual Aid: Churches and community groups are holding fundraisers to buy and deliver groceries to families who don’t feel safe leaving home. Notably, a local queer sex shop (Smitten Kitten) has become one of the central mutual aid distribution centers for receiving aid and sending it out. - Mutual aid money is being raised for supplies, groceries and crucially, funds are being focused for rent for families sheltering in place because they can’t work or because a breadwinner was abducted, or who need a warm place to stay after their home’s windows were smashed. - People’s Laundry, which formed during the GF Uprising amidst the pandemic, is collecting and washing clothes for families who can’t go to the laundromat. - Labor: A general strike has been called for Jan…
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