This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 12 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
On Thursday, Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s so-called border czar, announced that the administration will be concluding its operations in Minnesota.
Folks on the ground in Minneapolis and observers across the country are understandably apprehensive about declaring victory because we have heard rhetoric like this from the Trump administration before.
We will certainly have to wait and see what the government actually does, but it very much looks like the Trump administration is taking a different posture now. They may have finally realized that their occupation is a failure.
That kind of cruelty lingers. But, crucially, that cruelty did not win.
The administration thought it was going to storm into Minneapolis, crack some skulls and undertake an explicitly racist project to harass, slander and terrorize the non-white citizens of the Twin Cities, and be rewarded for it, politically.
Instead, everyone hated it. It has been overwhelmingly unpopular across the ideological spectrum in an incredibly diverse city.
People stood shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors. They went into an incredible mode of civic resistance, unlike anything I have ever seen before.
They organized food drops for folks who were scared to go to the grocery store. They drove their friends and neighbors who were afraid to take public transportation. They patrolled schools to make sure that kids and parents weren’t snatched away at the bus stop.
Regular people built an entire infrastructure to stand up and defend their neighbors — organic, home-grown, mutual aid to look out for one another.
It’s something I saw firsthand when I reported from Minneapolis two weeks ago. People refused to buckle, even after that organized resistance cost two people their lives. They saw Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti killed by their government in broad daylight — and they kept resisting anyway.
They would not give up and they would not give in. They would not allow Trump and Stephen Miller’s vision for this country to prevail.
It looks like they may have beaten back those forces, for now.
However, the cost of this occupation will be nearly impossible to calculate, not just for the people who lost their lives, or the others who were shot or taken, but also for many other folks in the city, who lived in fear for months.
Many had foregone medical care, such as people with chronic conditions, and even pregnant women, who stayed home because they were scared they would be taken.
Parents kept kids home from school amid stories of ICE raids at bus stops and on school grounds. There are concerns that some Minnesota schools may lose funding due to the drop in attendance — to say nothing of the cost of all the missed classes.
And how can you even begin to calculate the cost of the collective trauma forced on this community? The trauma of children such as Liam Ramos, the five-year-old who is never going to forget being used as bait by ICE agents before being detained and shipped down to Texas.
That kind of cruelty lingers. But, crucially, that cruelty did not win.
This administration made a bet that most Americans are as bigoted as Miller, and they were wrong.
Time and time again, the American people stood up and said “No way” — not just in Minnesota, but all across the country.
Like when they mistakenly shipped Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a foreign, black box gulag in El Salvador. They told us he was never getting out. But thanks to enormous public pressure, including from Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, he was returned to the United States. The government is still trying to deport him, but for now, he is with his family. There are tons of cases like this, where this administration detained people they shouldn’t have and then got caught by the public. Like Narciso Barranco, the father of three U.S. Marines who was brutally detained while doing landscaping work outside of a California IHOP. The government tried to argue that he was a danger because he was holding a weedwhacker. The public was outraged after they saw videos of his violent arrest. On Thursday, an immigration judge dismissed his deportation case. Time and time again, the American people stood up. and said “No way” — not just in Minnesota, but all across the country. Public pressure also secured the release of pro-Palestinian activists Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, who were unconstitutionally detained over their protected free speech. This week, an immigration court said Ozturk cannot be deported, according to her lawyer. On Wednesday, Khalil was back on Capitol Hill, lobbying on behalf of other targets of this administration while his own deportation case makes its way through the courts. Nothing is over here. But the lesson is that this administration can be beaten. The reason they can be beaten is because people — ordinary people living in this country, from different backgrounds and ethnicities and religions and worldviews — stood up. I don’t think all of these people who are working to oppose the Trump vision of a blood and soil nation, based on ethnic purity, all have the same views on public policy. But they do, fundamentally, share a sense of neighborliness and decency, and it turns out that’s a pretty powerful force. Right now, we are in a furious, ongoing, day-by-day political battle for what kind of country we want to be, but the people with the better, more humane vision have the numbers on their side. Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press). Recommended
