President Donald Trump’s apparent decision to de-escalate in Minneapolis was not driven by some kind of realization that he had caused too much harm. He was compelled to retreat because Minneapolis residents’ confrontations with his de facto secret police laid bare for the nation — and even his own party — how extreme his immigration agents’ behavior had become.
Minneapolis activists’ highly organized efforts forced Trump to incur political costs for his behavior and, in the process, illustrated the importance of resisting Trump’s authoritarian maneuvers instead of trying to passively ride them out. Every time a city shrugs and allows Trump to fabricate a reason for sending the military or militarized federal officers to a city, he succeeds in another trial run for more extreme political suppression in the future. But when Americans draw lines in the sand, they thwart his tests of our limits and lay out a path for how to protect our freedom.
Trump’s immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota is at its core disingenuous and racist. Trump exploited unsubstantiated and misleading right-wing propaganda about fraud of the federal government in Minnesota — which had already been investigated and dealt with by the criminal justice system for years — as a pretext to unleash “the largest DHS operation ever” in the state. And he pursued the operation as he called Somali immigrants “garbage” who do “nothing but complain,” and he reportedly angled to target them specifically in enforcement operations based on their nationality.
People in Minneapolis could’ve taken this lying down. They didn’t.
Much like Trump’s false claim that D.C. was a crime-ridden hellhole as a pretext for deploying the National Guard there, his decision to swarm Minnesota with federal agents was not about the purported policy problem of overwhelming crime, but about expressing dominance. “There is no serious case that this is about the number of immigrants, or some level of violent crime not seen elsewhere,” University of Michigan public policy professor Don Moynihan wrote in his newsletter last week. “It is about the Department of Homeland Security, in the form of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Patrol, developing their skills as the President’s stormtroopers. It is about making an example of a community.”
This was clear in the way federal officers comported themselves in the state. ICE agents patrolled streets with rifles, violently detained residents, covertly instructed agents to forcibly enter homes without judicial warrants, reportedly racially profiled suspects, detained legal immigrants and flagrantly flouted scores of court orders. And they did all this while mostly masked. Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, likened it to a “military occupation.”
People in Minneapolis could’ve taken this lying down. They didn’t. Building upon social networks developed during the protest movement that arose after the police murder of George Floyd in the city in 2020, they have come together in remarkable ways in the past couple of months to push back. They volunteered to stand guard in places with immigrant communities, monitored ICE agents, demonstrated en masse in the streets, went on strike and engaged in civil disobedience. They used whistles, car horns, and Signal chats to alert communities to ICE movements and behavior. These actions simultaneously served the causes of violence reduction and protecting immigrants and racial minorities. Robert Worth’s excellent report in The Atlantic sketched out how, while the movement was leaderless, it still produced in sum “a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest,” and he noted he could “see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people.” According to an activist Worth interviewed, more than 65,000 people in the city received training on how to legally observe ICE. Only after immigration agents killed Alex Pretti did it apparently sink in for some Republican lawmakers how brutal and politically toxic Trump’s Minneapolis operation was. It was only then that Trump appeared to reassess his strategy. And sadly it wasn’t necessarily even Pretti’s brutal death per se that caused some Republican lawmakers to express opposition or concern. It was the Trump administration’s lies and commitment to federal agent impunity surrounding the incident that raised red flags, including the descriptions of Pretti, disproven by video footage, as a terrorist “brandishing” a gun and evidently seeking to “massacre” ICE agents. (Trump later claimed he hadn’t “heard” his own officials using the term “terrorist,” which suggested the administration was walking back the label.) The images that made Minneapolis look like a war zone were upsetting, but they also showcased a fierce and inspiring refusal to comply with Trump’s white nationalist authoritarianism. Democratic erosion is not a natural phenomenon, but rather a decay that the governed have to consent to in order to take effect. Minneapolis refused to consent.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. 
