![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/murderers-1-original.png\")
The mercenaries who serve the Trump regime have squandered any claim to moral authority.
\nIn the waning phase of Donald Trump’s reign, opportunities will open up for profound social change. Here, we explore the nature of the difficulties besetting his administration and propose a few starting places for those who aim to do more than simply replace him with another politician.
\n\nIn less than a year and a half, Trump has completely used up the advantages with which he began his second term. He has passed from appearing unstoppable to flailing pathetically. Obsessed with presenting an image of strength, Trump is indeed—as Shakespeare put it—a poor player whose hour upon the stage will soon reach its end. The stream of falsehoods and threats issuing from his administration can be seen for what it is: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
\n\nThe fiasco in Iran is already Trump’s second quagmire this year. He began 2026 with a more or less successful stunt in Venezuela—but only four days later, the murder of Renee Good supplanted it in the headlines. For almost three weeks, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement mercenaries brutalized and murdered people in the Twin Cities, the entire Trump administration brazenly lied in contradiction of widely circulating video evidence. Having created a situation in which they could not risk looking weak, Trump’s cronies attempted to dictate reality by fiat as more as more residents of the Twin Cities joined the resistance to the ICE occupation. Finally, facing plunging polling numbers and the prospect of recurring general strikes, the Trump administration was forced to change course, firing Border Patrol “Commander at Large” Greg Bovino and trying to get Trump’s signature policy (“the largest deportation operation in American history”) out of the news.
\n\n The mercenaries who serve the Trump regime have squandered any claim to moral authority.
\nBovino’s departure set the stage for the departures of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi. The fact that Trump had begun his second term determined to avoid the continuous turnover of personnel that characterized his first underscores what a defeat this is for him. As his henchmen leave in disgrace, not only does that undermine the loyalty of his remaining underlings—who can see their own future in the ignoble fates of their colleagues—it also undercuts the narratives with which the departed lackeys sought to justify the administration’s deeds. Firing Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem is tantamount to admitting that the ICE operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minnesota were simply ham-fisted attempts to terrorize the population of the United States into submission.
\n\nIn invading Iran a month after firing Bovino, Trump sought to repair his image by repeating his apparent success in Venezuela. Instead, as in Minnesota, he stumbled into a debacle from which he has yet to extricate himself.
\n\nEveryone associated with the Trump regime is known now for continuous, pathological lying.
\nAfter continuously changing his talking points about the goal of the offensive throughout March, Trump sought to bring the conflict to a conclusion at the beginning of April by threatening massive attacks on civilian infrastructure—technically, a war crime. On April 6, Trump was still insisting that Iran’s ten-point proposal for a ceasefire was “not good enough.” The following morning, he declared “A whole civilization will die tonight,” terrifying many people into believing that he was threatening to use nuclear bombs—and perhaps unwittingly repeating the prophecy of the Oracle of Delphi, who told Croesus that if he went to war, “a great empire would fall,” not specifying that it was Croesus’s empire.
\n\nAn hour and a half before his own self-imposed deadline, Trump announced that, in dialogue with the Prime Minister of Pakistan—not with any representative of the Iranian government—he had arrived at a ceasefire, calling the ten-point proposal he had previously rejected a “workable basis” for negotiations.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/murderers-2-original.png\")
From Minnesota to Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine, they have nothing to offer but death and destruction for the enrichment of a few tycoons.
\nThe Prime Minister of Pakistan affirmed that the United States, Iran, and all of their respective allies had “agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon.” Yet the next day, the Israeli military was still attacking Lebanon, and in response, Iran continued to close the Strait of Hormuz.
\n\nIt’s hard to imagine a worse outcome for Trump. He has achieved none of his express objectives in Iran, neither regime change nor suppressing Iran’s nuclear program. He no longer appears to be a credible negotiating partner. Both his threat to target civilian infrastructure and his claim to have negotiated a ceasefire have been revealed to be hollow. Neither the Iranian nor Israeli governments are adhering to the agreements he claims to have arranged. He is forced into tension with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while the pressure on the global economy continues unabated.
\n\nIt remains unclear whether Trump was ever seriously considering a massive strike on civilian infrastructure—or even a nuclear strike—or if he was simply making empty threats for its own sake. Regardless, having to spend a day wondering if he would deploy nuclear weapons drove home for millions of people how dangerous it is to live under a senile autocrat—and at the same time, it did not make Trump any more frightening to his enemies. He appears at once volatile and weak.
\n\nWhatever happens next in Iran, the back-to-back defeats in Minnesota and the Middle East mark another turning point for the Trump regime.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/murderers-3-original.png\")
\nWhen Trump won the 2024 election, many of the debates about how to respond hinged on the question of whether he and his colleagues were evil geniuses or witless beneficiaries of historical forces. Much of the paralysis engendered by his return to power centered around this question. Liberals warned that any kind of resistance would play into Trump’s hands, enabling him to declare martial law; centrists cynically took advantage of the situation to argue that the Democratic Party should adopt far-right positions on immigration. Scarcely seventeen months later, it’s almost impossible to remember, let alone comprehend, the extent to which his adversaries talked themselves into giving up without a fight.
\n\nThe question has since been answered conclusively. Trump has one trick—pandering to what is basest in the most cowardly and hateful elements of society—which he repeats with inhuman consistency. In a social order that is itself debased, rewarding rapacious self-interest while punishing generosity and thoughtfulness, this strategy has gotten him far. But now he is hitting one wall after another.
\n\nAssembling a government on the basis of this strategy produced agencies filled with incompetent buffoons focused chiefly on cultivating a public image and competing for Trump’s favor. Conducting state policy on this basis has turned the majority of the population against ICE and even driven people back into the arms of the Democratic Party, one of the only institutions as unpopular as Trump.
\n\nOne of the most characteristic gestures of the Trump era is willful dishonesty as a form of intentional transgression signifying strength. When Donald Trump proclaims easily-debunked falsehoods, his followers interpret this as an expression of boldness; they can demonstrate the intensity of their loyalty by proclaiming their belief in these falsehoods, just as Stalin’s henchmen did. But one cannot make military decisions on the basis of falsehoods—sooner or later, there will be consequences.
\n\nMost of Trump’s strength is comprised of the fear that he has inspired in people. His initial rapid successes, like Hitler’s blitzkrieg attacks of 1939–1941, were due to the weakness of his adversaries—politicians, executives, and administrators who, like Trump himself, are driven only by avarice and entitlement. Only after he and the mercenaries who serve him came up against real resistance did it become possible to gauge their true strength. As Mikhail Bakunin put it in a letter to Maria Reichel, “It is only in combat that we see what a person can do.”
\n\nOr cannot do.
\n\nThe chief imperative driving the Trump administration’s decisions is the need to project strength. They have staked everything on building hard power rather than soft power, on intimidation rather than persuasion. Now that they have consumed most of their political capital, the field is opening up for others.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/2.jpg\")
A demonstrator endures chemical agents in Minneapolis to stand up for what is best in humanity.
\nAfter living through the Prague Spring, Milan Kundera wrote something to effect that the ideal form of government is a crumbling dictatorship.
\n\nAll forms of government are based in hierarchy and violence. Political and economic inequality reinforce each other: the more wealth is concentrated in a few hands, the more vertical the political structures become, and vice versa. Yet this remains largely invisible so long as people perceive the governments that rule them as legitimate, or at least inevitable. Suffering alone does not make people desire change; people desire on the basis of what they are able to imagine. Only when a discredited regime begins to collapse—creating a tension between what people see around them and what they are able to imagine—do large numbers of people begin to ask questions about how they might wish to change the structure of the society.
\n\nToday, these questions are more urgent than ever, as the gulf between the haves and the have-nots widens and politicians cut away the safety nets and concessions that once offset the impact of capitalism on communities and ecosystems.
\n\nRight now, Trump is historically unpopular, with little prospect of his standing with the public improving. Yet he still has nearly three years in office ahead of him. For millions of people, Trump’s rise to power and the uselessness of the institutions that were supposed to control him are calling into question the entire political system. We can see this rage and radicalization emerging, however confusedly, among the rank-and-file participants in the massive demonstrations that have taken place over the past year.
\n\nThis is an unprecedented opportunity for anarchists, abolitionists, and others who have concrete proposals to bring about structural social change. Right now, when no institutional forces are able to propose a solution to the problem, we should be making common cause across lines of difference, demonstrating the power of solidarity and the effectiveness of direct action, sharing what we have learned in the course of our efforts to resist the administration, and spelling out our vision of a better world.
\n\nThis window of opportunity will not last long. The closer we draw to the 2026 midterm elections, the more people will be focused on electoral politics, including many of those who are currently participating in grassroots initiatives. We might be in a stronger position to address people at this moment than we ever will be again in the course of the Trump era.
\n\nOften, the moment of greatest danger—for example, when fascists or ICE agents are murdering people in Charlottesville or Minneapolis—turns out to have been, in retrospect, the moment of greatest possibility. By the time the terror has subsided and we recognize the potential of the situation, the moment is already passing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/3.jpg\")
Federal mercenaries gratuitously assaulting people in Portland. No amount of brute force will suffice to subdue an increasingly desperate population.
\nWe should remember this, because as Trump’s position weakens, he and his supporters will attempt more and more terrifying and outlandish schemes to maintain their grip on power. He and his adherents still have enough time to inflict a tremendous amount of suffering, both in the US and overseas. We should prepare for much more aggressive rounds of repression. Likewise, we have already seen that Trump will not leave office willingly.
\n\nIn all likelihood, the outcome of the mid-term elections will be determined by what happens in the months ahead—not by how successfully politicians campaign, but rather, by the extent to which grassroots resistance makes it impossible for the ruling class to imagine that Trump could continue to advance their interests and the extent to which elements of the ruling class are able to regroup around other institutional forces, such as the Democratic Party.
\n\nAs we plan for May Day and the summer, we should take a longer view. How will the tactics that we demonstrate during these events help to familiarize large numbers of people with the sort of tactics that they will need to employ alongside us to thwart Trump’s second attempt to carry out a coup? How will the narratives that we popularize position us to keep fighting against all the other proponents of capitalism and oppression after Trump is gone?
\n\nWe should hurry to lay bare all the connections between fascists, billionaires, militarists, Zionists and Christian nationalists, cryptocurrency hucksters, tech moguls, corporate and social media platforms, federal agencies like ICE and the police and sheriffs that abet them, and the centrists and Democrats who paved the way for the tragedies of the second Trump era by suppressing grassroots resistance at the conclusion of the first. We should establish red lines within the opposition to Trump, making it unthinkable to promote or excuse any of these forces, showing how toxic the compromises with them have proved.
\n\nHere are some concrete goals that our movements could adopt:
\n\nShut down all milquetoast proposals to make superficial reforms to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, arguing instead for all-out resistance with the long-term goal of abolishing them. Those who have joined or remained in those agencies under Trump have shown their hatred for the rest of the population, making it clear that these institutions exist for the express purpose of serving autocrats. Those who have been imprisoned or deported must be permitted to rejoin their loved ones.
\nConnect the fight against ICE to the abolitionist movements against police and prisons. If Democrat politicians had not put so much effort into suppressing these movements between 2021 and 2024, social movements would have been much better prepared for the second Trump era, and the regime would have had fewer weapons at its disposal with which to impose control.
\nOrganize to free prisoners and compel prosecutors to drop charges against defendants in all cases resulting from resistance to ICE and the Trump regime in general. We can build on the refusals of grand juries to indict and juries to convict those accused of resisting ICE. As it becomes apparent to more people that the law is a political instrument serving those who hold power rather than a neutral institution, many people will seek ways of addressing injustice that do not concentrate power in the hands of a Supreme Court comprised of extreme-right reactionaries.
\nConnect the fight against Donald Trump to the fight against Flock cameras and data centers and—more generally—to the resistance to profiteering techno-fascists like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
\nChannel anti-war organizing towards targeting arms companies responsible for the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
\nShow that the ways that racism, misogyny, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry facilitate the cutthroat practices via which billionaires are impoverishing our communities.
\nBuild mutual aid projects, grassroots education projects, and other forms of social infrastructure outside the state that cannot be gutted by government austerity measures or threatened by crackdowns on academic institutions and non-profit organizations.
\nThe collapse of radical social movements at the end of 2020 is a cautionary tale. We must come out of the second Trump era stronger than we entered it. This is especially important because the real battles are only just getting underway. A wave of fascist political victories is looming in Europe, though if Trump is defeated soundly enough that may sap their momentum. Artificial Intelligence is only just beginning to drive massive numbers of people into unemployment while intensifying state surveillance and militarism.
\n\nAs we have argued before, in the 21st century, when the state can do little to mitigate the impact of capitalism, state power is a hot potato that burns whoever holds it. The same conditions that are elevating far-right parties to power around the world are also rendering it difficult for them to hold onto control. But that goes for whoever will succeed Trump, as well: if Trump is driven from office, his base will split into Zionist and neo-Nazi factions, each more virulent than the last generation of Republicans, while whatever administration succeeds him will also provoke anger and disillusionment—likely mobilizing a new wave of momentum from the far right. If what happened under the Biden administration recurs, the backlash next time will be more horrific than anything we can imagine. This is why we must address the problems that capitalism is creating at the root, not simply protest its most noxious figureheads.
\n\nWe must make sure that it is easy for everyone to distinguish our grassroots projects from any government that holds power, and continue to expand and deepen them regardless of whether there is an incompetent demagogue propelling people into the streets. As we have learned over and over—sometimes through courage, sometimes through cowardice—it is safer in the front.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/1.jpg\")
A demonstrator returns a tear gas canister to the murderers who shot it during the demonstrations in Minneapolis in May 2020 in response to the murder of George Floyd.
\nIn this text, when we speak about stupidity, we do not mean a lack of natural aptitude, but rather the question of whether one chooses to make use of one’s aptitudes or to actively suppress them. By now, it should be apparent to all that the people who paved the way for Trump’s rise—many of whom are strangely obsessed with the idea that they possess natural aptitudes that others do not—have been willfully, obstinately refusing to see what is right in front of their faces. Stupidity, in this sense, is not an intellectual condition, but a moral failing.
\n\nNo one puts this more clearly than the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who witnessed the rise of the Nazis:
\n\n\n\n\nStupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
\n\nYet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what “the people” really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly.
\n\n-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “On Stupidity” in Letters and Papers from Prison
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/04/08/4.jpg\")
Those who choose to serve tyrants may be able to suppress everything wise and beautiful in themselves, but they will not succeed in destroying wisdom and beauty.
\nThe header photograph was taken by Mark Graves on Sunday, February 1, 2026, at Portland’s ICE facility. It was the second day in a row that federal agents attacked demonstrators with chemical agents.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/03/31/anarchists-at-the-2026-no-kings-rallies-reports-from-around-the-country", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2026/03/31/anarchists-at-the-2026-no-kings-rallies-reports-from-around-the-country", "title": "Anarchists at the 2026 No Kings Rallies : Reports from around the Country", "summary": "Reports from anarchists who engaged with the March 28, 2026 No Kings rallies.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/header.jpg", "date_published": "2026-03-31T17:30:51Z", "date_modified": "2026-03-31T19:59:40Z", "tags": [ "ICE", "no kings", "outreach", "Portland", "Minneapolis", "new york city" ], "content_html": "Ahead of the third No Kings worldwide day of protest on March 28, we published a call for anarchists to engage with the rallies as an opportunity to draw people into more concrete forms of organizing and action, and offered handouts for that purpose. Here, we share highlights and reports from some of the participants in the day’s events.
\n\nOrganizers claim that a total of eight million participants in the protests, up roughly a million from the October 18 No Kings rallies, which we had also published a call to engage with. Donald Trump’s popularity has reached an all-time low, as he continues to an unpopular war with Iran after his attempt to use Immigration and Customs Enforcement to terrorize cities like Minneapolis was thwarted by grassroots resistance. Yet concrete mass resistance has yet to take shape in most of the country.
\n\nThis makes anarchists’ efforts to demonstrate a way forward especially important. In Phoenix, in response to a local call for an anarchist contingent in No Kings expressing opposition to borders, ICE, and repression, anarchists displaying banners reading “Solidarity with the Prairieland Nine” and “First they came for the anti-fascists” marched at the very front of the crowd.
\n\nPhoenix, Arizona: Anarchists carry banners at the front of a march during the March 28, 2026 No Kings demonstrations.
\nMany of the flashpoints of March 28 took place at locations that have already become battlegrounds under the Trump administration. In downtown Los Angeles, protesters hurled chunks of concrete at Department of Homeland Security mercenaries outside the same federal detention center that was at the center of the clashes that touched off the uprising against ICE in June 2025. At the ICE facility in Broadview, near Chicago, Illinois, police arrested and brutalized several protesters. In Denver, protesters took over highway I-25, forcing police to respond with tear gas.
\n\nIn addition to the reports below, you can consult this report-back from anarchists in central Oregon.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/4.jpg\")
\nSupporters of the Prairieland defendants attended three No Kings events in DFW this past weekend. We passed out hundreds of fliers and had lots of conversations about the case, with both random attendees and activists. It was a great opportunity to see how far awareness of the case has spread—and it does seem to have spread.
\n\nIn Fort Worth, members of the DFW Support Committee had an official table and a speaking slot. We marched together, including two random young people who felt inspired to join our crew, with the defendant signs and a large banners that read “Free the Prairieland Defendants.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/2.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/3.jpg\")
\nIn Modesto, anarchists set up a free zine table with CrimethInc. stickers and color posters at the recent No Kings rally. The rally brought out hundreds of participants. We handed out free zines about the anti-ICE struggle and rapid response networks along with information about protest safety and more. Someone from a local group brought over a big bag of homemade whistle packs they had made at a recent event, featuring the number for the local rapid response line.
\n\nWhile thousands of miles away, the struggle in Minneapolis has had ripple effects here, pushing many to embrace the fight against ICE and get involved in local autonomous efforts. Many speakers at the event encouraged participants to get involved in anti-ICE organizing and to support calls for a general strike on May 1st—efforts we can all amplify and build toward.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/19.jpg\")
\nWe printed 800 flyers. Our little team distributed something like 700 of them in about two hours.
\n\nWe found ourselves circulating alongside the usual suspects selling socialist newspapers, but had positive response rates probably over 80%, with most of us remarking that sustained one-on-one conversations were a personal highlight. X—— and I talked to one older white woman living in Harlem who was giving out quarter sheet flyers that just explained how to download Signal. Lit.
\n\nI’m starting to feel that “liberal” (a coherent historical and political position advocating for free trade and political rights for citizens) is a poor descriptor of this kind of crowd. The widespread affect was both anger and directionlessness. X—— remarked that it would have been easy and politically striking to enter the crowd with huge banners on sticks or flags saying FREE THE PRAIRIELAND DEFENDANTS. The march offered physical and political space for that kind of heterogeneous vibe; an avant-garde contingent could have made use of it.
\n\nIt would have been moving to me to do something like that. It probably been useful for creating a pole to flyer and start conversations around, assuming we had a concrete project to involve people in.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/17.jpg\")
Anarchists carry banners at the front of the march on the Capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona during the March 28, 2026 No Kings demonstrations.
\nWe live in a college town of less than 100,000 people. We published an open call for an anarchist contingent in the No Kings demonstration here.
\n\nThe demonstration was to begin downtown, then march through the business district to a rally a half hour’s walk away. We knew it would be very difficult to find each other in the crowd, so we chose a convergence point several blocks away, at a location that has often served as a gathering point for previous anarchist demonstrations.
\n\nAs it turned out, however, some of us met there and proceeded to the main starting point together; others showed up at the starting point of the main demonstration, and indeed became lost in the crowd; and still others went directly to the site of the rally to set up literature tables, as they had done at the previous two No Kings demonstrations.
\n\nOnce those of us who met at the convergence point reached the crowd—which consisted of many thousands of people—we began distributing stickers and handbills promoting anarchism and an upcoming date on the Breaking the ICE speaking tour that was booked nearby. We gave out several hundred of these, but the march got underway before we could find each other again, so we marched in smaller knots, carrying our banners separately rather than in a single bloc. In the end, it may not have made much of a difference—almost everyone on the streets was in the march, so there was no crowd of spectators to witness a coherent anarchist contingent.
\n\nWhen the march reached the rally, it was easier to find each other around the folding tables that our comrades had set up and covered with zines. Throughout the rally, people came up to the tables; this turned out to be the part of the day when we were most identifiable as a political pole within the crowd. One smart tabler put up flyers throughout the rally area encouraging people to download Signal and subscribe to the local announcements-only Signal thread promoting anarchist events in the area.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/18.jpg\")
An anarchist literature table at a No Kings protest on March 28, 2026.
\nAmong ourselves, we took different approaches to engaging with the crowd. I spent the entire time proselytizing for the upcoming speaking event, just trying to get people into the room to learn about direct action. By contrast, one comrade got into a shouting match with a liberal carrying a sign proclaimed “I want to be governed, not looted”—the liberal simply would not understand why an anarchist would prefer to loot and not to be governed.
\n\nAlthough students at the university make up fully a quarter of the population of this town, the majority of the participants in the demonstration were in their forties or older. That underscores the fact that, while many millions of people have participated in the No Kings demonstrations, millions more who oppose Donald Trump—especially from the demographics that were the driving force behind the George Floyd rebellion—have stayed home. So far.
\n\nAfterwards, I spoke with anarchists in several mid-sized Midwestern cities whose efforts to engage with No Kings had gone similarly: they had showed up with banners and marched together in small groups, without anything happening that was especially worth reporting on. But they did distribute a lot of handbills, whether about the Prairieland case or other things.
\n\nI still think it would be advantageous to be able to show up to these demonstrations in large numbers with black flags and march together in a coherent bloc. If we want people to be interested in participating in anarchist initiatives, we have to show that we are a force to be reckoned with. When the streets are already full of people and the police have their hands full, doing so should be easier and safer than usual.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/5.jpg\")
A banner displayed by an anarchist contingent in a No Kings demonstration on March 28, 2026.
\nWe live in a mid-sized city, somewhere around 180,000 people. Our previous No Kings events were pretty substantial, and this weekend was no different with maybe 2000 people participating. A medium-sized group of us showed up in full black bloc. Before we even reached the protest, we were heckled by trucks and passersby. Fortunately, we were not the only anarchists there—we immediately found others in bloc that we didn’t even know. Once we combined numbers, we comprised a decent proportion of the protesters present.
\n\nWe spent much of our time leading chants and dancing to music, while the liberals around us sat in almost dead silence. We also handed out about 100 pamphlets and zines and talked to even more people about what being an anarchist means for us.
\n\nOur location in the protest was interesting—we were located on the sidewalk adjacent to a busy intersection, with us at the very end, facing the busiest corner in the area. Many drivers and passersby honked and chanted in support as they passed by. Others were less supportive. One truck dropped burning coal rocks in front of us; it was more pathetic than dangerous.
\n\nAbout 45 minutes in, we saw a crowd developing on the other side of the intersection, wearing MAGA hats and carrying flags and signs of hate. They kept shouting at us from the other side of the street and occasionally throwing things at us. Finally, some of the counter-protesters broke off from their group and walked towards our crowd.
\n\nWe interpreted this as a threat against the safety of every protester present, but also as an opportunity to show people that we don’t have to tolerate hate.
\n\nWe moved to the edge of the sidewalk and cut them off, preventing them from getting to the rest of the crowd. We yelled over them and refused to give them the opportunity to speak. When they got right up to us, they began yelling and threatening us, which caught the attention of some protest “marshals.” The marshals demanded that we let them pass and not give them any attention. We acted like we didn’t hear the marshals and continued blocking the counter-protesters off with a massive sign—poetically, it read “Fascists not welcome!”
\n\nEventually, the counter-protesters made their way back to their people. Altogether, they numbered no more than a dozen compared to our nearly 2000.
\n\nWe believed our presence at no kings was a local success. We spoke to a lot of people sympathetic to anarchism and anarchists. We made many new friends—and some enemies, but we did so unapologetically.
\n\nOne thing we did that we would like to recommend to anarchists everywhere else—stop bringing your phones to protests and instead bring Meshtastic LoRa devices. We were able to communicate effectively and efficiently without getting pinged by any cell towers. Our presence was basically invisible there, and being able to communicate that way gave us a unique advantage over our local surveillance adversaries.
\n\nThis video shows the conflict at the ICE facility in Portland on March 28, 2026.
\nAfter roughly 30,000 people flooded downtown Portland for the No Kings parade, a few hundred made their way to the ICE facility on the South Waterfront. People chanting “ICE out!” filled the driveway, stepping over the thin blue line that federal agents painted across the entrance to denote the point beyond which they are determined to arrest people.
\n\nAfter someone burned an American flag in the driveway, federal agents surged out and made an arrest. The crowd immediately pushed forward, forcing the agents to retreat back inside. Over a hundred people flooded the driveway. Projectiles flew towards the feds—water bottles, sticks, and random objects. Surprisingly, Department of Homeland Security agents did not respond with munitions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/1.jpg\")
The vicinity of the ICE facility in Portland, Oregon.
\nShortly after 6 pm, a band set up across the street, using a megaphone propped up on a mic stand. By sunset, the crowd had swelled to around 500.
\n\nAs the band played on, another rhythm took over: the rattle of the facility gates, shaking in time with the drums. Then—suddenly—they gave way. The gates burst open, and a few people stepped through.
\n\nDHS took their time responding. No Border Patrol, no Border Patrol Tactical Unit, no familiar wall of federal tactical gear—at least, not at first. For the first time in a long time, the feds in Portland hesitated.
\n\nIt turned out that they were waiting for backing from the local authorities.
\n\nSoon after DHS went back inside, Portland Police bike cops formed a line up the street at the intersection of Bancroft and Macadam. A riot van pulled in behind them and Oregon State Troopers spilled out to join the formation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/09.jpg\")
State troopers arrive.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/10.jpg\")
Police line.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/11.jpg\")
A Portland police officer known for his brutality.
\nTogether, they advanced on the crowd. The push from police was immediate and aggressive—they shoved people to the pavement, knocked older folks out of lawn chairs, barked orders to move back when there was physically nowhere to go. They forced the crowd back until they reached the edge of the facility, then declared the area closed, holding the line while the feds repaired their gate.
\n\nJust before 8 pm, nearly an hour later, police pulled back. The gate was fixed and local police had finished doing the feds’ bidding. The crowd erupted: “Whose streets? Our streets!”
\n\nThe fixed gate didn’t last two minutes.
\n\nHands were back on the gate. Metal groaned. And once again, it broke open. The crowd roared. Graffiti spread across the building: “Kill nazis,” among other tags. Within minutes, DHS returned—this time, with Border Patrol agents in full fatigues and gas masks. They carried out more arrests, bringing the total to at least four.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/12.jpg\")
DHS agents at night, before they retreated.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/13.jpg\")
DHS agents guarding the gate.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/14.jpg\")
The contested territory.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/15.jpg\")
One federal mercenary displaying egregiously bad muzzle discipline.
\nProtesters attempted to pull back those the officers targeted. They successfully de-arrested some people, despite being continuously obstructed by a wall of livestreamers and photographers raising their cameras.
\n\nEven then, however, the feds held back on using munitions. This was shocking, not what people have come to expect at the ICE facility. The officers moved in, made arrests, and retreated, only to experience another barrage of projectiles. Bottles, sticks, eggs, and other objects rained down until they disappeared behind their doors. While the restraint and lack of “less than lethals” on the part of federal agents was noticeable, this didn’t make the brutality of their arrests any less violent, as multiple arrestees were slammed down to the ground, piled on, and dragged away, and at least one officer pointed his loaded sidearm directly at people’s heads.
\n\nThroughout the night, a handful of far-right instigators were identified and forced out of the crowd. One of them was pummeled with water balloons filled with pink paint to the laughter and cheers of onlookers. Flags caught fire again—one American flag and one flag bearing a swastika. At one point, someone climbed onto the awning and dismantled a security camera piece by piece. This inspired people to take down several other cameras, pulling the wiring out.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/08.jpg\")
Right-wing instigators.
\nWhy did federal agents show unusual restraint? Why were local police left to do the bulk of the crowd control? These remain open questions.
\n\nBut one thing is not in question: people kept coming. They repeatedly crossed the blue line painted on the ground. They came back again every time federal agents attempted to push them back. Whatever strategy was unfolding behind those doors, it met with rage, defiance, and a refusal to back down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/31/16.jpg\")
Mercenaries’ exit, stage left.
\nIn April, anarchists from the Twin Cities who have participated in resisting the ICE occupation there will travel the country speaking on their experiences. At each presentation, they will share what they have learned from building rapid response networks, explore how Minnesota thwarted Operation Metro Surge, and draw out lessons about how to defeat fascism.
\n\nThree different touring groups will carry out concurrent tours covering the Midwest, the East Coast, and the West Coast, for a total of two dozen events. You can find the tour schedule below.
\n\nIf you can help us to promote the event in your area, please contact us! Likewise, if you would like to set up an event like this in your community, reach out to us and we will try to include you in a future tour.
\n\nAfter travel expenses, all proceeds from this tour will go towards legal defense for ICE arrestees and mutual aid for vulnerable families in the Twin Cities.
\n\nFor background on the fight against ICE in the Twin Cities, begin here. You can find an archive of all of our coverage of ICE here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE__poster_bw.png\")
Click on the image to download the PDF to print in black and white.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE__poster_color.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the PDF to print in color.
\nWe will update these listings with more information on an ongoing basis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-03-31-Atlanta-Georgia__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
March 31 Atlanta, GA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-01-Asheville-North-Carolina__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 1 Asheville, NC
\nChicago, Illinois: 6:30 pm at Co-Prosperity, 3219 South Morgan Street
\nDurham, North Carolina: 7 pm at the Burrow, 207 North Church Street
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-02-Durham-North-Carolina__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 2 Durham, NC
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-03-Bloomington-Indiana__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 3 Bloomington, IN
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-03-Richmond-Virginia__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 3 Richmond, VA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-04-Baltimore-Maryland__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE-color.jpg\")
April 4 Baltimore, MD
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-04-Cleveland-Ohio__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 4 Cleveland, OH
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-05-Buffalo-New-York__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 5 Buffalo, NY
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-06-Binghamton-New-York__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 6 Binghamton, NY
\nNew York City, New York—two concurrent events:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-07-Queens-New-York__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 7 Queens, NY
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-13-Berkeley-California__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 13 Berkeley, California
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-14-Sacramento-California__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.jpg\")
April 14 Sacramento, CA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-17-Olympia-Washington__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 17 Olympia, WA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/2026-04-18-Seattle-Washington__CrimethInc_Tour__Breaking_The_ICE.png\")
April 18 Seattle, WA
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/23/1.jpg\")
\nFrom February 25 to March 1, aspiring revolutionaries in the Twin Cities hosted hundreds of people who traveled to Minnesota to take part in the Melt the ICE week of action. Multiple events took place every day, including marches, blockades, noise demos, speaking events, and trainings. These actions and workshops served both to bolster the resistance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota and to teach activists from all over the country how to export the Twin Cities’ rapid response model to their hometowns.
\n\nIn this report, organizers reflect on the week of action and draw out lessons for the movement as a whole.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/3.jpg\")
February 27, 2026.
\nFor three months, Minnesotans have supported our friends, family, and neighbors who shelter in place and face the constant threat of kidnapping at the hands of federal agents. We have experienced daily encounters with tear gas, high-speed car chases, and the threat of deadly violence. At the same time, we witnessed a dizzying flurry of analyses about why our resistance was so strong and robust. Where could this moment take us?
\n\nYet less than two weeks after the murder of Alex Pretti, we began to lose momentum. The international uproar following Pretti’s death forced the Trump regime to make concessions, changing tactics in Minnesota and firing Greg Bovino, the so-called “commander-at-large” of US Customs and Border Protection and the public face of Operation Metro Surge. These concessions were designed to take the wind out of the sails of the resistance—and to some degree, they worked.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/1.jpg\")
February 27, 2026.
\nThis was only possible because our movement lacked a political horizon beyond “ICE out.” While everyday militancy and care had blossomed around the common goals of defeating ICE and supporting our neighbors, there was less momentum around demands to free the same neighbors from the concentration camps where they are now held.
\n\nOne of our comrades had the idea to organize a week of action to share the tactics at the heart of our resistance movement and to continue to build towards revolutionary struggle. It instantly made sense. Since the murder of Renee Good, we had been hearing from comrades across the country that they wanted a way to come here and plug in. And we were nowhere near ready to let go of the revolutionary potential of this moment in the Twin Cities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/8.jpg\")
March 1, 2026.
\nAs aspiring revolutionaries living in the Twin Cities, by late February 2026, we were swinging back and forth between contradicting perceptions of reality. From one perspective, we were triumphant: we had driven out a fascist paramilitary force bent on kidnapping innocent people. Alongside our neighbors, we had demonstrated that we would not tolerate authoritarianism in our cities. From another perspective, it didn’t feel like we had won at all. Thousands of Minnesotans had been captured, at least three had died at the hands of ICE, and most of the abductees were stuck in concentration camps across the country awaiting an unknown fate in horrific conditions. We had thwarted many abductions, but we were still witnessing more.
\n\nWith the exceptions of the rebellion in North Minneapolis after ICE shot Julio Sosa-Celis on January 14, and the autonomous zones that the people briefly established around the sites where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered, we had seen few instances of prolonged confrontation with the state. Even the mass mobilization day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping” (which union reps, bound by law, could not even call a “strike”) brought us little closer to direct conflict with ICE and its collaborators. Despite the historic participation of more than 300,000 people, the logic and power of a general strike was so obfuscated that, when some groups pressed for another strike on January 30 a week after the first one, volunteers who had been asked to spread the word to small businesses reported, “They don’t want to close again because of profit loss—is there any way we could offer financial support?”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/13.jpg\")
March 1, 2026.
\nThe questions pressed on us: how could we push this movement towards revolutionary struggle, sharpen our collective analysis, and ensure that this moment that had been consuming our daily lives did not end in citywide burnout?
\n\nPrevious experiences had taught us the potential of bringing people together from across the country to build resistance. These included mass calls to action to Stop Cop City, the Treaty People Gathering mobilization in northern Minnesota during the construction of the Line 3 pipeline, and the legacy of summit-hopping in the early 2000s. The relationships we forged at these mobilizations have shaped our movements. Many of our closest friendships emerged from these.
\n\nWe decided to give it another shot. We hoped that if we built enough energy, the next time that ICE planned a large-scale operation anywhere in the country, this same convergence could take place again.
\n\nSo, yes, if ICE comes to your city, we will bring the heat to you.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/26.jpg\")
February 28, 2026.
\nAs we spread the idea of the week of action, local organizers were excited despite sedimentary layers of burnout. The initial discussions confirmed that this event would reach across tendencies. Activists and organizations across the state agreed to our long-term goals of abolishing ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, police, and prisons. This unity stems from the George Floyd uprisings, where police abolition became a mainstream value in Minnesota. Now, even nonprofits can be pushed to sign on to the goal of abolition.
\n\nThis demand did alienate some groups, which did not sign on. But we had more than enough collaborators. One of the mistakes of the Trump administration has been giving us something we can all work on together.
\n\nAs the week of action began to take shape, we knew that we wanted to center the tactics that we believe are most likely to continue to erode state power. The most important of these is the rapid response networks, which have been so central in disrupting ICE operations. We wanted to get as many people on the streets practicing rapid response as possible, both to give new people firsthand practice and to bolster the numbers on the streets during what the authorities claimed were the final days of the occupation. This is the part of the movement that brings people into direct confrontation with ICE and the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/19.jpg\")
A meeting space on February 26, 2026.
\nWe also conceived of the week of action as a means of drawing attention to “secondary targets,” corporate and government ICE collaborators that prop up the deportation machine.
\n\nOne example of a secondary target is the predatory housing system. We knew that starting in the first week of March, many vulnerable people who had been unable to work during Operation Metro Surge would begin to face eviction. Local tenant organizers had begun calling for an eviction moratorium in January. In February, they began leveraging a call for a rent strike in defense of families facing eviction. This was a form of practical solidarity with our undocumented neighbors and a move towards flexing economic power not seen in the US for decades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/5.jpg\")
\nSimilarly, we wanted to exert economic leverage on a variety of other entities that facilitate federal operations—including Hilton and various other hotel chains that contract with ICE, companies like Enterprise Rent-a-Car that provide them with vehicles, and corporations like Target and Home Depot that allow them to stage on their property at the expense of vulnerable employees. We also called for people to organize to make their workplaces as hostile to and noncompliant with ICE as possible. Nurses and other hospital workers led the charge in this arena, especially at locations that had experienced ICE attacks, such as Hennepin County Medical Center.
\n\nIn preparation for the week of action, we built out our working groups and got a website online. There has been extensive coverage of Operation Metro Surge—endless content flooding social media feeds, local news cycles dominated by various related stories, daily spots in national and global outlets. We created materials that we hoped could attract attention in this barrage, flooded the channels of our existing networks, and waited for RSVPs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/16.jpg\")
A bike patrol training on February 26, 2026.
\nThe idea for the week of action had emerged in the final days of January; the working groups did not come together until the second week of February. By the time our RSVP form was live, the opening night of this production was only two weeks away. This tight timeline was responsible for many of our efforts’ shortcomings. Had we started a few days later, it might have been impossible to organize a week of action altogether.
\n\nOne consequence of this short turnaround time was that the week of action self-selected participants for whom it was possible to leave home for several days on short notice, with no financial assistance for transportation. Although we were able to provide communal meals every day from February 24 to March 1, and we owe a debt of gratitude to locals who opened their homes to strangers so that we could house everyone who requested it, this event was still primarily accessible to white, middle-class participants.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/22.jpg\")
A meeting at a church on February 26, 2026.
\nWe were grateful for feedback from a participant who pointed out a related dynamic: our events had a lack of intentional gathering space for immigrants and people of color. Community and connection are the factors that keep people grounded in movements. We could have done more to develop a collective sense of belonging.
\n\nWe do not blame these problems solely on the tight timeline. This phenomenon is a core dynamic of the movement itself, and speaks to a complex question of how to craft an interracial and intercultural movement. The overlapping cultures of white activists, the middle class, and neighborhood leaders in rapid response channels exist in profound separation from their Black and brown counterparts, who are fiercely organizing to defend their own communities. There are many reasons for this separation. Many of our neighbors of color are so vulnerable that they are sheltering in place. Many more are immobilized by poverty conditions, or do not trust white organizers who come to them with pre-formed agendas. Thus far, our failures to build a truly multiracial movement continue to hinder our effectiveness. The so-called drawdown has revealed the character of this movement: ICE is still operating, but because they are no longer so visible on the streets, where they will be directly witnessed by white people, participation in the resistance has declined.
\n\nHow can we carry this movement forward, broaden its scope, and move beyond moderation?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/17.jpg\")
An art build on February 26, 2026.
\nPolitical education is crucial to fostering the strength, militancy, and collective analysis of our movements. As part of the week of action, we put on several dozen training sessions on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. These included tutorials on how to set up rapid response networks, skillshares about basic first aid for chemical weapons, a discussion of the impact of the 2020 George Floyd uprising, presentations by teachers and parents on school patrols and school-based mutual aid networks, a panel on ICE resistance in other cities, and much more.
\n\nIn preparing these sessions, we emphasized the principles of popular education: including room for input, cultivating participant-generated discussion, and teaching through contradictions. We did this for the benefit of the facilitators as much as the participants. We knew that active reflection on our tactics through teaching would reveal as much to us as it did to those who came to learn.
\n\nTo our surprise, many people offered sessions freely, without being asked. The closer we got to the event, the more ideas began to flow about what we should discuss and how. The memorial stewards of the sites of the murders of George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti offered to present a session. For every political education session we offered, there were dozens more we wanted to offer, and thousands more people we wish had heard them.
\n\nAnother core component of the week of action was inviting participants into local rapid response systems. After attending sessions that detailed the function of rapid response systems and best practices for responding to ICE, we gave attendees the choice to participate in “commuting” (patrolling in cars) and patrolling on foot. The stewards of local rapid response networks, which operate on a geographical basis, designed systems for integrating hundreds of out-of-towners. Patrollers from various neighborhoods trained well over a hundred participants. We took them on “ridealongs” in our neighborhoods following typical patrolling routes, hosted foot and bike patrolling sessions, and ran dispatch for a Signal call for people who followed ICE vehicles as they left the Whipple Federal Building.
\n\nThroughout the week, many participants voiced concerns that local rapid response systems would prove unique to the Twin Cities context and be difficult to replicate elsewhere. Despite these reservations, they began to strategize creatively about how they might adjust rapid response structures to account for differences in demographics and the relative size of their cities. There was very little ICE activity reported that week in Minneapolis and Saint Paul themselves, but consistent reports came in from the suburbs, exurbs, and rural Minnesota.
\n\nSome comrades speculate that ICE operations have moved away from the Twin Cities metro area due to the organizing here. Suburban and rural areas present different geographical and political challenges to rapid responders, but it would be wrong to say they are not organized. Neighborhoods within the metro area are increasingly partnering with suburbs and rural areas to bolster capacity and coordination. Out-of-town participants found this inspiring when thinking of ways to build rapid response networks in their home contexts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/18.jpg\")
A meeting space on February 26, 2026.
\nThe decline of Operation Metro Surge poses a question: what will become of these rapid response structures?
\n\nAlongside political education and patrolling, organizers hosted a variety of actions against ICE around the Twin Cities. In our wildest dreams, the week would have involved so much action around the cities that the police would have been unable to keep up with all of it. The goals were to pressure ICE and those that work with them, raise public consciousness about secondary targets (hotels, rental car companies, county jails that are holding ICE detainees) and take action against them, disrupt ICE’s operating logistics, and offer replicable avenues for a wide range of people and organizations to join in.
\n\nOur actions were hosted by a variety of organizations. Some actions were somewhat less confrontational, such as a rally at the State Capitol and an open mic at the Whipple Federal Building. On Friday, February 27, a “March against ICE Collaborators” snaked through downtown, stopping at various corporate targets—including Target’s corporate headquarters, Hilton, Enterprise, CBS News, and a construction firm called United Properties, not to mention the Hennepin County Jail. Marchers covered the streets with slogans in chalk, and ended by throwing snowballs at effigies of Mayor Jacob Frey and “Border Czar” Tom Homan.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/2.jpg\")
February 27, 2026.
\nAlso on February 27, hundreds of local students hosted a walkout and sit-in at the State Capitol rotunda. The students were accompanied by the Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli dancers, a Mexica-Nahua group. That same day, several protesters were indicted on charges related to the alleged disruption of a church service at a church led by a pastor who worked with ICE. Upon learning of this through the rapid response channels, the students who walked out boarded their bus and drove straight from the Capitol to the federal courthouse.
\n\nFebruary 27, 2026: march in the Twin Cities against ICE collaborators.
\nOn Saturday, February 28, neighborhoods hosted block parties to build community, spend time together, and block ICE from their streets. A local childcare collective hosted a parade for kids and families. Affinity groups hosted autonomous nighttime noise demos at the hotels where ICE agents sleep. People at one of these demonstrations later went to certain DHS officials’ home addresses.
\n\nWe invited many formal organizations to help organize these actions—Indigenous Roots, Sunrise Movement, Unidos, 50501, Democratic Socialists of America, Veterans for Peace, Black Cat Workers Collective, and more. While we remain critical of the non-profit industrial complex and progressive politics, all of these organizations agreed to the abolitionist line of abolishing ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the police, and prisons. We aim to resist left sectarianism and work across party lines wherever we can. These organizations didn’t necessarily host the actions that we would have, but they collaborated with us in the coordinating committee meetings and they provided options for people to participate in a range of different kinds of activity.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/7.jpg\")
February 28, 2026.
\nSaturday also featured a demonstration at the Sherburne County Jail. In Minnesota, ICE has partnered with several county jails to imprison immigrant detainees. Sherburne currently imprisons many undocumented abductees, as well as prisoners of the 2020 George Floyd Uprising. We brought art and a speaker to the parking lot at the Sherburne, and a DJ blasted protest music. We danced to stay warm. We chanted “Fuck ICE” and “We love you,” hoping that our imprisoned sisters and brothers could hear us from inside. With hundreds more protesters, we might hope to eventually block the entrance and actually slow jail operations; for now, we remind our incarcerated relatives that we have not forgotten them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/27.jpg\")
March on the Sherburne County Jail and ICE detention facility on February 28, 2026.
\nOn Sunday, March 1, we marched to the Whipple Federal Building to demand freedom for our stolen neighbors and the return of stolen Indigenous lands. We marched through the streets just south of Whipple, and were pushed back by a line of riot cops from our attempt to block the south entrance. Dispersed interactions with sheriffs and conservation officers mounted into a standoff. In the midst of the standoff, the Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli arrived to dance and to pray. Officers then declared an unlawful assembly and surged into the so-called “protest zone,” arresting 29 people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/10.jpg\")
The Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli dancers on March 1, 2026.
\nAt the same time as this march arrived at the southeast side of Whipple, a smaller autonomous action blockaded the road on the northwest side of the building with shields and reinforced banners. Sheriffs deployed chemical weapons and arrested 11 more people, for a total of 40 arrests that day. No ICE traffic went in or out of the building for more than two hours, even after the protests on both sides had dispersed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/12.jpg\")
March 1, 2026.
\nAcross the political education sessions, rapid response trainings, and protests, we could feel considerable exhaustion from local organizers. Turnout was lower from locals than we expected, an unsurprising outcome from a drained base. Nonetheless, in the course of the week, thousands of us took various forms of offensive action against ICE. We brought the heat to targets already facing pressure; we spotlighted corporations that we will continue to campaign against. We know that our organizing and action must continue nationwide.
\n\nYou can help. You can disrupt primary and secondary ICE targets where you live, be they detention centers, Hiltons, Enterprises, Targets, or other corporations that assist ICE.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/23.jpg\")
March on the Sherburne County Jail and ICE detention facility on February 28, 2026.
\nWhat did the week of action show about how we can build revolutionary struggle in this moment?
\n\nOur network contains many and varied approaches to revolutionary organizing. We seek to take what is best in each of these tendencies, fit them together, and attempt to address the contradictions that arise. The week of action was one attempt to address these contradictions. Many communist and anarchist groups that have throwing down here brought in their comrades from around the country.
\n\nIn the Twin Cities context, one political tendency has deeper and broader roots in poor and working class communities than communists or anarchists: progressive nonprofits and labor unions. At their best, these organizations can provide a measure of political power for some of the most oppressed members of the working class. The major drawback is that they cannot withstand the inertia of the nonprofit-industrial complex, as they are beholden to their billionaire funders and to the limitations of the law. Consequently, they rarely overcome bureaucracy or engage in real militant resistance to the ruling class.
\n\nThe Week of Action was one attempt to collaborate between the groups listed above—not out of long-term political alignment, but out of practical necessity. Creating a revolutionary movement will require coordinating across all these tendencies.
\n\nAnother potent element of the week of action was multicultural celebration. To be able to overcome the US empire, we will need a resistance movement that is welcoming and irresistible in its appeal. Together, we ate Somali sambusas, danced to the Chicano music of Las Cafeteras, witnessed the power of the Indigenous Roots danza, participated in Dakota ceremonies, and ended the week with a rave. We don’t list these experiences to emphasize multiculturalism for its own sake, but to identify them as some of the most euphoric and important parts of the week of action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/24.jpg\")
March on the Sherburne County Jail and ICE detention facility on February 28, 2026.
\nIt is crucial to integrate deeply-rooted cultural practices into our resistance. Activists in the United States must learn from revolutionary comrades in the Global South. It’s not enough for white people just to march on behalf of their undocumented neighbors—we must build deep, long-lasting, and politicized relationships across cultural boundaries.
\n\nIf everyone who has ever done a rapid response patrol signed on to the Twin Cities Tenants Union’s strike pledge, it would exceed its goal of 10,000 participants, and we could exert real leverage upon the ruling class. Likewise, if everyone who works alongside an immigrant was willing to march on the boss for them and with them, our movement would become more powerful.
\n\nWe must sharpen our analysis of the moment alongside our neighbors and coworkers. One means of achieving this is to continue to hold regular political education sessions at which to learn about and reflect on what the people of Minnesota have accomplished over the last three months and what we can accomplish together in the future. Without intentional, communal reflection, we may not be able to grow.
\n\nOperation Metro Surge is ongoing. In fact, we’ve seen an uptick in ICE activity in the days since the week of action. As federal agents shift towards more covert methods, the resistance must continue to adapt and grow. We would like to extend gratitude to everyone who contributed to the week of action and everyone who participated. We invite critique while celebrating the will, skill, and determination that brought us together.
\n\nIn the great people’s uprising against ICE, the Week of Action was just one small part. Every great historical movement is comprised of a thousand small parts.
\n\nAll power to the people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/09/20.jpg\")
February 26, 2026.
\nOn March 1, 2026, at the conclusion of a week of action against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement occupation of the Twin Cities, protesters converged on the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, Minnesota. At least four hundred people marched on the southeast side of the building to demand that ICE withdraw from Minnesota and that the land Fort Snelling occupies be given back to the Dakota people. Many Native people participated in the march, including members of the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Chippewa tribes. On the opposite end of the building, a group of fifty protesters blockaded Minnehaha Avenue with shields, reinforced banners, homemade tank traps, and improvised barricades.
\n\nHennepin County Sheriffs and Minnesota State Troopers attacked both protests almost immediately. They tackled and dragged dozens of people out of the march on the southeast side. At the blockade on the northwest side, they beat protesters, sprayed them with bear mace, and slammed a person’s head against the pavement. One person bled from their eyes and suffered corneal damage from taking so much mace.
\n\nThe sheriffs arrested forty people in total. Ten of these arrests occurred at the blockade and thirty at the march. The first attacks on the march did not occur until after the barricades on the other side of the building were cleared away. Presumably, the blockade functioned keep pressure off the march by drawing police attention elsewhere.
\n\nFrom Chicago to the Twin Cities, local and state police who answer to Democratic officials have played an essential role in enabling ICE to terrorize communities. Without the continuous assistance and support of local authorities, federal agencies would have been outmaneuvered by protest movements long ago. Every time cops and sheriffs participate in brutalizing those who oppose the ways that ICE is abducting and murdering people, this shows the complicity of Democratic officials in the rise of fascism.
\n\nDespite the hardships that the participants endured, this brave action shows that the resistance to the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities is not over. In replacing so-called “Commander at Large” Greg Bovino with “Border Czar” Tom Homan, Donald Trump is trying to rebrand the agency responsible for the high-profile murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. (Homan himself accepted a bag of $50,000 in return for promising to distribute government contracts in an FBI sting operation in 2024, aptly illustrating how the persecution of immigrants functions as a cover for government corruption and the military-industrial complex.) Yet even after the withdrawal of thousands of ICE agents from the Twin Cities, more than 400 remain—an unprecedented number before the surge of federal mercenaries into the city two months ago. Thankfully, people are not finished fighting ICE.
\n\nHere, an anarchist in Minneapolis who participated in the blockade action describes what happened.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/4.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nIt was a cold, bright morning when I got to the north lot outside Whipple. About forty people were already there. I was nervous. Our numbers were dangerously small. We knew going in this would be a smaller action, but I felt exposed. The wind buffeted us in the shadow of the seven-story concrete detention center. Were we about to get slaughtered?
\n\nWe waited a few minutes. People hugged each other and huddled in their affinity groups whispering pep talks. Eleven more comrades trickled in. I counted every one of us, then counted again. Two Hennepin County Sheriff cars were watching from the other side of the parking lot. We had scarcely more than fifty people.
\n\nA van swerved into the north lot and screeched to a halt. The first deployment team leaped out, already in gas masks, and started throwing hastily-painted plastic shields out of the back of the van. Everyone scrambled to empty the van, fastening respirators and goggles to their faces and grabbing shields. The sheriffs got out of their cars; they were yelling into their radios calling for backup. A cop car heading south towards Whipple made a sharp U-turn and plowed over the curb of the median strip to cut us off.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/10.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nWe had barely left the parking lot when a stout, mustachioed sheriff pepper-sprayed the person to my left. The person flinched and fell backwards, but did not cry out. Medics started flushing their eyes. We kept pushing forward.
\n\nA line of sheriffs blocked our path before we reached our intended blockade point. Some of them were in normal uniforms; others were in full kit tactical gear, looking almost exactly like the federal agents who guarded this area in the recent past. One of them menaced us with a can of bear spray. I fiddled with my goggles, frantically trying to stop the damn things from fogging up in the cold.
\n\n“IF YOU HAVE A SHIELD, PUT IT ON THE GROUND NOW!” a sheriff bellowed at us. He bellowed the same phrase again, and then a third time.
\n\n“Not today, asshole,” somebody to my right shouted back. “Is your family proud of you, you fucking pig?”
\n\nThe cops ran at us. They maced somebody. They started grabbing shields and wrenching them out of people’s hands. I was standing in the front. A sheriff put both his hands on the top of somebody’s shield and they wrestled back and forth over it. The person let go of the shield, and the sheriff toppled backwards and fell on his back.
\n\nSomebody started shouting instructions to fall back. Most of us did. The sheriffs tackled two brave people who were slower to retreat. Three or four officers dogpiled onto each of them. One person’s helmet flew off and they struggled to stand up. A sheriff threw himself on top of them, smashing their head onto the sidewalk with an audible crack.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/1.jpg\")
\nSomeone with a bullhorn walked out into the street, attempting to take the road a second time. She started a chant: “Whose streets? Our streets!” The cops immediately tackled her, as well. The rest of us followed, trying to get back into the street to form a shield wall. Two sheriffs flanked the person in front of me and tried to pull them forward. People on our side grabbed the person by the backpack and tried to pull them back. The sheriffs hit us with another jet of bear mace and we lost the person. Someone else in the front was holding the line as best they could, shoving back and forth with their shield. A sheriff tried to grab them by the arms, but a comrade behind them crouched and hugged them around the waist, wrenching them backwards. That person got away.
\n\nWhen the melee concluded, they had arrested ten of us. There were only forty of us left in the street. The number of cops confronting us had dropped, too, as many of them had their hands full detaining our arrested comrades and putting them into a van. We fell back again and put up a shield wall, now with a severely diminished number of shields. Somebody grabbed a pallet and a broken stop sign from the side of the road and threw them into the street in front of us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/5.jpg\")
\nOnly after the arrests did the sheriffs issue a dispersal order.
\n\nThe next ten minutes felt like hours. The sheriffs kept their distance now. I think they were calling for reinforcements. Four vehicles blocked the road in front of us, and two blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Hiawatha behind us. I was afraid we were going to get kettled. We huddled together in the freezing wind, crouching behind our few remaining shields. A middle-aged woman pulled up her car behind us. For a moment, I thought she could be ICE. Then she yelled out her drivers’ side window: “You guys are all so hot and brave!!!”
\n\nOur morale was low by this point, but she helped boost it.
\n\nThen, finally, the cavalry arrived. A second deploy team pulled up in a flatbed truck. People swarmed around the back of the truck, ripped away a green tarp, and pulled out buckets of hinges, nails, and scrap metal. We dumped them onto the barricade. We also pulled out three “tankbuster” traps—four-foot-high welded jacks that looked like barricades from the beaches at Normandy, and positioned them to block the road. Piled beneath all this stuff, we pulled out two 8’ x 4’ reinforced banners made of corrugated steel. I wish we’d had this shit 20 minutes ago, I grumbled to myself.
\n\nWe held the road for another half hour. The sheriffs did not approach us again. Taken aback by the barricade, they were constantly talking into their radios. At 10:24 am, I received a text on my burner phone that the march on the other side of Whipple was no longer holding the street. This meant ICE had an egress point at Gate 3 and were no longer trapped inside. That was our cue to leave. We called our exfil team.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/6.jpg\")
\nIronically, the smoothness of our exit seemed to disorient the sheriffs more than anything we’d done at the blockade. Eight cars pulled up behind us and we piled in, abandoning the barricade and peeling off toward Hiawatha.
\n\nOne car got followed by an ICE SUV on the way out. The driver led them on a chase through South Minneapolis until they reached Powderhorn Park, where they used a local rapid response chat to call for reinforcements. Dozens of neighbors came out to the park, filming with their phones. The ICE vehicle turned around and withdrew.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/8.jpg\")
Photograph by @slunttttt.
\nI was frightened and stressed out during most of the action on March 1, but I did it anyway. Many things went wrong during the planning and execution. We took 20% arrests, and some of the arrestees caught misdemeanor charges. We never had the numbers to properly accomplish our task—yet somehow, we managed to block the road for 52 minutes. Of every organized protest at the Whipple building in the last three months, this one was by far the smallest. It was also the first and only occasion on which we succeeded in fully blocking ICE into their headquarters for any length of time.
\n\nWhat happened on March 1 represents a new phase of the struggle against ICE in the Twin Cities. We are decidedly on the other side of the crest of movement activity that peaked in January. The so-called “drawdown”—which still leaves 407 ICE agents on our streets—was intended to demobilize our movement, and in this respect it has partly succeeded. The thousands who fought them in the streets in January are exhausted.
\n\nYet fight them we must.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/03/02/11.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“We are not many, perhaps more than you dream of, though we are all determined to fight to the last.”
\n\n—Plain Words, 1919
\n
In the following analysis, participants in the resistance to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement assault on the Twin Cities chart the course of the movement from 2025 to the present day, exploring why it gained momentum despite escalating repression.
\n\nThe surge of federal mercenaries to the Twin Cities is not over. Even if it is true, as federal authorities allege, that less than 500 federal agents remain (not counting Homeland Security Investigations agents), that is still several times the number of ICE agents that were deployed to the Twin Cities before 2026. One of the classic strategies of fascism is to ramp up violence to the maximum level, then back off the most extreme measures in order to accustom people to a more repressive status quo.
\n\nNonetheless, the administration’s original objective was to normalize sending thousands of mercenaries to terrorize entire cities into submission. In that regard, the people of the Twin Cities achieved a victory, undermining the perceived legitimacy of the federal forces and forcing them to change tactics.
\n\nThe people of the Twin Cities did not turn the tide against the occupation by force of arms, but by out-mobilizing ICE. Yet this does not mean that physically fighting the occupiers has played no role in the outcome.
\n\nA mass mobilization across the entire society forced the federal government to begin to withdraw. Well over 30,000 people have participated in the rapid response networks in some way,1 utilizing a wide range of tactics. Many thousands of these people dedicated their lives to the resistance and patrolled the streets every day for over two months. Many thousands more have participated in clandestine mutual aid networks to bring food, supplies, and rent relief to undocumented families forced into hiding. One in four adults in Minnesota participated in the general strike of January 23 in some way, and an estimated 8% of all Minnesotans refused to work that day. Signs reading “Everyone welcome except ICE” appeared in the windows of practically every business in South Minneapolis.
\n\nThe scale of the resistance prompted Stephen Miller to remark,
\n\n\n\n\n“You only have to read their own words and hear their own words and judge their own conduct to understand that this is clearly an insurgency against the federal government.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-1.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\nIn the negotiations in Hanoi a week before the fall of Saigon in 1975, an American general reportedly told a North Vietnamese commanding officer, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.”
\n\nThe North Vietnamese commander replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
\n\nThe Twin Cities could offer the same retort to our enemy today. Insurgencies win by continuously wearing down a more powerful opponent. We win by not losing.
\n\nWhile the vast majority of patrollers used car horns, cell phone cameras, and whistles as their weapons, it would be incorrect to characterize the resistance as strictly nonviolent. An unknown number of brave people threw their bodies between ICE and our vulnerable neighbors. Some of them slashed the tires and smashed out the windows of ICE vehicles, pelted ICE agents with snowballs, and rescued arrestees from their clutches.
\n\nAccording to “Border Czar” Tom Homan, in January alone, nearly 160 people were arrested for impeding or assaulting federal agents. In the course of that month, ICE and Border Patrol shot one person every week, killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti and injuring Julio Sosa Celis. Undeterred, the people rose in rebellion in greater and greater numbers after each shooting: on January 7, by fighting federal agents at Roosevelt Middle School, storming the doors of a federal courthouse, and barricading off the site of Renee’s murder; on January 14, by chasing off federal agents from the Northside and looting three of their cars; and on January 24, after the murder of Alex Pretti, by erecting barricades in Whittier and fighting off both ICE and local police, compelling them to withdraw.
\n\nFrom the daily skirmishes at the sites of abductions to the riots that engulfed entire neighborhoods, these clashes played a crucial role in the development of the resistance. Without these incidents, the daily rapid response chats, the hyperlocal neighborhood groups, the late-night hotel noise demos, and even the mass work stoppages might not have cohered into a movement capable of grinding down the resolve of the federal government. The reasons for this are social, not military.
\n\nRather than looking at these moments as random occurrences of stochastic turbulence, extracurricular activities that punctuated the ongoing deep organizing with sensational headlines, we understand every engagement with enemy forces as part of an ongoing arc of escalation. Every escalation from ICE drove our own escalations in a feedback loop. Every time people fought back, that opened up a new range of possibilities and we stepped through a portal into a new phase of resistance.
\n\nEach clash with ICE propelled the movement forward in three ways:
\n\nTo show how this took place, we will briefly review the development of the movement from its origins.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-4.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\nIn the Twin Cities, the first significant confrontation with ICE took place on June 3 at Taqueria Las Cuatro Milpas. The next day, people confronted ICE agents as they carried out raids in Chicago and Grand Rapids—and two days after that, the clashes began in Los Angeles that rapidly built to the first uprising of Trump’s second term.
\n\nAfterwards, while Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles and went on to target Chicago and other cities with surges of federal agents, the administration did not immediately escalate ICE activity in the Twin Cities.
\n\nAn organization called Monarca, launched in 2024, began holding legal observer trainings for people who wanted to track the movements of ICE. A similar group named MPLS Whistles emerged in October ahead of a press conference featuring Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
\n\nThe first indications that Operation Metro Surge was on the way occurred on November 18, when ICE attempted to raid the Bro-Tex paper factory in Saint Paul. They abducted two workers, pepper-sprayed onlookers, and shoved demonstrators out of the street as a crowd spontaneously formed and attempted to block their vehicles. As the mercenaries fled, somebody smashed out the back window of an ICE van.
\n\nWord of the raid and the response spread like wildfire. A week later, on November 25, another ICE raid took place, this time on the east side of Saint Paul in the Payne-Phalen neighborhood. They took two more people. This time, word spread all over the cities and a larger crowd—over a hundred people—came out to stop them. The energy of the smaller clash a week prior had primed the population. This time, some people showed up in respirators and helmets. Federal agents escalated their repressive tactics, shooting pepper balls and sponge rounds from shotguns. One protester was injured by agents who cracked their head against the pavement.
\n\nAs in June, DHS personnel tried to claim after the fact that the raid was not immigration-related, but nobody believed them. As we will discuss below, this is presumably a disinformation tactic intended to “keep the temperature down,” a priority that Republicans and Democrats share.
\n\nThe two big November confrontations forced federal agents to change their strategy to hasty snatch-and-grabs. This shift showed the limitations of the first iteration of the rapid response networks, in which organizations like Monarca would verify reports and then circulate them. The rapid response networks that were cohering on Signal and Whatsapp solved this problem by decentralizing, cutting out the bottlenecks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/11-25-1.jpg\")
November 25, 2025. The beginnings of a proportionate response.
\nA week later, ICE invaded the Twin Cities. The stories on the news said they were targeting Somali immigrants. Waves of fear spread through every immigrant community. Some people stopped showing up to work.
\n\nICE abducted twelve people in the first three days of December before the Department of Homeland Security formally announced Operation Metro Surge on December 4. Soon after, over 300 ICE agents were occupying our streets. Stories began to circulate about house raids in the suburbs. Organizers started calling face-to-face meetings to set up neighborhood defense groups. Proper anti-ICE patrols got underway. The first patrollers took to euphemistically calling ourselves “commuters.”
\n\nIn the course of the first two weeks of the occupation, a holding pattern set in. ICE would jump out of their cars in pairs and snatch someone. Sometimes, if we were lucky, a crowd would form. People would get out their phones and blow their whistles and cuss at them. The agents would pepper-spray someone and leave with an abductee.
\n\nOn the handful of occasions when we could stop abductions by sheer numbers, we did—for example, when ICE raided a construction site in Chanhassen in dangerously cold temperatures and two workers got frostbite from being trapped on a roof while a crowd faced down the feds. But for the most part, most of us were relatively passive observers in this period. Most of the abductions succeeded.
\n\nOn December 15, that began to change. Two ICE agents attempted to kidnap a pregnant woman at the corner of 29th and Pillsbury. Agent Brenden Cuni slammed her to the ground and shoved his knee into her back. This was also the first time we positively identified an ICE agent after seeing him in the field. People began throwing snowballs and big chunks of ice at the agents from all sides.
\n\nAs the thermal temperature dropped in the second half of December, the political temperature ratcheted up. It became commonplace to see ICE brutalizing people. December 22 marked the first time they fired live ammunition at us, when they shot at a man in Saint Paul after ramming his car. Reports circulated about ICE shooting out one observer’s tires. Another was arrested in a parking lot near the Whipple federal building (the staging area for practically all ICE activity in the area) and charged with “stalking.” They started brake-checking drivers who followed them, or boxing us in. They began attempting to carry out the abductions more quickly and violently. Their violence became more theatrical. The occupation created a new status quo.
\n\nFor a couple of suspiciously calm days before January 6, it appeared that the abductions in Minneapolis might finally be slowing down. Then DHS announced a surge of 2000 more ICE and Border Patrol agents. Suddenly, the streets were overrun with them. Whereas before, you needed a car if you wanted to “commute,” now there were so many agents that foot patrols around certain hotspots became effective. The abductions became more indiscriminate. We saw agents grabbing people at bus stops and using facial recognition software on random people on the sidewalk. The same day that the surge began, ICE sent detained Minneapolis resident Victor Manuel Diaz to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he died—or else was murdered—only a week later.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-07-1.jpg\")
January 7, 2026. People respond to the murder of Renee Good.
\nOne day into the surge, on January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good. Dozens of federal agents gathered at the site of her murder to threaten the crowd. Considering what the agents had just done, the crowd’s immediate reaction was conservative and restrained. People blocked the street and chanted at the accomplices in the killing. Unprovoked, Border Patrol “Bor-Tac” officers Michael Sveum and Edgar Vazquez opened fire with chemical weapons, touching off skirmishes at 34th and Portland in which some people threw snowballs at federal agents as they retreated.
\n\nTwo hours later, a fight broke out at Roosevelt Middle School, where people successfully stopped ICE agents from abducting an immigrant worker by swarming them in front of the building. That night, locals barricaded off 34th and Portland Avenue, the scene of the murder. Ten thousand people turned out to stand vigil for Renee Good.
\n\nOn the morning of January 8, the day after the murder of Renee Good, people organized by a AFL-CIO “direct action trainer” carried out the first attempt to blockade the Whipple building. The crowd was fairly tame, but officers tear-gassed them nonetheless. As the protesters were only using soft blockade tactics, they were not able to withstand the assault.
\n\nAfter Renee’s murder, a new status quo emerged. ICE ramped up its terror to new heights. It became common for them to smash out people’s car windows. They detained more observers. They started using tear gas in minor confrontations in which it would have been unusual for regular cops to deploy it. Two Target employees who were citizens were beaten and arrested for filming federal agents. ICE released people from custody in the middle of the night in sub-zero temperatures in public parks. Liberal conspiracy theories became popular alleging that Trump was trying to use this violence to provoke us into a reaction. Rapid response chats ballooned in size.
\n\nOn January 11, Greg Bovino conspicuously took a Border Patrol convoy up and down University Avenue, harassing people in crowded areas. At a Speedway gas station in Saint Paul, they beat and choked Orbin Mauricio Enriquez Serrano unconscious, and punched and tackled observers while they carried away his body. Two days later, a hundred people turned out to confront ICE when they raided a house in Powderhorn; ICE tear-gassed them. Clashes broke out at the Whipple building later on the night of January 13, when protesters and DHS police exchanged fireworks for CS gas and flashbangs.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-2.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. Police and federal agents tear-gassed an entire neighborhood after shooting Julio Sosa-Celis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-6.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. Police and federal agents terrorizing the neighborhood after shooting Julio Sosa-Celis.
\nWe saw an inflection point on January 14, when an ICE agent shot Julio Sosa-Celis through his own front door in north Minneapolis. Black and brown young people from the working-class Northside neighborhood came out by the hundreds and battled federal agents alongside activists. For three hours, MPD supported ICE as they fired tear gas and rubber bullets. People responded with bottles, rocks, and firecrackers.
\n\nICE withdrew first, abandoning at least three vehicles. MPD fled shortly afterwards. The youth of Northside tagged and smashed up their cars, stole a gun safe from one trunk, and turned the scene into a lively block party. Witnesses livestreamed as people rifled through the ICE vehicles, pulling out sensitive documents and “challenge coins” distributed to the mercenaries for perpetrating harm against communities. Federal agents did not return until hours later.
\n\nFor many in Twin Cities, January 14 felt like a turning point. It represented the stirring of a sleeping giant: the same social force that had produced the George Floyd rebellion rising to put its unmistakable stamp on the struggle against ICE.
\n\nAfter the riot in Northside, the number of detainees flown out of Minnesota reportedly dropped from 204 detainees flown out that day to only 114 the following day (January 15), and only 77 on January 16. The number never again reached anything like the levels seen between January 6 and January 15. The “drawdown” in the number of federal agents occupying the Twin Cities did not begin until February, but the riot of January 14 immediately put a cap on how many people the agents could abduct because it forced them to act more cautiously.
\n\nIt was direct action—not the decisions of officials of either political party—that turned the tide. The changes in official policy came later, acknowledging a reality imposed by courageous grassroots action.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-5.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. People respond to the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-4.jpg\")
January 14, 2026. People respond to the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-14-3.jpg\")
People investigate the vehicles that federal agents abandoned after shooting Julio Sosa-Celis and terrorizing the neighborhood for hours with tear gas and flash-bang grenades.
\nThings reached a crescendo on January 23, when 300,000 people went on strike against the occupation.
\n\nThe next day, six CBP agents murdered Alex Pretti in cold blood, in broad daylight. A call went out for observers. Out of all the riots we’ve experienced, the street fighting in Whittier was notable for how rapidly it broke out. The most impressive part was that without any planning, all of the participants knew what to do at once. Barricades dotted Nicollet, Blaisdell, and 26th Street. People set dumpsters on fire. The pallets at one warehouse were all repurposed as barricade materials. Federal agents fired an astonishing amount of tear gas to cover their retreat before fleeing onto the 35W highway.
\n\nThree days later, Greg Bovino had been relieved of command and the state government was angling to make a deal for some sort of détente. That same day, Governor Tim Walz said,
\n\n\n\n\n“The politics for the White House is they cannot afford to see tear gas on the streets and they certainly can’t afford to see another incident like we saw on Saturday morning.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-3.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\nToday, nearly four weeks have passed since Alex’s murder and the events in Whittier. Border czar Tom Homan allegedly withdrew 700 agents from the Twin Cities after those events, although he and the other representatives of the federal government have given us no reason to take them at their word.
\n\nAbove all, the “drawdown” represents a strategic shift intended to pacify people. The state government has given ICE access to all county jails. ICE may have become less visible, and they may be terrorizing the suburbs more intensely than the city centers, but they are still here—their motor pool is still full at Whipple and they’re still kidnapping people every day. Local organizers are calling for a week of action from February 25 to March 1 to keep the pressure on at a moment when the regime is trying to release it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-25-1.jpg\")
January 25, 2026: a federal mercenary menaces people outside a hotel housing ICE agents.
\nWe can derive three tentative conclusions from this sequence of events:
\n\nThe introduction of militant tactics did not diminish popular support for the resistance. On the contrary, the rapid response infrastructure has continued to grow and develop in each phase of the struggle. There were 3000 commuters in December; as of mid-February, some 30,000 have participated. The state has failed to convince the public to accept a dichotomy between “good protesters” and “bad protesters.” The movement remains extraordinarily popular.
\n\n“Disturbing the peace” is a form of leverage for the movement in and of itself. What forced the federal government to retreat was not only the direct surveillance and confrontation of ICE agents by commuters; it was also the general threat to public order posed by a movement of thousands of people in constant real-time communication that sometimes bleeds over into neighborhood rebellions, such as the ones that took place in Northside and Whittier in response to the shooting on January 14 and the murder of Alex Pretti on January 24. When they started negotiating, Walz and Trump both agreed that it was crucial to “turn down the temperature.” Insofar as that priority unifies the fascists within the Republican party and the false opposition represented by the Democratic establishment, it indicates how a grassroots social movement might pursue its own interests in a way that cannot be co-opted by either of the dominant forces in government.
\n\nThe old mechanisms of repression no longer work. This is why the state is resorting to brute force. The powers that be are no longer interested in practicing the kind of counterinsurgency that involves winning hearts and minds. They’re making a bid to govern by terror alone. This is historically an indicator of a weak state, one that that no longer possesses legitimacy in the eyes of those it governs.
\n\nIn other words—a government living on borrowed time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/23/01-24-2.jpg\")
January 24, 2026. People respond to the murder of Alex Pretti.
\n\n\n\n“From now on the demagogues, the opportunists, and the magicians have a difficult task. The action which has thrown them into a hand-to-hand struggle confers upon the masses a voracious taste for the concrete.”
\n\n—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
\n
This week, demonstrators in the Twin Cities have been experimenting with filter blockades, a means of monitoring traffic for federal agents and, in some cases, obstructing their activities. Here, we present a guide to maintaining filter blockades, share accounts from filter blockades in the Twin Cities this past week, and conclude with a broader look at the history and potential of the model.
\n\nYou can find updates about the use of filter blockades in the Twin Cities here.
\n\nWinter 2026 has seen a protracted struggle in The Twin Cities. On one side are the mercenaries of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Donald Trump’s attempt to build a federal police force answerable only to him for the immediate purpose of committing ethnic cleansing and the longer-term purpose of terrorizing all opposition. On the other side are the people of the Twin Cities who are moved by their consciences to protect their neighbors and defy tyranny. Their resistance has emerged as rapid response networks tracking ICE movements and impeding their attempts to kidnap people. It has also given rise to blockades at the federal building, a general strike, and riots that have forced ICE and police to withdraw from neighborhoods.
\n\nOver the past week and a half, we have witnessed the emergence of a new tactic: the filter blockade.
\n\nAs seen in the Twin Cities, filter blockades are barricades that turn intersections into roundabouts, crewed by rapid responders who check for ICE vehicles. The filter blockades function to slow or stop occupying forces; everyone else is waved through with a smile. In addition to this “filtering” function, they also serve as informal hubs for sharing food, meeting neighbors, creating art, performing music, making plans, and meeting other immediate needs for camaraderie and connection.
\n\nThis tactic has provoked the ire of ICE and local police—an indicator of its effectiveness. In order that this model might proliferate, we present a how-to guide, a brief overview of the recent history of this tactic, and some lessons learned from prior filter blockades, illustrated with accounts from the past week’s experiments.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/06/10.jpg\")
\nFilter blockades are a simple and effective way to resist the occupation of our communities. All you need is a few determined friends or neighbors and some widely available materials. The goal is to slow traffic, without fully blocking it, in order to identify potential ICE vehicles. The more filter blockades, the more effective the strategy becomes.
\n\nThe more participants, the better, but even a small determined group can operate an effective blockade. Make sure to discuss ahead of time what to do when you encounter ICE—whether that means blocking the intersection or just passing on news of the sighting to everyone who needs to know.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/06/4.jpg\")
\nWhile filter blockades are a relatively new tactic in the resistance to “Operation Metro Surge,” barricades have already taken a variety of forms in the Twin Cities. After police murdered George Floyd in 2020, mourners transformed the site into George Floyd Square, maintaining a self-organized autonomous zone. At the same time, several groups took community safety into their own hands, including Rocksteady Alliance, Powderhorn Safety Collective, Little Earth Protectors, and the Brown Berets. Some set up checkpoints around their neighborhoods.
\n\nDuring the rebellion in Whittier in response to the murder of Alex Pretti on January 24, people built barricades on several roads. This inspired both the barricading of University Avenue at the noise demonstration at Home2 hotel the following night and the filter blockades that appeared thereafter.
\n\nThe first filter blockades of 2026 emerged out of rapid response foot patrols. Shortly after the beginning of Operation Metro Surge, rapid responders who chose not to pursue ICE vehicles by car or bike began to take up positions on street corners, intersections, and sidewalks throughout their neighborhoods—particularly in areas with populations that were targeted for ICE harassment. These foot patrols served both to monitor ICE activity continuously in a given area and to create a mobile standby force capable of documenting, engaging, and interfering with the operations of ICE agents when they entered neighborhoods.
\n\nSome of the most spectacular moments of opposition thus far during Operation Metro Surge emerged as spontaneous responses from foot patrollers and rapid responders who bravely sought to defend their neighbors from abduction. Because of ICE’s high-speed snatch-and-grab tactics, the success of these defenses relied on community members either arriving at the scene of ICE activity incredibly quickly or already having defenders in the area.
\n\nThe earliest filter blockades blossomed in areas where foot patrols and neighborhood defenders gathered in roundabouts and side streets, often around fire pits, where multiple people could keep a watchful eye out for vehicles driven by ICE agents. These first filter “blockades” were essentially occupied roundabouts. Their purpose was primarily to slow down traffic, giving neighborhood defenders time to look inside vehicles for ICE agents. At first, there were no real mechanisms for actually halting ICE vehicles. Nonetheless, there are reports of ICE vehicles turning around and abandoning particular routes after seeing them staffed by neighborhood patrollers.
\n\nStarting at the beginning of February, community defenders in South Minneapolis have taken a more confrontational stance with the filter blockades. While filters had previously only been deployed in residential side streets, organizers began to move roundabout barricades into more populated thoroughfares that were known to be used regularly by ICE agents. Whereas previous blockades only had to contend with a limited number of vehicles, moving into larger streets meant that the barricades had to process hundreds of vehicles per hour while remaining vigilant for potential ICE activity.
\n\nFollowing a direct intervention by the Trump Administration’s border Czar Tom Homan, Minneapolis police stormed the three most prominent barricades, temporarily shutting all of them down. However, it is easy to rebuild a filter blockade.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/06/1.jpg\")
Barricades around the site where ICE murdered Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026.
\nHere are a few takeaways for future community defenders who find themselves at the barricades.
\n\nFor those who are primarily interested in documenting ICE activity and relaying it to rapid response threads, a simple roundabout is likely enough to slow ICE vehicles down long enough to identify them or potentially deter them from attempting to drive down a street. Others focused on community building have made blockades that become block parties, serving as both monitoring points and spaces for community building.
\n\nHowever, if you want to halt ICE vehicles and repel them from an area, you must prepare ahead of time and design your blockade accordingly. At one of the larger filter blockades, two vehicles containing ICE agents were able to pass through because the blockaders were not prepared to halt them. Community members adapted by deploying makeshift gates constructed out of pallets, which they moved into the road to halt cars long enough to run their plates through an ICE database. They reinforced these by readying furniture, pallets, and other materials and resolved to challenge ICE directly. The next day, when an ICE vehicle came through, they confronted the driver and eventually compelled him to flee the area.
\n\nCommunity defense hinges on community consent. Especially when deploying more assertive strategies like checkpoints, organizers should be friendly and welcoming to drivers and passerby alike. Thus far, the filter blockades have been popular in the Twin Cities, receiving widespread support in the form of encouragement, food, and supplies. Groups seeking to set up filter blockades should do so with the broadest possible coalition of community support, taking every measure to ensure that the blockades don’t disrupt everyday life in ways that people don’t appreciate.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/06/7.jpg\")
Photograph courtesy of Minneapolis Spring.
\nOnce you have established what you are trying to achieve, make sure that everyone has a clearly defined role. When ICE arrives, what happens will be fast, loud, and intense. At that point, it will be too late to discuss what to do. The response of a blockade is only as good as the response of each individual; preventing access in such a situation means moving with speed, precision, and coordination.
\n\nWho is running license plates? Who is communicating with rapid response threads about ICE sightings in the area? Who is crewing the pallet gates at the checkpoint? Who is tending the fire? These are questions that any neighborhood group should ask themselves ahead of time and revisit throughout the duration of the blockade. Don’t be afraid to adapt and switch roles as needed. Situations change—so can we.
\n\nLarger blockades on bigger streets are more likely to wind up directly confronting ICE agents. However, that may not be your goal. Smaller blockades on residential streets can disrupt operations on a smaller scale or protect specific locations.
\n\nWhile larger blockades are flashier, they are also more likely to face pressure from local law enforcement groups that are collaborating with federal occupiers. For community groups that seek to challenge ICE directly or expose the complicity of local and state authorities, this may be welcome; for others, it could be unnecessary.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/06/9.jpg\")
\nThe goal of filter blockades is simple: protect neighbors and establish a culture of resistance to injustice. It is almost inevitable that someone will respond to this with anger, but it is not the task of community defenders to convince them or engage in conflict with them. If this person is not affiliated with or collaborating with law enforcement, those holding the barricades should simply let them through. Choosing your battles is a fundamental part of strength. To be effective, a culture of resistance to the state must cultivate a culture of respect for our neighbors—even the ones we experience as annoying, rude, or wrong. This mindset is crucial to cultivating a popular struggle.
\n\nLikewise, some people will push back against direct action tactics, framing their concerns in the language of safety or deescalation. Yet choosing not to resist ICE is also a decision with serious consequences. Those organizing in a particular context must make their own decisions on the basis of how they understand the specific dynamics at play within their communities. We may not be able to win over everyone, but centering an ethic of participatory community defense, we can proceed with clear minds, strong hearts, and the knowledge that nothing they can throw at us is greater than the spirit of people who have chosen, against all odds, to resist.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/06/6.jpg\")
Photograph courtesy of Minneapolis Spring.
\nWe put the checkpoint up around 8:30 am. After about 30 minutes, one ICE car slipped through unbeknownst to us. A few minutes after it passed, it was radioed in as confirmed ICE and to be on the lookout for it.
\n\nShortly thereafter, another ICE vehicle came speeding toward the checkpoint, veered into the opposite lane of traffic to avoid being stopped, and sped away.
\n\nAround 10 am, we heard whistles and car horns, the signal warning that ICE was in the neighborhood. At least half a dozen people ran to address it. The vehicle escaped, but accidentally sped toward the checkpoint. When the driver realized this, they turned around, running right back into the crowd. The vehicle came away with some light damage to the taillight and driver-side mirror.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/06/8.jpg\")
\nI joined a group of neighbors curious about the filter barricade on 32nd and Cedar. We wanted to learn more about what they were doing, what their goals were, and to figure out if we could do something similar in our own neighborhood.
\n\nWe drove through in the car to see what sort of vibe they were putting out. Was this a checkpoint, a filter, a stationary patrol point, or something else entirely? The people standing in the middle of Cedar with pallets gave us a wave and we responded with a few honks in solidarity. Their traffic circle functioned as a deterrent, something like a store greeter, except with more warmth than you can expect from customer service.
\n\nWhen we arrived, there were a half dozen people there doing barricade work, two on either side of the intersection on Cedar (the thoroughfare street) and two in the middle relaying plate checks/rapid response SALUTE reports to the people stationed on Cedar. The outer ring of the barricade was made of an amalgamation of wood pallets, traffic equipment, furniture, shopping carts, and tarps. Inside that there was seating and makeshift tables offering posters, PPE, and lots of snacks and drinks. At the center was a firepit, offering a modest but well-stoked fire to warm the patrollers and anyone else who happened by.
\n\nIn stark contrast to the checkpoints that the National Guard set up, it really felt like they brought the community out. When we walked up to the edge of the barrier, they welcomed us in right away. If you’ve done any ICE watch, it gets easier to just walk up and start a conversation asking what’s going on, does anyone need assistance or a supply run? Obviously, you’ll be treated better if you’re trying to be helpful, but the mutual aid bug is part of how we distinguish ourselves from ICE (since we, too, hide our faces).
\n\nThe two guys in the middle were doing fine on supplies—they said more and more people were bringing stuff or just handing it off as they passed by in their cars. We stood around the middle talking shop a bit. Eventually, I went off to talk to some of the people standing on the south side of Cedar.
\n\nThe person holding up the piece of plywood he’d just spray-painted to read “ICE OUT” told me that he’d been out there for about three hours; the other person had walked over about an hour earlier and decided to help out. After we talked for a bit, he let me know that he needed to leave soon, so I took over his position and stood on Cedar with a walkie-talkie. We didn’t get any confirmed plates while I was there.
\n\nWhile I was on Cedar, one guy drove up and gave us three pizzas. Another, driving a car hand-painted with a mural, handed me a three-dimensional cardboard representation of a middle finger on a stick with the inscription FUCK ICE. Neither said a word. Another dude slowed his car down, rolled down his window, and asked if we needed anything. After the person tending the fire asked for more wood, the man gave a thumbs up and returned ten minutes later with a massive trash bag of firewood, like he was Santa Claus.
\n\nAbout 90% of the interactions I had there were positive: honks of solidarity, waves, salutes, people rolling down their windows to thank us or ask if we needed anything. Every single school bus driver that drove by opened their window to thank us.
\n\nThe only negative interactions were with a few larger vehicles. No 18-wheelers came through, but some truck drivers didn’t appreciate the tight squeeze. Nonetheless, we experienced no verbal or physical altercations.
\n\nWe did see a couple police officers pass through the roundabout without issue, offering a slight nod or a polite wave off the steering wheel. I assume that those gestures just represented those individual officers’ opinions.
\n\nLater, I saw a sheriff’s truck with its lights on across the South end of Cedar, blocking off the road. I told my buddy to report it to the center, and I left my spot to go ask what was happening. The officer was outside the truck directing traffic off Cedar.
\n\n“Hey are you shutting down this road to destroy the barricade?”
\n\n“Yeah, sorry, some residents complained, so we have to get rid of it.”
\n\nWhen I got back to the barricade, the fire was extinguished and everyone was on the sidewalk. A single officer pushed over anything left standing. Cruisers were blocking off the intersection, along with a van full of geared-up officers. A garbage truck rolled in after them and they threw everything they could into it. We gathered all we could, saving food and mutual aid supplies. They left as fast as they arrived.
\n\nIt didn’t make the dent in morale I think they wanted. We lost a lot of stuff, yet the thought in our minds was—how can we do better?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/06/5.jpg\")
\nThe practical impulse on the part of an insurgent population to assert control over space through the use of barricades is likely as old as cities themselves. The barricade is the political expression of a basic mechanical principle: with the right means, every flow or throughway can be interrupted. The castle has the castle door and drawbridge, the city its walls, and so on.
\n\nIn the past decade of social and ecological struggle, this strategy has assumed various forms. On the ZAD (Zone à Défendre, “zone to defend”) at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, where a popular squatting movement sought to prevent the government and private construction companies from paving over historic farmlands to make an international airport, the occupation of the territory led to a proliferation of diverse barricades, including trenches and even the excavation of entire stretches of road. Several regions of the Zone consequently became inaccessible to motor vehicles, while others were only accessible with varying levels of difficulty. While no two barricades were exactly alike, the trend was away from temporary, ephemeral structures toward more durable constructions.
\n\nDuring that same period, an explosive teachers’ struggle in 2016 in Oaxaca experimented with short-term, high impact takeovers of major arterial roads. The Oaxacan blockades were a radical expression of a paradigm of struggle familiar to those of us who grew up after the heyday of the classical labor movement and learned to attack the economy from positions outside it.
\n\nIn the classical paradigm, factory strikes withhold productive labor, thereby forcing production to stop, while port worker strikes withhold circulatory labor, leaving ships and trucks unable to load and unload. However, since teaching is neither productive labor nor circulatory labor, teachers who sought to impact the bottom line of the state and the ruling class had to select a site of intervention suitable to their own initiative. Taking to freeways, the teachers and their families and supporters occupied strategic positions such as toll booths and interchanges in order to block large stretches of road. This sometimes took dramatic forms, such as burning looted semi-trucks positioned sideways across multiple lanes. The interruption of highway transit offered the teachers’ movement a means of asserting control over the circulation of commodities in order to inflict financial harm on the state and the ruling bourgeoisie. However, as one teacher observed in an interview, the stoppage was not intended to be total: they let through “cars, but not trucks hauling goods for major corporations like WalMart and Coca-Cola.” In other words, the model of this barricade was not the trench, but the filter.
\n\nA few years later, again in France, a version emerged that combined the models from the ZAD and Oaxaca. During the Yellow Vests movement of 2018-2019, thousands of residents in smaller towns took over the roundabouts, where they built shacks and cabins out of pallets. For the most part, they selected roundabouts at the entrances to their towns, beside the on-ramps to major freeways. As in Oaxaca, this strategically positioned the movement to levy the circulation of commodities via trucks; like the ZADists, their occupations also played a positive role, functioning as hubs for self-organization, sharing, and political encounter. At the roundabouts, participants in the movement were able to find each other and interact with the neighbors and friends who passed through.
\n\nSomething similar occurred in Colombia in 2021, shutting down entire cities.
\n\nWhat is happening in the Twin Cities represents another innovative expression of the filter blockade, though leveraged against a different enemy with different aims. Rather than targeting the flow of commodities, the filter blockades of the Twin Cities respond to the need to combat fascistic state terror. To this end, they represent a development of a new strategy in an evolving dialectic of cat-and-mouse between ICE agents and the rapid response networks that have been pursuing, recording, and obstructing them. Instead of chasing after agents, the filter blockade points towards the possibility of excluding them from entire zones of the city by asserting popular control over the means of circulation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/06/2.jpg\")
Barricades around the site where ICE murdered Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026.
\nIn A History of the Barricade, Eric Hazan observes that the virtue of the barricade lies in its tendency “to proliferate and form a network that crosses the space of the city.” It is this “faculty of rapid multiplication” that gives it its offensive potency: “victorious barricades,” Hazan writes, “are those that pin down the forces of repression, paralyze their movements, and end up stifling them into impotence.” Since it is easy to circumvent one or two barricades, for barricades to function effectively as a weapon, they must mushroom up all over, for it is only in conjunction with each other that they become effective at controlling enemy movements through a terrain. Although the past week of experiments with filter blockades in the Twin Cities has garnered attention online, they have only just begun to spread.
\n\nIn addition to hindering enemy movements, filter blockades can serve other useful functions. While the rapid responder networks enabled individuals to act in concert through live Signal chats coordinated by dispatchers, with drivers converging together around sightings only to disperse just as quickly, the primary form of connection they facilitated was mobile, temporary, and remote. By creating consistent places for neighbors to find each other, cooperate, and collaborate, filter blockades offer a starting point to reweave the fabric of everyday life.
\n\nBy contrast with the “centros” model, in which people established a presence at the sites of ICE raids targeting day laborers, filter blockades leverage the geography and resources of residential neighborhoods, enabling activities usually reserved for the private spere to take on connective political implications, while incorporating cultural activities often reserved for other venues—poetry readings, potlucks, art builds, snowball fights, hip hop performances, know your rights trainings, and the like. While their political function is circumscribed and spatial, their role in the lives of the neighbors around them is inherently open-ended and should foster a wide range of experimentation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/06/3.jpg\")
Barricades around the site where ICE murdered Alex Pretti on January 24, 2026.
\nIn the following analysis, participants in the resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in the Twin Cities reflect on the lessons of the strikes of January 23 and January 30, looking for ways to expand and strengthen the movement.
\n\nOn January 23, 2026, a general strike against the ICE occupation paralyzed the Twin Cities. Seven days later, a second strike took place, on January 30. The first of these mass strikes drew significantly more participants than the second.
\n\nA poll conducted by participating labor and faith organizations reports that 23% of registered voters participated in the first strike in some way—a figure that does not even include vast sectors of the working class, such as undocumented workers, young people, and tens of thousands who are understandably disillusioned with the political system. Extrapolating from those polls, which indicated that 38% of those who participated in the strike in some way actively refused to work that day, we can conclude that over 300,000 people withdrew from the economy on January 23 in the Twin Cities alone.
\n\nA major Somali shopping center called Karmel Mall closed for the day. Daycare centers were forced to close when their staff demanded the day off. Workers forced a major AT&T call center to close. The biggest nursing home in the Twin Cities metro area held mandatory all-staff meetings to threaten to fire employees who participated, but those scare tactics failed and they faced mass absenteeism. The combined population of Minneapolis and Saint Paul is less than 750,000; that Friday, we saw an estimated 100,000 people take the streets in sub-zero temperatures. It is safe to conclude that at least one out of every eight Twin Cities residents took part in the general strike.
\n\nMost of what we have done here since the federal attack on the Twin Cities began has been reactive. We have organized rapid response networks to document ICE and confront their operations; we have driven them out of areas after they shoot or murder people; we have attempted to blockade their headquarters. The really exciting thing about the general strike was that it was proactive: by withdrawing our participation from the economy, we were exerting pressure not only on the Trump regime, but on the capitalist class that backs it and the Democratic politicians who have largely stayed out of its way or actively assisted as its bounty hunters have kidnapped our neighbors and terrorized us.
\n\nIf we are to reach a future in which we are not at the mercy of a totalitarian police state, we will have to develop our ability to engage in collective actions like the general strike of January 23. We have to become capable of proactively exerting leverage upon our adversaries, fracturing their coalitions and ultimately breaking their grip on power. What could hinder us from doing this?
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/01/1.jpg\")
\nThe second general strike was also massive, though significantly smaller than the first. Estimates of the crowd sizes downtown range from 20,000-30,000 people, depending on the source. A number of factors account for this discrepancy in size.
\n\nFirst, the general strike of January 23 had been called at least ten days in advance, whereas the call for the January 30 strike went out only five days ahead of time. But this alone cannot explain the difference. In times of extreme urgency and anger, actions that are called immediately sometimes turn out better than actions that are called too far in advance. The general strike of January 23 occurred at a high point of organically building momentum, when people were desperately looking for a way to take action; the strike of January 30 occurred when politicians had managed to undercut this momentum.
\n\nMovements often contract after they appear to have won concessions—in this case, the demotion of Border Patrol “Commander at Large” Greg Bovino and hollow promises from Democrat politicians to negotiate for some “guard rails” around ICE activity. Any apparent victory, however symbolic, functions as a pressure valve to diminish the urgency that people feel.
\n\nAlthough the people of the Twin Cities have experienced horrific violence at the hands of ICE for months now, the replacement of Bovino with border czar Tom Homan has given local politicians an opportunity to assert a new narrative, with governor Tim Walz calling for “a return to normalcy.” At best, this will mean a kinder, gentler Gestapo.
\n\nBoth Donald Trump and the Minnesota Democrats have a stake in “turning down the temperature,” even if that means that ICE abductions continuing by the thousand. One local Twin Cities group speculates that Walz and Trump are already working together to keep the ICE operation going in a slightly less controversial manner:
\n\n\n\n\nWe can infer the nature of the deal Walz made with Trump from the things we have seen over the last six days. Border Patrol have abandoned their previous function as crowd control at ICE’s local headquarters, the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building. Now they have ceded that role to Hennepin County Sheriffs. In the past, we’ve seen these sheriffs wearing standard blue police uniforms. This morning, when they beat and arrested at least five protesters outside Whipple, they were dressed up in tactical gear, green uniforms, and masks. They looked almost indistinguishable from the BorTac officers they are replacing. It seems clear that Walz offered up his own stormtroopers to replace Trump’s, so that Operation Metro Surge can continue unabated, and he can save face by pretending that the worst of the federal invaders have gone home.
\n
Even if the Democrats get ICE to behave more politely, that should appease no one. If all that the Trump administration has to do to normalize putting thousands of ICE agents in the streets is to start by doing so with unhinged violence and then retreat to a slightly less provocative approach, they will repeat that tactic all around the country. There is no “appropriate” role for ICE; Donald Trump has channeled so many billions of dollars to ICE for the purpose of building a private army with which to mete out repression targeting scapegoats and political enemies alike. The road to fascism is paved with reforms that pacify people just long enough to tighten the vice.
\n\nRather than trying to reform institutions that exist for the sole purpose of abducting, oppressing, and murdering, we have to abolish them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/01/3.jpg\")
There can be no compromise with institutions that exist for the sole purpose of oppression.
\nThe other reason that the second strike was smaller was that the constellation of labor unions, immigrants’ rights organizations, and religious institutions that bolstered the numbers for January 23 neither promoted nor mobilized their members for January 30. Instead, the call for the January 30 strike seemed to originate from a coalition of student organizations at the University of Minnesota, including the Somali, Ethiopian, and Eritrean student associations, the Black Student Union, and a graduate student organization.
\n\nTo understand the political dynamics behind these two very different strikes and the decline in participation on January 30, we have to address an albatross that has weighed down revolutionary movements for centuries: vanguardism.
\n\nVanguardism is defined as
\n\n\n\n\n“The strategy whereby an organization attempts to place itself at the center of a revolutionary movement and steer it in a direction consistent with its ideology.”
\n
The idea of a revolutionary vanguard party underpins practically every authoritarian socialist project since the 19th century. In November 1917, Vladimir Lenin made a speech in which he set the blueprint for every state socialist party, asserting that
\n\n\n\n\n“A party is the vanguard of a class, and its duty is to lead the masses and not merely to reflect the average political level of the masses.”
\n
Organizations that model themselves in this image see themselves as the brain of the movement, and the rank-and-file participants as the body. They believe that their role is to guide an ignorant populace in a more “advanced” direction.
\n\nThe anarchist Alfredo Bonanno summarized his critique of this approach succinctly enough:
\n\n\n\n\n“This organization tends to cut itself off from and impose itself upon the revolutionary movement that produced it.”
\n
But don’t take Bonanno’s word for it. For us, this is not an ideological issue—a question of political branding—but a strategic issue.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/01/2.jpg\")
\nThe problem with vanguardism is that even when it works, it doesn’t work. Even when vanguardism consolidates control of a movement in the hands of the leadership of a single organization, it doesn’t make the movement more vibrant and effective. Whether the organization in question uses its authority to impose a direction on the rest of the movement or to hold the movement back from action altogether, it can only inhibit the growth of a movement with a widely distributed sense of agency and initiative. What’s more, organizations that understand themselves as the vanguard of the movement tend to compete with each other for control in ways that undermine the prospects of the movement as a whole. The general strike of January 30 is instructive because it offers examples of all three of these outcomes.
\n\nBy 2 pm on January 30, it became clear to anyone who was paying attention that the student groups were not themselves in the driver’s seat of the strike. A certain authoritarian socialist party was running the show. Their professionally-printed picket signs displayed their phone number. Their yellow-vested marshals policed the crowd and directed people along a predetermined route. Their chant leaders stood with a PA system on the back of a 26-foot flatbed truck that led the march. We marched in a big circle, starting and ending at the same location, Government Plaza, giving participants no opportunity to engage state forces or gum up ICE infrastructure. Like practically every event that this group has ever called, the march was as much an advertisement for the party as a tactic intended to exert pressure on the ruling class and empower the oppressed.
\n\nPresumably, this particular party, fairly large by the standards of Marxist-Leninist sects in the United States but without much of a foothold in the Twin Cities, had funneled its plans through student groups at the university. It used them as proxies to call for a strike at a moment when the iron was hot and the people of Minnesota were clamoring to fight ICE. As vanguard parties frequently do, it led from the rear.
\n\nBut all was not well in the wider ecosystem of left organizations. Another Marxist party, with a smaller footprint on the national stage but a much more established presence in Minneapolis, refused to participate in the January 30 strike. Through one of its most active front organizations, the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, this competing party conspicuously declined to endorse the general strike, explaining this decision thus:
\n\n\n\n\n“This is not a MIRAC action. We support the workers’ struggle and follow the lead of unions for strikes and strike related activities. We have not seen the vast majority of unions sign onto this. MIRAC will always put our logo on our events. We do not endorse actions with no organizational logos because we can’t ensure it’s safe [sic] for participants.”
\n
Because this proposal for a mass strike came from outside their turf, they could only view it with territorialism and suspicion. While their competitors led from the rear, this organization sought to stand aside completely, as if they could be neutral on a moving train.
\n\nThese organizing failures are not merely incidental. They are familiar patterns that have been associated with the vanguardist approach to movement building for generations. The zero-sum approach to politics, the jealous factionalism, the turf war attitude, the reliance on front groups, the deprioritizing of tactics that actually confront the authorities, and the opportunistic drive to seize a leadership role over and above any other strategic consideration are all recognizable signs of vanguardism.
\n\nThe resistance to ICE in the Twin Cities became powerful because, rather than starting from top-down leadership models, it began at the grassroots with models that anyone could employ, models that maximized the agency and autonomy of everyone who wanted to participate. The rapid response networks proliferated because they were empowering, because they made everyone a protagonist, not because they were controlled by infallible leadership. If anything, the Twin Cities rapid response model removed bottlenecks and centralization from the model developed just a couple months earlier in Chicago, which had already been horizontal and participatory.
\n\nBecause the movement in the Twin Cities grew up in a process of organic experimentation, offering space for everyone’s ingenuity and initiative and recognizing strength in diversity rather than in the control of a preexisting leadership, it has been able to grow bigger, stronger, and smarter than any single party ever could. People try out tactics and strategies and stick with the ones that work, not the ones that benefit a leadership cadre. We should not conflate building the membership of top-down organizations with building the power of a movement. For example, many unions officially refused to participate in both the January 23 and January 30 strikes, but rank-and-file membership participated in both nonetheless. Rank-and-file readiness to strike is almost always ahead of the leadership, in unions and parties alike.
\n\nAs long as our movements depend upon vanguardist organizations and their petty power struggles, we will remain at their mercy and consequently at the mercy of the ruling class. We need a movement that cannot be held back or hijacked by any leadership, a movement that compels every aspiring vanguard to hurry after it, setting aside their squabbles and petty ambitions. That was what made the general strike of January 23 so powerful.
\n\nSo the problem with the January 30 strike was not that it brought out fewer people than the January 23 strike, per se. Many of the experiments that participants in the movement in the Twin Cities have undertaken have brought out far fewer people while pointing to an open horizon and demonstrating possibilities that others could take up and improve upon. But simply attempting to repeat the movement’s previous victories for the sake of recruitment, without opening space for innovation and confrontation, can only run it into the ground.
\n\nThe important question is whether an organizational model is reproducible, serving to empower whoever makes use of it to resist oppression, or extractive, serving to concentrate power in the hands of leaders.
\n\nThe leaderless character of the resistance to ICE in Minnesota is precisely what has made it effective. The decentralized nature of the rapid response groups has made them durable and agile. The initiative of autonomous fighters in the neighborhoods has enabled people to rise in revolt every time they have shot or murdered our neighbors. The horizontality of our mutual aid networks makes them opaque to the feds while enabling them to feed, clothe, and care for vulnerable families. No official organization would ever dare to call for the countless acts of bravery by which individuals have collectively propelled this movement forward. The everyday anarchism of the Minneapolis revolution is its greatest strength.
\n\nTo the extent that we allow top-down forces to take control of the movement, we will compromise its structural integrity and set ourselves up to lose. With so much on the line, we can’t afford to let that happen.
\n\nWe don’t need everyone who participates in the movement to agree. Some will buy into the false promises of Democratic politicians, at least until the next betrayal. Some will prefer to look to the leadership of authoritarian cadre organizations. But if a critical mass of people understand that no one is coming to save us—that it really is up to us to win this fight—and take it upon ourselves to stand up to ICE, doing whatever it takes regardless of what any politician or party prescribes, our movement will remain dynamic enough to go on growing.
\n\nAnd in the end, we will win.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/02/01/4.jpg\")
\nIn the following account, participants in the noise demonstrations targeting hotels that house federal agents in the Twin Cities recount their experiences and explain how this tactic might be employed elsewhere.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/26-3.jpg\")
January 26, 2026.
\nOn Monday, January 26, a hundred protesters converged on the SpringHill Suites by Marriott in Maple Grove, Minnesota to see off disgraced former “Commander at Large” of Customs and Border Protection Greg Bovino, freshly demoted and set to be shipped back to California. Demonstrators blew whistles, beat snare drums, and banged on pots and pans. Border Patrol officers collaborating with local police responded by shooting tear gas and pepper balls and shoving people indiscriminately, arresting at least two protesters.
\n\nThis was the latest in a series of noise demonstrations targeting the hotels housing this occupying force. So far, multiple hotels have closed as a result, and it is conceivable that some mercenaries have gone without rest, as well.
\n\nTwo days after the Whittier neighborhood chased out federal agents following the brutal murder of Alex Pretti, the regime chose to rotate out Bovino as the public face of the federal occupation. His “Commander-at-Large” position has been abolished. This will reduce the number of federal mercenaries occupying the Twin Cities by at least one, but it leaves thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to continue terrorizing us, now likely with more assistance from the Democratic governor and mayor.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/26-1.jpg\")
January 26, 2026.
\nNonetheless, this is the first crack to appear in our oppressors’ armor. They are not making this concession because they murdered Alex Pretti, but because the people fought back. The struggle is far from over—Immigration czar Tom Homan will be arriving to replace Bovino soon, and we will have to pivot to confront a new strategy. But it is instructive that CBP BorTac officers, who were the most theatrically violent agents in the first act of this invasion, are the first to withdraw from the fight after suffering a single defeat, the way cowards do.
\n\nWhat happens in the Twin Cities is a prelude to a much larger struggle that will unfold around the country. We can help to equip you to fight these same bounty hunters when they show up in your town by sharing the tactics with which we are fighting them here. Alongside the rapid response networks, the general strike, the blockades, and the revolts when they shoot people, we have been experimenting with noise demonstrations.
\n\nHere is what we have experienced, so far.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/26-2.jpg\")
January 26, 2026.
\nThe first noise demo I attended was at the Home2 Suites by Hilton in Bloomington, Minnesota by the Mall of America. This was very early into the occupation, when rapid response was still being run primarily out of South Side networks and had yet to proliferate through the rest of Minneapolis and the greater metro area. I saw an infographic shared in the daily patrol chat, asking for people to attend with noisemakers and not to post about it on social media.
\n\nWhen we arrived at the hotel, there were about a dozen protesters and four Bloomington Police squad cars waiting in the parking lot with their lights on. The word on the ground was that the Signal loop being used to plan the demo was infiltrated, necessitating the creation of a new, somewhat vetted planning chat on the spot. We did a lap around the hotel banging pots and pans, blowing whistles, playing brass instruments, and setting off car alarms. When we finished our lap, we pressed on and did another. Then the squad cars drove up to block our path and we left.
\n\nThe group that emerged out of this demonstration involved all sorts of everyday people, but it was de facto headed by representatives of a certain longstanding formal organization, which published recordings of the demonstrations and claimed responsibility for them. To give credit where it is due, the experience, confidence, perceived legitimacy, and organizational capacity of this larger public-facing organization may well have been essential to popularizing noise demonstrations as a tactic in the Twin Cities.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/25-1.jpg\")
January 25, 2026. You can obtain these stickers here.
\nThe strategy has involved two kinds of demonstrations:
\n\nRegarding the invite-only noise demonstrations, the group quickly coordinated new ways to identify and protest at hotels that were collaborating with the fascist occupiers. Some people would go to the hotels, acting like guests, and ask workers if they had heard anything about ICE staying there. Others would follow up on tips by scouring hotel parking lots for confirmed ICE license plates. When one worker was fired for tipping the planners off that ICE was staying at their hotel, people developed online forms for anonymous tips.
\n\nEverybody brainstormed new ways to make more and more noise. Full drum kits quickly became a mainstay of the demonstrations, showing up in both stationary and mobile forms. One person brought handheld personal alarms that poduce a high-decibel noise when a pin is pulled and do not shut off until the pin is replaced. These devices, widely distributed among the participants, made for quite a headache for hotels when left behind in inaccessible locations after protesters departed with the pins. People began to bring powerful flashlights, shining them into the windows of hotel rooms.
\n\nTo decide on a time and location, the participants would create a new chat for each demonstration, picking a nearby location at which to meet and discuss the specifics of that night’s plan. One innovation has been to start by setting off car alarms for an agreed-upon amount of time, then leaving our vehicles to make noise on foot, going around the hotel in laps. When the police show up and issue a warning, we leave, reasoning that smaller groups are not as effective at resisting those orders as a massive crowd is.
\n\nEventually, people began to prepare a list of hotels to target on a given night. We’d protest at one hotel until the police arrived, then simply move on to the next in another neighborhood or even city.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/25-8.jpg\")
January 25, 2026.
\nIn late December, comrades had gotten word that there were feds staying in the Canopy by Hilton in the Mill District of Minneapolis and, once again, the Home2 Suites in Bloomington by the Mall of America—the same location mentioned above. The plan that night was to meet up at midnight nearby to go over how we wanted to start the demonstration. Certain people took on specific roles: one person would be police liaison, another would de-escalate angry bystanders and try to recruit them into the demonstration. Our goal was to ensure the demonstration could go on as long as possible, even after local police departments showed up to shut it down.
\n\nThe action at the Canopy started shortly after midnight. It drew a larger crowd for one of the smaller demos. Folks had brought a wide range of noisemakers with them: pots and pans, speakers, whistles, an entire drum kit, megaphones, even a didgeridoo. A few also brought flashlights and a laser pointer to shine into the windows of hotel rooms. Staff inside of the hotel quickly called the cops to quash the commotion, but the police responded slowly.
\n\nThe noise was audible from several blocks away in multiple directions. Neighbors from many apartment buildings came outside to check out what was happening. Someone even hopped out of their car to hand a demonstrator an airhorn, then circled the block honking their car horn! Roughly 20 to 30 minutes into the demo, a few Minneapolis Police Department squad cars started to show up, driving slowly by the demonstration, but the officers did not exit their cars or declare the crowd to be trespassing.
\n\nAt one point, there were four squad cars stationed at the end of the street to the left of the demonstration, presumably chatting about how to engage with the protesters. After what appeared to be a lengthy discussion, they departed.
\n\nThe noise demonstration went on, uninhibited by police or angry residents, for a solid hour. My companion and I left the Canopy location to head to the next meeting spot in Bloomington. After we had left, comrades who were still at the Canopy by Hilton lingered to speak to press about the action. Shortly after that, MPD rolled in with an absurdly heavy-handed show of force. According to our comrades who were still present, they showed up with a dozen or more squad vehicles—one activist joked that there was one car per police officer that responded to the demonstration. An officer on a loudspeaker announced that the activists had to leave and declared the action an “unlawful assembly.” No arrests took place.
\n\nAfter the action at the Canopy, our comrades rendezvoused with us in Bloomington to establish our plan of action for the next hotel. It was cold and raining, so we decided to keep it short and sweet. We drove into the hotel parking lot and set off our car alarms for a few minutes before getting out to do a couple laps around the hotel making noise. The police responded differently to this demonstration than they had to the one earlier this winter. They weren’t already stationed there waiting for us, but their response was quick. The officers who responded told activists to leave the premises immediately or be trespassed.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/25-9.jpg\")
January 25, 2026.
\nThe first of the public demos with mass attendance took place in Edina, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis. The crowd easily numbered around 200. More and more people showed up throughout the night, a common feature of noise demonstrations. The crowd was furious, but the atmosphere had the energy of a party. Protesters danced and laughed and socialized when not using their noisemakers. Some identified the vehicles of the federal mercenaries and exchanged notes about how to recognize them. The organizers tried to keep the crowd on the sidewalk and off of hotel property, in hopes of delaying a police response, but largely failed in this effort.
\n\nFor the first time, ICE agents staying in the hotel walked into the lobby in plainclothes with their faces masked in order to watch the uproar. This incensed the crowd, many of whom charged up to the doors and windows to scream at the occupiers, pound on the glass, and shine strobe lights in their eyes. When one fed attempted to blow off the crowd by visibly watching basketball highlights on his phone, a protester shouted “You’re watching ads, you broke bitch! Kill yourself!” The federal agent returned to his room shortly thereafter.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/25-2.jpg\")
January 25, 2026.
\nEach time the crowd began to directly confront the federal agents, yellow-vested peace police desperately sought to corral the demonstrators into taking another lap around the hotel. Again, these efforts met with only moderate success. Eventually, two Edina police officers arrived, placing themselves at the hotel’s front entrance. They tried to give a dispersal warning but were completely drowned out by of the protesters.
\n\nYou should wear earplugs at any noise demo—my tinnitus has taught me that lesson well.
\n\nThe protests marshals decided their job was to do the work of the police for them. They told everyone it was time to disperse. A large segment of the crowd didn’t listen, and the marshals simply left. Police repeatedly attempted to disperse the crowd by issuing warnings, without effect.
\n\nFinally, Edina police and officers from four neighboring police departments all showed up in riot gear, declaring an unlawful assembly at the whole hotel and the surrounding blocks, and threatened to deploy chemical weapons. When the thinning crowd of protesters saw that the police outnumbered them, they left, having averted arrest or injury. At this point, there were five different police departments standing around protecting the property of the collaborators.
\n\nIn this case, the protesters escalated to the maximum possible extent, then decided for themselves when the situation was no longer favorable—a decision that the protest marshals had tried to reserve for themselves.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/25-7.jpg\")
January 25, 2026.
\nThese protests were effective at their intended goals. Multiple hotels eventually ceased to house the murderers, even after the demonstrations had ended, and some hotels in St. Paul shut down operations entirely.
\n\nBearing this in mind, the initial organizers began to encourage other groups to plan their own noise demonstrations. The advantages of this more decentralized approach are illustrated by the demonstration that took place on University Avenue on January 25, one day after the summary execution of Alex Pretti and the ensuing street battles.
\n\nThe participants in the January 25 noise demonstration had taken notes on what had worked in the streets. The clashes that established Alex Pretti square on January 24 were characterized by the rapid proliferation of barricades. On the night of January 25, by the time I could see what was happening at the Home2 Suites on University Avenue, trash cans, wood pallets, and mattresses had been pulled into the street, blocking off University Avenue on both sides of the hotel. The protesters made plenty of noise. At least one window was smashed, while the rest were decorated with messages including “Fuck ICE, ICE Out!” and “Killers stay here.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/25-6.jpg\")
January 25, 2026.
\nSome protesters pulled signs off the building; some entered the lobby and rearranged the furniture.
\n\nAfter at least two hours of this, for the first time, the feds took it upon themselves to respond to a noise demonstration directly, setting the stage for the demonstrators to break new ground. With the roads blocked off, the federal agents had to run in on foot from the side, filling the street with tear gas and shooting riot munitions into the crowd in order to enter the hotel.
\n\nNonetheless, the demonstrators remained for a while, even throwing a metal pot at the head of a federal agent who was menacing the crowd with a riot shotgun in the front door. Eventually, scores of feds and Minneapolis police arrived in riot gear to clear the barricades and evacuate the ICE agents staying in the hotel. They arrested 14 people in the ensuing melee. The pigs held skirmish lines while a now smaller group of protesters to west of the hotel waited patiently on the sidewalk, heckling the feds. After roughly an hour, the feds drove off, once again filling the neighborhood with tear gas as they retreated.
\n\nAfter the police and feds left, the protesters went right back to the front of the hotel and began making noise and adding new paint to it for another hour. Minneapolis police returned in riot gear, this time with public works crews in tow, using the same bulldozers and garbage trucks they weaponize against unhoused neighbors to clear the barricade materials off the road.
\n\nOnce more, protesters simply waited for them to leave, then resumed making noise. By the time I was no longer able to follow the events, the demonstration had gone on for six hours—the longest I’ve heard of by far.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/25-3.jpg\")
January 25, 2026.
\nPublic pressure campaigns can get the ball rolling. Escalation serves to achieve more immediate results.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/25-5.jpg\")
January 25, 2026.
\nPick your battles. Fight your enemy while they are at rest.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/25-4.jpg\")
January 25, 2026.
\nA good noise demonstration in progress advertises for itself.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/27/25-10.jpg\")
January 25, 2026.
\nBy early morning on Sunday, January 25, the autonomous zone that people had established around the site of the federal execution of Alex Pretti had dissipated. While the flowers and memorials around the vigil remained, continuing to draw mourners, the National Guard had removed the barricades around Nicollette Ave in the early hours of the morning. Those who were willing to put their rage to a purpose needed a concrete point of intervention.
\n\nThe Party for Socialism and Liberation had called a march, but the march offered no opportunity to engage federal agents or ICE infrastructure. Fortunately, as described above, demonstrations directly confronting ICE where they slept were already happening consistently in the Twin Cities. Thanks to weeks of collective effort, several hotels had already been identified as housing ICE. A flyer circulated on Sunday only a few hours before the noise demo. Under other circumstances, this could have been too late to draw any participants—but thanks to the urgency of the moment, people wanted to come, and the last-minute announcement left the cops little time to prepare. When we walked up to the noise demo, there was no law enforcement around, federal or local.
\n\nAbout fifteen people were already there, crowded around the glass walls of the hotel lobby, through which we could see several men who looked like ICE agents as well as some other hotel guests. The energy was high—someone had brought a small drum kit and another person had a percussion set and cymbals. People blew whistles, shook noise-makers, and blasted music on portable speakers. For an hour, we channeled our rage about the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and the months of terror that immigrants had experienced in the Twin Cities into creating a loud, joyful, communal space. As the crowd grew, we spread out across the sidewalk, moving in front of the doors, where someone had spray-painted, “ICE OUT, ICE KILLS.”
\n\nPeople started moving into the street—first standing in the bike lane, then dragging a trash can into the road. Soon, people were grabbing any bin they could find, pulling pallets and old mattresses out of the alleys until they had completely blocked one side of the street. The barricade on the other side was smaller—a couple trash cans, a few traffic cones, and some parking markers from the hotel—but it sufficed to stop traffic. At one point, a man we suspected to be a plain clothes agent, who had been walking around taking notes on his phone, attempted to dismantle the barricade. People rebuilt it and he retreated inside the hotel.
\n\nCity busses on each side of the street had to turn around or pull over. Multiple cars pulled up and parked, forming their own barricade. Families with children in their cars watched the demo from a safe distance: they cheered, honked their horns, blasted music, and set off their car alarms. In addition to noisemakers, people shined flashlights at the windows and set off a few roman candles. Agents could be seen looking out from their hotel windows with cameras or phones. On the street, there was a cacophony of trumpets and drums. People started kicking the trashcans to a beat, and we danced with friends and strangers.
\n\nThe hotel had locked the front sliding doors and left a paper sign instructing guests to go around the back. We learned that ICE was going in and out the back, and people spotted men who had been seen filming us through the glass walls go out the back and leave in their cars. Maybe if the crowd had been bigger, there could have been more people watching the back of the hotel, in order to note which cars they used—an idea for future demos. Some of the people inside the hotel who were not agents seemed supportive. Others played ostrich—after someone delivered food from Sweetgreen and left it outside the locked front doors, a guy staying at the hotel went downstairs and pried the doors open to grab his delivery. By that point, the doors were broken.
\n\nAfter about an hour and a half, agents—or perhaps they were hotel security—opened the front door momentarily to yell at those outside. People crowded in front of the doors and yanked them open, as the agents and security inside scrambled to retreat. Both the outer and inner sliding doors of the lobby were forced open and people crowded into the vestibule. Chanting “Fuck ICE!”, the crowd forced the doors to unhook and swing open completely, facing off against an agent and some hotel security. By this point, most of the windows had been painted. A lone Minneapolis police officer forced his way through the crowd to join the agents.
\n\nFor about an hour, he was the only law enforcement there, repeatedly pelted in the face with snow and screamed at by the crowd. There was a small row of people in the front at the vestibule, a larger row of streamers and press filming and taking photos, and then the rest of the crowd behind them. People threw snowballs and trash over the heads of the press. Some young women drummed on a trash can by the entrance; their friends danced together while other protestors grabbed the contents of the can to throw inside. The agent and security attempted to barricade the entrance with vending machines, which repeatedly fell back on them. The lobby filled with trash. Eventually, a window shattered, and people took videos of masked and helmeted ICE agents leaving out the back door with their luggage.
\n\nWhile this was happening, people went into the parking lot and checked all of the license plates against the massive database of known ICE plates that Minnesotans have been collecting for months. The plates of two known ICE cars were announced through a megaphone, and by the end of the night, the cars had been smashed and painted.
\n\nBy this point, the building had been damaged, agents’ cars wrecked, and the agents were evacuating. Three hours after the noise demo began, three federal agents from the Bureau of Prisons showed up with firearms and deployed tear gas. After waving their guns around wildly and escorting the agents out of the hotel with their luggage, they eventually called for backup against what was by then a much smaller crowd of mostly press. One of the BOP federal agents was hit in the head by a flying object. Finally, additional federal officers arrived and deployed tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and green smoke, as well as large numbers of Minneapolis Police attempting to carry out a mass arrest. They arrested several members of the press and some protesters, but most people had already left.
\n\nSetting up a noise demonstration is relatively straightforward: someone had to confirm where ICE was staying, choose the most promising location, pick a time, make a flier, and spread it around. But it was only possible to do so quickly because of cumulative months of building networks and collecting information. The infrastructure of hotel and license plate databases equipped people to make a snap decision about which hotel to target. Likewise, the courage with which people built barricades, blocked the street with their cars, and confronted the agents in the hotel emerged from months of confrontation in the Twin Cities. It did not hurt that people were able to see the agents on the premises—they were there filming us and trying to figure out what to do.
\n\nThe noise demonstrations represent an effective use of secondary targeting. In the Twin Cities, hotel noise demos have offered another way to address agents at a fixed location where they lack the defenses and organizational structures that they have at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building. Most of the confrontations in the Twin Cities have arisen out of spontaneous responses to raids, with a few taking place at the Whipple building; while the immediate responses to raids are critical and the demonstrations at the federal building have enabled activists to exert pressure on a choke point at the time of their choosing, the hotels are stationary targets with fewer defenses. Publicizing the noise demonstrations in advance can give the cops time to prepare a response, but people should prepare creatively and not let this deter them.
\n\nWhen there are no better options on the table, people will join symbolic marches or stay at home. But when options are available, many people will seize the opportunity to act courageously and effectively. In places that are not under overt federal occupation, where the lower density of ICE agents or ICE-watch organizing can make it more difficult to respond in time to ICE raids, finding secondary targets can offer a way forward, whether those are hotels, contractors, local officials, or business collaborators.
\n\nOn Saturday, January 24, an ICE agent murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Five agents tackled and beat him, then an agent shot him multiple times. Video footage from multiple angles confirms that the agent shot Pretti after he had been disarmed. Immediately following the murder, the Whittier neighborhood rose up and battled ICE, Minnesota police, and Minnesota State Troopers for over four hours, eventually forcing them to withdraw.
\n\nThis murder occurred one day after a historic general strike in which more than 100,000 workers in the Twin Cities walked out against the ICE occupation. Many people in the streets expressed the opinion that the federal agents murdered Alex as an act of revenge for the strike.
\n\nOnce again, we note the role that local and state police play in enabling ICE to continue murdering with impunity. Democrat politicians have expressed disapproval of ICE tactics, but they and the police who supposedly answer to them have yet to do anything concrete to stop federal agents from terrorizing, abducting, and murdering.
\n\nThe following is an eyewitness account from an anarchist in Minneapolis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/25/4.jpg\")
\nI woke up at 9:15 this morning to my phone buzzing over and over. The first text I saw read, “URGENT FROM WHIT/UPT IN FRONT OF GLAM DOLL DONUTS: Someone has been shot by ICE.” I groggily squirted some caffeine syrup into my water bottle as I processed this information. I threw on five layers of clothes, a pair of goggles, and a mask, called in sick to my job, and rushed to the scene.
\n\nWhen I got there, there was already yellow crime scene tape up around a three-block stretch of 26th Street. Masked ICE and Border Patrol officers guarded the perimeter, armed with shotguns and pepper spray cans. An ambulance was still there. A crowd circled around the crime scene tape, but did not cross it. A friend recognized me in the crowd and patted me on the shoulder. Someone told me the victim was dead. One person was weeping. Most people were cursing at the feds. An old woman was shouting “You are going to hell!” in the face of a Border Patrol stormtrooper. He was threatening her with a can of pepper spray.
\n\nBehind us, on 1st Avenue, three people started rolling a dumpster into the street. An ICE agent fired a tear gas grenade at them. My friend and I started running south on 1st Avenue to get away from the gas. We turned right, then right again onto Nicollet Avenue, bringing us to Nicollet and 26th, where ICE had murdered the man hardly half an hour before. There was a much bigger crowd here facing off against a skirmish line of feds. We recognized another friend of ours and ran up to them.
\n\nJust then, we heard the loud crack of flash-bang grenades being fired maybe two or three blocks northwest of us. “We’ll take my car,” our friend yelled. He was parked right there on Nicollet. We piled into his car and he flipped a U-turn and sped away from the ICE agents. We made a few turns and ended up at 25th and Blaisdell.
\n\nThere was a line of MPD Riot Squad cops at the far end, closer to Nicollet. I recognized them by their yellow vests. Between us and the pigs, closer to Blaisdell, a group of people were building a barricade out of dumpsters, trash cans, cinderblocks, and wooden pallets. We heard the ubiquitous call-and-response chants of “FUCK ICE, ICE OUT!” People drummed on the trash cans along to the beat. Someone was sprinkling what appeared to be home-made caltrops in front of the barricade.
\n\nAs we approached the barricade, people in the crowd started rolling the dumpsters forward toward the police line. Somebody lit one of them on fire. One man was shouting at us, futilely trying to peace-police the crowd, but no one wanted to hear it. A few people promptly escorted him away. Flames engulfed the burning dumpster. People rolled that one forward too.
\n\nFlames engulfed the burning dumpster.
\nThe police started shooting tear gas and rubber bullets. Their aim was not particularly good. This was the first time this year that I’ve seen them use rubber bullets rather than pepper balls or gas. The crowd fell back, and the cops charged forward and overtook our barricade. Three of them tackled and arrested one person near me, slamming her to the pavement. I yelled and turned back for a second, but instantly choked on the tear gas and was forced to fall back towards Blaisdell. Some people were chucking glass bottles and chunks of ice at the cops as they retreated.
\n\nThe crowd pulled more trash cans from the alleys and quickly began building another barricade further back. I had lost track of the person I had driven there with, but soon I found another person I knew. Some began shouting for people to fall back west on 26th and keep building barricades. This ad hoc strategy caught on. People ran down the street leaving trash cans and tires behind them, creating a series of small barricades as the cops advanced.
\n\nA woman was watching from her porch. Someone ran up and addressed her: “Ma’am, we’re out here defending the neighborhood against ICE. We need barricade materials. Is there anything in your yard you wouldn’t mind parting with?” She nodded urgently and showed them to her backyard, offering a flower bed, an old couch, and a lawn chair. Three people helped to carry these out and add them to the barricades.
\n\nWhile this game of cat-and-mouse progressed, Signal messages arrived from others who were holding down a different barricade three blocks away, on Nicollet on the south side of the intersection. Our crowd was facing off against MPD, but theirs was facing off against ICE. My friend and I decided to join them. We cut through a series of alleys until we came out on 27th Street.
\n\nWe ran left onto the stretch of Nicollet full of restaurants that locals know as “Eat Street.” There was a much bigger crowd there standing behind a barricade made mostly of wooden pallets. A skirmish line of ICE and CBP officers stood on the opposite side. We could see the fear in their eyes. It felt good.
\n\nNo sooner did we approach the barricade than ICE opened fire with tear gas. I’m not a stranger to tear gas, but they fired more than I’ve ever seen. Noxious white clouds enveloped us. My lungs felt like they were burning. Somebody picked up a canister and threw it back. We stampeded south on Nicollet to get out. When I turned to look behind me through the gas clouds, I saw ICE SUVs and a Bearcat armored car leaving the scene, headed east toward the highway.
\n\nWe ran down to 1st street, where I’d started out, to try to catch the agents as they retreated. We turned and ran north back up to 26th. People were peppering their cars with rocks and ice chunks as they drove off toward the 35W on-ramp. They fired more tear gas and green smoke out of the vehicles as they fled onto the highway.
\n\nAfter people chased off the ICE agents, we returned to 26th and Nicollet from the east. A huge number of state troopers were lined up on one end of 26th, facing the protesters on the other side. They had an LRAD on top of a Bearcat. One of the cops was reading a dispersal warning over a loudspeaker.
\n\n“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” one person shouted back.
\n\n“TRAITORS!” screamed someone else.
\n\nThe state troopers launched a barrage of tear gas and flash-bang grenades at us. Someone threw a powerful firecracker back at them. It exploded at their feet.
\n\nThe crowd hurried back and turned left onto another street. Everyone was exhausted from a long morning of activity; many were starting to move more slowly. I saw the state trooper vehicles speeding away through their own cloud of tear gas, just as the ICE agents had done. It took me a minute to realize that they were gone.
\n\nI ducked out of the ongoing protest. It was high time to buy a real gas mask. I went to a hardware store and picked up a big pack of hand-warmers to give out to the crowd. It wasn’t until my adrenalin eased up that I realized I hadn’t eaten yet. I was famished.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/25/1.jpg\")
\nI returned to the site of the murder about 45 minutes later. A massive crowd of well over 1000 people had gathered, filling up a whole city block. It reminded me unmistakably of George Floyd Square. The block that was once Eat Street had transformed into Alex Pretti Square.
\n\nIt appeared that all the little barricades that the people of Whittier had erected had been relocated here, blocking off Nicollet at both ends. People sat on top of dumpsters, drumming on the lids. The crowd looked more racially diverse than I’d ever seen that neighborhood before. A Mexican flag was waving near the middle of the crowd.
\n\nA young woman produced a PA system in the middle of the crowd. Everybody circled around it as people took turns making speeches.
\n\nA young man took the mic. He couldn’t have been more than 20.
\n\n“Y’ALL. NOBODY IS COMING TO SAVE US. WE MADE HISTORY YESTERDAY. WE WENT ON GENERAL STRIKE. WE SHUT DOWN THIS WHOLE FUCKING CITY. THAT’S THE BEST WEAPON THE PEOPLE HAVE, WE’RE THE ONES WHO MAKE THE WORLD RUN AND WE’RE THE ONES WHO CAN MAKE IT STOP. BUT ONE DAY’S NOT ENOUGH. WE GOTTA KEEP IT GOING INTO MONDAY.”
\n\nThe crowd broke out into thunderous applause, cheering and drumming rhythmically on the dumpster lids.
\n\nThe young man started a chant: “NO MORE MINNESOTA NICE! MONDAY MINNESOTA STRIKE!”
\n\nIt echoed across the square.
\n\nThe ICE invasion of the Twin Cities has long since passed the point of no return. It is unthinkable that society could return to “normal” after what we have seen and felt. The powers that be know very well that they have to play for keeps now. So do we.
\n\nToday, at the Battle of Whittier, even through the tear gas, we could taste a softer, gentler future to come. These federal murderers know it, too. We will bury them beneath the new world in our hearts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/25/2.jpg\")
\nOn January 23, thousands of people went on strike in the Twin Cities to oppose the ongoing campaign of kidnapping and murder that federal mercenaries have perpetrated over the past two months in service to Donald Trump’s program of ethnic cleansing. Over 1000 businesses shut down—some enthusiastically, others involuntarily. At the same time, a smaller number of demonstrators set out to prevent federal mercenaries associated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement from carrying out the abductions they had planned for the day.
\n\nEarly on the morning of January 23, in sub-zero conditions, roughly 75 demonstrators with shields and reinforced banners blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive, immediately adjacent to the Bishop Henry Whipple building, which ICE has been using as their base of operations in the Twin Cities. At the same time, someone left an RV trailer blocking Airport Service Road near the north end of Federal Drive (see map). This completely blocked two of the three means of ingress and egress to and from the Whipple building. Presumably, the blockade was intended to box ICE in at the north end of Federal Drive, blocking off every point of egress, but as it played out, they still had access to one exit.
\n\nThe RV trailer blocking Airport Service Road remained in place for about half an hour. The demonstrators blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive for two and a half hours.
\n\nThere was no sign of ICE or BorTac (the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, members of which have beaten and tear gassed protesters at prior actions by the Whipple building) during the entire two and a half hours. The ICE motor pool appeared almost totally full during the action, suggesting that they weren’t staging from any secondary location. It is possible that this action effectively trapped a large number of ICE agents at their headquarters.
\n\nEventually, after the trailer had been removed, Hennepin sheriffs threatened to attack the demonstrators with chemical weapons. The participants in the blockade dispersed five minutes later, before chemical weapons were deployed. Two arrests were reported in the area, apparently not in connection with the blockade at the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\n\nThe role of the sheriffs is noteworthy. From Chicago to the Twin Cities, local and state police that supposedly answer to Democrat politicians have played a fundamental role in violently suppressing protests in order to enable ICE to continue kidnapping and brutalizing people. Any movement against ICE will have to contend with this bipartisanship.
\n\nTwo weeks ago, on January 8, protesters blocked the gates of the Whipple building for one hour in response to the murder of Renee Nicole Good by federal agent Jonathan Ross. Today’s attempt raises the bar. It is inspiring that thousands of people participated in today’s general strike. The blockade at the Whipple building shows that some are prepared to go further, taking bold and creative action to directly impact what ICE can and cannot do.
\n\nIn the following anonymously submitted account, participants describe what they witnessed during the blockade and offer some context for their experiences resisting the ICE occupation.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/1.jpg\")
Location 1: demonstrators blocked the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive. Location 2: an abandoned RV trailer blocked Airport Service Road.
\n“It’s been the longest year of my life.” You can hear this refrain throughout the Twin Cities—and it’s only January. More than fifty days of occupation by federal forces has weighed upon the resolve and well-being of resisters and occupiers alike.
\n\nThe federal site at Fort Snelling, where the Whipple Building is located, is known for having served as a concentration camp imprisoning the Dakota people in the 1860s. This legacy continues today with the use of the site as the home base for thousands of masked kidnappers. The 3000 federal agents involved in this operation outnumber the ten largest police forces in the Twin Cities combined.
\n\nThe first abductions began as a trickle and built to a stream, then a flood like the mighty Mississippi. The most henious and evil acts are burned into our brains, reminiscent of the sort of attacks the Israeli army has carried out in the West Bank: ambushes on schools and hospitals, masked invaders using terrified children as hostages, shootings, even a public execution. The piercing tones of 3D-printed whistles are scorched onto our eardrums like tinnitus. Yet the violence of ICE has fueled a shared rage that many people never knew they were capable of. Many new resisters are waking up to this reality for the first time. Others have experienced wave after wave of struggle in the Twin Cities, which have prepared many of us for this moment.
\n\nFascism is not on the way. It is here.
\n\nIn response, people prepared to go on the offensive on the day of the general strike. This offensive involved three different struggles, none any less important than the others.
\n\nLike many on the global stage, we find ourselves in unfamiliar waters. The old rules have been thrown out the window. In the streets, ICE acts more like Nazis than like cops. This is especially apparent to those of us with experience in anti-fascist organizing. Their terroristic tactics combine a mixture of brutality and cowardice; their unpredictable nature has strained even seasoned veterans.
\n\nThis is the first form of conflict we must deal with: struggle against self.
\n\nUncertainty breeds fear. We have use threat modeling to identify what the risks are and which ones we are prepared to run. Movement tactics like positioning sharpshooters on roofs, using security checkpoints, and sending security teams to escort people through dangerous areas have become common once again, as they were in the height of the 2020 uprisings. This is the case even for large meetings now. We study and practice these skills over and over, doing our best to address our fears while seeking to assuage anguish over those who have already been disappeared.
\n\nCare must be taken when deliberating too, as frustration can easily flare up over minor or inconsequential issues. Recognizing and regulating our own emotional states is key to avoiding the tendency to act on fear. Group visualization techniques present an opportunity to imagine possible outcomes and prepare our responses in advance.
\n\nThe crime against humanity that we call genocide doesn’t just affect those who are abducted or killed. Those who remain must carry its weight. In the week leading up to the general strike, we wrestled with all of these things. Nonetheless, we pressed on.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/2.jpg\")
Demonstrators with shields and reinforced banners blocking the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\nThere is a difference between ordinary cold and bitter cold. It’s difficult to describe if you haven’t experienced it. In the bitter cold, there is almost a serene stillness to the air, a seeming tranquility daring you to underestimate its lethality. Literal arctic chills can spread through our state. A week ahead of the general strike, it became clear that it was going to be a very cold day.
\n\nThis second form of conflict is just as dangerous as any human violence: struggle against nature.
\n\nI’ve seen one exposure death before. The glassy black skin on their body isn’t a vision I will ever forget. ICE have recently been taking a page out of the Saskatoon Police force’s “Starlight Tours” and dropping off arrestees in the middle of the night in remote areas, intentionally using weather exposure as a weapon of torture. On the morning of the general strike, temperature adjusted for wind chill was about -30 degrees Fahrenheit (-35 Celsius). This can cause uncovered skin to develop frostbite within twenty minutes, a challenge that requires careful planning and specialized clothing to address.
\n\nIn the modern surveillance state, one must also take care to avoid being identified by one’s specialized winter clothing. Despite organized warming stations, several volunteers from out of town underestimated the risks and were injured from exposure alone. There surely would have been two or three times as many participants in the blockade were it not so bitter outside.
\n\nAs in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, there were concerns that state or federal forces might use water as a weapon. At one point, a scout identifed and radioed out what appeared to be preparations to employ a water cannon. In this weather, with no nearby facilities to warm up in, such a weapon could inflict permanent harm. Similarly, water to flush chemical weapons can pose a risk in these temperatures.
\n\nTensions were high, but with extra jackets and handwarmers, we were able to hold the line.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/24/3.jpg\")
The RV trailor abandoned in the middle of Airport Service Road.
\nBeing across the highway from the rest of the city, the Whipple Building is difficult to reach on foot and well-protected from pedestrians. Two days before the action, our adversaries added additional layers of fencing to create chokepoints and opportunites to trap demonstrators. They put up jersey barriers and fences on either side of Federal Drive, all the way down, separating the street from the sidewalk, blocking off every driveway—creating a sort of tunnel. Understood solely as a defensive tactic, this made sense in a mindset obsessed with violence. Though it also made it easier to blockade the route, as their fortifications left them only three exit points.
\n\nFour different groups prepared to take action to blockade those points. This is the final form of conflict we must confront: struggle against the occupiers.
\n\nOne group walked in from the city and train station, carrying shields, steel banners, and other items. Their goal was to block the primary access point, diverting traffic. Arriving early, I saw items being distributed as people huddled for warmth in the exposed parking lot. At first, the numbers looked concerningly small. The group pressed forward to the chokepoint, occupying the area before the tunnel. The demonstrators could not get in, but the mercenaries would not get out.
\n\nPerhaps the latter had not prepared for this mutual achievement of goals. In any case, the only forces that these demonstrators encountered were three squad cars from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. The federal forces remained holed up in the building, apparently afraid to step into the cold. The demonstrators chanted and taunted them to draw their ire; still, federal agents did not show themselves. They took no offensive action of any kind.
\n\nPerhaps the federal agents, too, are exhausted from their long campaign of contemptible violence. Perhaps they were stretched thin from preparing to deal with the general strike. Perhaps they were more afraid of nature than the demonstrators were. Or perhaps they were obeying strict orders from their commanding officers not to engage, for reasons we can only speculate about.
\n\nIn any case, it was unusual that they did not attack the blockade. The participants successfully retained all the equipment and supplies they had brought out to the action, which is unusual for such confrontations.
\n\nWhile that group held the city entrance, other groups took coordinated action elsewhere. One group towed blockading material into the highway entrance. The first convoy in this group apparently deployed an RV trailer and exited the area. A second convoy in the group left the area without deploying any sort of barricade, as sheriffs swarmed the trailer at the last second. The single RV trailer that remained nonetheless obstructed egress for nearly half an hour.
\n\nFinally, two other groups provided support and a human blockade on a side road. Unfortunately, sheriffs carried out two arrests there during an agressive push towards the fortified “tunnel.” Reportedly, snowballs were thrown at federal vehicles, shattering one window. Ice versus ICE.
\n\nAfter tear gas was deployed, many of the people in this area began coming over to the primary blockade, reinforcing the numbers at the intersection of Minnehaha and Federal Drive.
\n\nAs the hard barricades were cleared and others poured in, the demonstrators took a moment to consider the situation. They had already achieved their objectives for the day, coordinating between several groups and seizing the opportunity of the general strike as a whole to grind things to a halt at the Whipple building. Given the opportunity to leave without sustaining losses, they chose to take it, leaving before weapons were deployed. They marched back as a single unit in a tactical retreat, still protected by shields and steel banners, chanting “Minnesota’s got the ICE melt!”
\n\nFor two and a half hours, demonstrators had blocked all but one of the routes in and out of the Whipple building.
\n\nToday’s action only strengthens our resolve. Now we have more experience coordinating with one another and more knowledge of the terrain. The fact that federal forces did not show themselves reinforces the notion that they are not prepared to defend themselves in large confrontations—or at least, that they consider it preferable to avoid doing so. Their continued reliance on state police and sheriffs poses complicated strategic questions for us, but it could also create complications for them in the future.
\n\nAs local comrades recently stated in regards to Donald Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act:
\n\n\n\n\n“We must continue to organize communities, patrol our streets and build rapid response teams, push for workplace stoppages, and grind them down every step of the way. We must exact a price for every footprint they leave in our snow. When we have the opportunity, we will drive them from our streets and tear down their concentration camp. ICE will melt when the heat turns up.”
\n
Forever yours in struggle.
\n\nIn the following analysis, anarchists from Germany explore how events from German history should inform those who are resisting the consolidation of authoritarian power in the United States today.
\n\nGreetings from Germany. Even though we have seen many videos of police murdering people, it still enrages us every time. After the murder of Renee Good, we reflected on what we could do to support the opposition to Donald Trump.
\n\nWe have decided to share our experiences from Germany and German history in hopes that this will help people in the United States to defend themselves against attempts to control, pacify, and divide. One of the central elements of the Nazi rise to power in Germany was the fact that the leaders of the Social Democrat parties participated in the crackdowns suppressing a series of uprisings.
\n\nIn addition, we want to call on everyone else in the territory claimed by Germany to support the resistance in the United States with all resources available. If Trump is stopped, we may also have the chance to defeat authoritarianism here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/8.jpg\")
“Remember Renee—Don’t let the state destroy all good in the world.” A poster in remembrance of Renee Good seen somewhere in Germany. You can download the design in Appendix I, below.
\nBefore the Nazis took power, Germany had one of the largest workers’ movements in the entire world. This movement was dominated by the Social Democratic Party (SPD). From 1919 on, the second strongest power was the Communist Party (KPD). Consequently, the German workers’ movement has always been strongly focused on elections as a means of acquiring state power.
\n\nDespite this focus on the parliamentary route, the rank and file of the German workers’ movement has repeatedly been compelled to resort to other means. In 1918, a revolution organized by workers and soldiers overthrew the emperor and created the first German republic, creating a government led by the Social Democrats.
\n\nShortly afterwards, right-wing militias and elements of the official military staged a coup against the government in Berlin. The government fled.
\n\nIn response, a nationwide general strike took place with millions taking part. In the Ruhr area, workers went a step further: tens of thousands armed themselves and drove the police and military out of the region, establishing workers’ councils. In the cities where the anarcho-syndicalists were strong, people also expropriated companies. The workers were so powerful and the regular German military so weak that the most important industrial region of Germany, a region with millions of inhabitants, was liberated from the control of the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/3.jpg\")
An anti-fascist workers’ militia in the town of Dortmund during the Ruhr Uprising.
\nAfter the strikes, direct actions, and militant struggle stopped the coup, the same social democrats that the workers had helped to victory quelled the uprising. To accomplish this, they made use of some of the right-wing militias that had previously been involved in the coup. They were able to do this because half of the workers withdrew from action after the “legitimate” government was back in power.
\n\nTo crush the Ruhr uprising, state forces murdered over a thousand workers, including many of the most militant fighters of the workers’ movement. Consequently, they were not able to participate in the resistance to the growing fascist movement in the following decade.
\n\nSome 93 years after the suppression of the Ruhr uprising, it was the same party, the SPD, that deployed over 31,000 cops to the G20 summit in Hamburg to defend the autocrats Trump, Putin, Erdogan, and Xi.
\n\nToday, the SPD is in a coalition with the conservative CDU. Its chancellor, German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz, gives speeches in which he speaks of migrants as “a problem in the cityscape.”
\n\nIn short, the SPD are to Germany what the Democrats are to the United States. The Democrats, too, are trying to pacify the resistance against Trump in order to maintain their own power.
\n\nWithout the uprising that took place in 2020, the Democrats likely would not have returned to power. Yet after that uprising, the Democrats sought to eliminate the most militant elements of the resistance via repression while doing their best to re-legitimize the same institutions—such as ICE—that now serve Trump once again.
\n\nWe do not know how history would have turned out if the workers had not let themselves be divided during the Ruhr uprising—if many of them had not given up as soon as the democratically elected rulers were back in power. But the Ruhr uprising was the best chance to stop the rise of fascism in Germany. After that, no large anti-fascist insurrection took place again.
\n\nIn the long term, it’s better not to compromise, not to let oneself be pacified and disarmed, whether literally or figuratively. Being uncompromising and taking risks is often safer than restoring the status quo.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/4.jpg\")
German SWAT police attempting to suppress resistance to the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg, in order to defend Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Saudi Arabian finance minister Muhammad al-Jadaan.
\nThe other lesson that we can draw from German history is that civil war is not the worst thing that can happen. After 1933, there was resistance to fascism in Germany, but the resistance movement was too weak to wage a large-scale struggle like the Ruhr uprising.
\n\nBy contrast, in countries like Spain and Italy, where the workers’ movement was not dominated by social democrats focused on elections but rather was driven by anarchists and socialists focused on grassroots organizing and action, a long struggle took place against the fascist regimes that came to power, involving extensive resistance.
\n\nIn the case of Spain, after decades of unauthorized demonstrations, strikes, and militant attacks, the capitalist elite were forced to introduce a democratic system as a concession. The foundation for this extensive resistance had been laid by generations of peasants’ and workers’ resistance from which a great anarchist movement grew, culminating in the anarchist revolution in 1936 and the civil war from 1936 to 1939. Although the anarchists were defeated in the civil war, their efforts left such a mark in Spain that eventually fascism was abolished without the sort of military defeat that was essential to ending fascism in Germany.
\n\nTo be clear, we do not want a civil war. We want a social revolution—we want people to stand so decisively against the state and capitalism, with such unity, that the other side is too small to wage war at all. But if our only choice is between civil war and a dictatorship that will have a free hand to imprison and murder millions of people, then the decision should be clear. Civil war is better.
\n\nDemocrats in the United States are trying to stoke fear that “non-peaceful” confrontations with ICE and the Trump regime will lead to the deployment of the military. And then what? People will get shot for protesting? But aren’t people already being shot?
\n\nWhat the Democrats really fear is not that people could be hurt in the streets, but that Democrat politicians might lose their jobs. Because they want to maintain their own power, they try to pacify and divide the resistance with rhetoric about the necessity of remaining “non-violent” and “law-abiding.”
\n\nWhat happens when a population unites against a regime and no longer stops at what is legally permitted? We saw the answer in Germany in 1989 when the GDR (the so-called “German Democratic Republic”) collapsed.
\n\nAt that time, the resistance to the regime was not all “nonviolent.” There were attacks on the police. The demonstrations were not law-abiding—in fact, they were all illegal. Millions of people broke the law. Because of the number of people on the streets refusing to obey, the regime knew that it would have to use the military, including tanks, to quell the uprising.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/5.jpg\")
“No Power for nobody”: Anarchists participate in the largest demonstration against the GDR Regime in 1989. Anarchists, especially anarcho-punks and eco-activists, played an important role in bringing down the dictatorship.
\nParts of the government became afraid of escalation. They were unsure whether their military was ready to obey the order to attack protesters. They asked their main ally—the Soviet Union—to support them with troops. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev refused.
\n\nThe Trump regime is not dependent on Moscow, at least not in this particular way. But it relies on an American state apparatus that is not entirely under its control.
\n\nAs long as the Trump regime is not forced to use the military and all other available forces, as long as the loyal shock troops of ICE suffice to enable them to accomplish their goals, those who are not yet definitively on Donald Trump’s side will not have to make a decision. They will not have to experience a Gorbachev moment in which they might decide against carrying out Trump’s orders.
\n\nEscalation always involves the risk of losing. But holding back in this situation means choosing to lose.
\n\nThe downfall of the GDR also shows that it is not necessarily useful to address resistance directly to the despot, as he will not be the one who hesitates, but rather to those who are not completely ideologically on his side.
\n\nIn the context of the United States, this would mean not to focus all energy on ICE and Trump. It is important to oppose them, but that will go much better if every time Democrat politicians send local and state police and National Guard to protect ICE, they experience consequences that make it impossible for them to continue to do so.
\n\nThe uprising in the GDR did not succeed in a vacuum. In many countries in Eastern Europe, the heads of numerous dictatorships were forced to decide whether to double down on repression or make concessions. Any weakening of the dictatorship in a neighboring country made it possible to expand the fighting elsewhere, because it was no longer possible to move troops from one Warsaw Pact state to another.
\n\nWe want to propose a question. What would it take to ensure that a mayor in the USA can no longer send the police when people try to confront a hotel full of ICE agents? What has to happen to compel a governor to order his National Guard not to interfere? What circumstances would have to prevail on the street to make it impossible for the National Guard of one state to be sent in another?
\n\nWhile fascists and autocrats are not yet in power in Germany, the day when they could be is not far away. The AFD (Alternative for Germany) is about to become the strongest party in Germany. The AFD represents positions similar to the MAGA movement, and the demographics that support them are similar.
\n\nWhile it has a clearly fascist base, most people do not vote for the AFD because they support its positions. As surveys show, they vote AFD to express their anger at the existing system. Consequently, the AFD is now especially successful in the Ruhr area—the region where the largest anti-fascist uprising in German history took place in 1920—as well as in East Germany. This is not a coincidence. After the people in Ruhr area mined coal for 100 years to support German industry and German wars, the region was left impoverished the way that the Rust Belt in the United States has been since the 1970s.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/6.jpg\")
A survey of AFD voters in February 2025, in which 85% of them claimed that the AFD was the only political party via which they could express their protest.
\nAnd who was responsible for this? The SPD—the social democrats who managed the process of economic decline for 50 years while diligently profiting from their posts in the state apparatus until the situation finally became so stark that they could not maintain their majorities.
\n\nAnd here we find another parallel: just like Trump, the AFD does not promise material improvements to its base; rather, it promises hatred and violence. It will not benefit the majority of its constituents. The AFD openly states in its election program that it intends to cut German social spending, just as the Republicans are doing under Trump. Its leaders are primarily recruited from the academic elites; they are not the ones who are at risk from these cuts.
\n\nThe neoliberal left (SPD) and the conservatives (CDU) who are currently in power in Germany have already partially implemented these cuts on the grounds that doing so would stop the AFD from gaining support. Unsurprisingly, this has done nothing to erode the popularity of the AFD. These neoliberal leftists and conservatives are comparable to the right wing of the US Democrats.
\n\nThe only other notable political force in Germany is the Left Party, which now represents the new Social Democracy. It’s clear where this will end up. In the neoliberal global order, and due to the decline of the imperialist rule of Europe, the Left Party will not be able to carry out significant social reforms. Like Syriza, it will betray its predominantly young voters—this has already been shown in the decision to abstain from the vote on a pension package, which allowed the law to pass. (At the expense of the younger generations, this pension package preserves the status quo of the state pension without compelling privileged groups—such as Beamte, a special group of state employees, entrepreneurs, and self-employed people such as doctors—to pay into the general pension system.)
\n\nTo summarize: just as in the United States, where the Democrats do not represent a real alternative to Trump and cannot stop the fundamental causes of authoritarianism, in Germany, there is no real alternative to be found within the state.
\n\nThe only way out would be a movement that overturns the fundamental power structure of society, putting an end to the state and capitalism. Unfortunately, the prospects for this in Germany are currently very weak.
\n\nIn view of all these factors, we could be reduced to despair, but actually, we are still capable of hope. We are able to hope because we have experienced that what is happening in the United States can spill over to Germany. Inspired by the George Floyd uprising, tens of thousands in Germany spontaneously took to the streets against the violence of the police in the summer of 2020—something that has not happened in Germany for decades, because, thanks to their “good training” see Appendix II, the police rarely kill white people from the middle class. Summer 2020 was one of the few moments in the past decades when, for a moment, something other than the status quo seemed possible.
\n\nAfter that, protests continued against police murders, although—being organized by an alliance of liberals, social democrats, and parts of the so-called “radical left”—they were mostly directed at securing the convictions of the policemen involved. As in the United States, this strategy has failed utterly. Instead of becoming more “accountable,” police are expanding their powers in Germany, including the use of Tasers, AI-based surveillance, and the installation of monitoring software.
\n\nBut if people in the US succeed in stopping Trump and the resistance that unfolds exceeds the control of Democrat politicians, if something better than the old status quo becomes possible, that will also inspire people in Germany and all around the world.
\n\nThat is why we want to call on everyone in the territory claimed by Germany to support the resistance against Trump.
\n\nThe only route that promises long-term security is the route to another world.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/7.jpg\")
15,000 people protest in solidarity with the George Floyd Uprising on June 6, 2020 in Berlin.
\nAfter seeing the above photograph of this poster hanging in Germany, we’ve succeeded in acquiring a PDF of it, which you can download here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/9.jpg\")
Click on the image to download the PDF.
\nIn their attempts to pacify resistance to the Trump regime, Democrats promote the narrative that a “better trained” police force would be less violent.
\n\nThe example of the German police shows that this is false. German police are among the most highly trained in the world. German officers receive two and a half or even three years of training. They receive training in deescalation and communication. This does not prevent them from murdering people.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/1.jpg\")
German police receiving training about racism against Sinti and Romani people.
\nA well-trained police force does not create more freedom and security. It creates a stronger state. It is precisely this “strong” state that has repeatedly made great horrors possible in German history.
\n\nIn 2024, police in Germany shot and killed 22 people. For comparison, if the population of Germany were equivalent to the population of the United States, this would mean that German police killed approximately 100 people. In the United States, police kill over 1000 people a year, but the figures in Germany do not include those who have been killed by the police in other ways—there are no central statistics about the total number of police murders in Germany, just as there were no public statistics about police murders in the United States until fierce demonstrations brought the subject to light. Firearms are much harder to come by in Germany, yet the police still kill people, even without that justification.
\n\nIn any case, despite all the training, the number of people that police shoot in Germany is increasing.
\n\nAre police less likely to do violence to people because they are trained to “help” them? Consider the case of a deaf 12-year-old, whom police shot on the night of November 16, 2025. The police were sent by the youth welfare office because the 12-year-old had left a residential group of the youth welfare office to visit her family. Shortly after midnight, several police officers broke into the family’s home, pulled the mother, who was also deaf, out of the apartment, and shot the 12-year-old with both a pistol and a Taser. The child survived, though critically injured. The police claim that the 12-year-old had a knife in her hand. If she really did have a knife in her hand, it was a spontaneous attempt to defend her family against the violence of the state.
\n\nThe reasoning of the police for the operation was that the twelve-year-old urgently needed insulin and therefore had to intervene. The logic is that the state must protect people from themselves by force, must violently rule them for their own good. Training is not the issue here. The problem is the monopolization of force by an institution that exists for the sake of using violence against the general public.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/21/2.jpg\")
The entrance to the apartment building where German police shot a 12-year-old girl on November 16, 2025. It is located in Hamme, a working class neighborhood in the town of Bochum in the Ruhr Area.
\nThe rapid response networks people organized to defend their communities against federal agents seeking to kidnap, brutalize, and terrorize them have undergone a whirlwind evolution to keep up with ever-shifting Immigration and Customs Enforcement tactics. Over the past month and a half of occupation, volunteers in the Twin Cities have continuously updated their rapid response model, arriving at a dynamic and resilient system. In the following report, we explore the details of that system for the benefit of others around the country who may soon be facing similar pressures.
\n\nOn December 2, 100 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were deployed to the Twin Cities as part of a multi-city surge in detentions and deportations. Since then, the Twin Cities have become cities under siege, unrecognizable to many residents. The number of federal officers occupying them has jumped 30-fold to nearly 3000. For comparison, the Minneapolis Police Department has roughly 600 officers. The murder of Renee Nicole Good, a member of the rapid response network, on January 7, followed a week later by the shooting of another person on January 14, has caught the attention of the nation.
\n\nNonetheless, most people assume that what is happening in the Twin Cities looks like ICE enforcement and resistance in other parts of the country. On the contrary, the scale of detentions, deportations, and clashes is without precedent.
\n\nTo learn about the earlier iteration of the rapid response model, developed in Los Angeles and refined in Chicago and elsewhere over the fall, start here. To learn how to set up admin-only Signal loops, start here.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/a/3.jpg\")
\nDuring the months preceding the surge of ICE agents to the Twin Cities, local people and organizations created a relatively centralized rapid response network, in which observers would submit sightings with varying levels of substantiation to an admin on a mass text system. As soon as admins could intake, reformat, and verify the reports, they would blast it out on the system and people nearby would converge. This seemed to work for turning people out to major operations, like a raid on an apartment complex, but began to falter as ICE experimented with faster, more lightweight operations.
\n\nThen, around December 1, the raids essentially stopped, and the influx of agents began a campaign of door knocks and snatch-and-grabs. The previous model was immediately rendered obsolete, because the window of time to intervene shrank to a matter of minutes. Community members who were wanting something more confrontational than the existing legal-observer-style bottle-necked system started to build out a parallel system to fill the gaps and move more nimbly.
\n\nThis new system began with a large-scale chat for Southside reports, where anyone can drop an alert of any kind. As ICE operations accelerated in volume and speed, the open, more nimble chat grew in members and became a space that attracted those who wanted to do more than simply record ICE operations. People integrated the existing whistle program to alert targeted people about ICE’s arrival and to harass the agents, then increasingly got in the way—blocking ICE vehicles with personal cars, using their bodies to block agents, using crowds and car patrols to intimidate small groups of agents into withdrawing.
\n\nAs the chats got larger, more chats were made to break the city up into smaller and smaller segments—some of which have gotten as small as a four-block radius. This allows people to see reports directly relevant to them and respond to nearby sightings quickly and effectively.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/a/2.jpg\")
\nThese networks have benefited greatly from a program of counter-surveillance at the local ICE headquarters. The Whipple, a federal building in Fort Snelling on the outskirts of the Minneapolis and St. Paul, has long been a regional headquarters for ICE, having previously housed other federal agencies. The complex is located across the street from a National Guard base, down the road from a military base, and next to the preserved fort itself. The fort sits on the sacred site of the convergence of two rivers. It was one of the earliest sites of colonization in the area; at one time, it was a concentration camp holding native Dakota people.
\n\nThe Whipple includes offices, processing and detention facilities in the basement, and a sprawling parking lot. Community members identified this complex as a key location over the summer; they have maintained a presence there since August.
\n\nThe building is hemmed in by two state highways, two rivers, and an airport. With only two vehicle exits, tracking ICE vehicles entering and exiting the facility is easy. Whipple Watch, as it’s called, has involved protesters and observers stationed there for months, gathering intel on the convoys headed into the city or taking detainees to the airport, identifying patterns of operations such as surge days and times, and carefully cataloging the plates of vehicles going in and out. This database of plates gets near constant daily use, enabling rapid responders on foot and in cars to confirm known ICE vehicles in real time. ICE has begun swapping out cars and plates throughout the day to undermine this counter-surveillance, but the volume of submissions pouring in is only growing.
\n\nWhipple Watch describe their goals as threefold:
\n\nWhipple Watch has undeniably succeeded in achieving these particular goals, even in the face of a hostile militarized force.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/a/1.jpg\")
Much of ICE watch consists of patrollers in cars or on foot, monitoring and reporting on the movements of federal agents.
\nEach chunk of the city (Southside, Uptown, Whittier, and so on) has rotating shifts of dispatchers, who admin a running Signal call throughout operational hours. Sometimes, multiple dispatchers overlap to split up the extra tasks of watching the chat, relaying reports to other channels, and checking license plates. Dispatch also helps people evenly distribute patrols across an area, takes notes, and assists people through confrontations. All patrollers in cars and on foot and stay on the call throughout their patrol. There is a constant flow of information, allowing other cars to decide whether they are well-positioned to join in, take over tailing the car, or continue searching for additional vehicles.
\n\nSince the structure has divided up into more granular neighborhood-based zones, people in many areas have also developed a daily chat system, with chats that are re-made and deleted each day to keep them clear and not maxed out of participants (as the maximum number of members of a Signal group is capped at 1000). Various areas of the cities and the suburbs have replicated the basic structure of this system but with slightly different models, chat structures, vetting systems, and data collection.
\n\nA data collection team collects anonymized data submitted from Whipple Watch and many of the local rapid response chats, aggregating them into consumable formats, such as interactive maps of hotspots. This team also admins the searchable database of license plates sorted by “confirmed ICE,” “suspected ICE,” “confirmed not ICE,” and other categories.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/a/7.jpg\")
\nAdditional place-based chats have emerged around school systems, faith communities, mutual aid grocery deliveries, and the like. Another development was the Neighborhood Networks intake chat, which acts as a clearinghouse for incoming volunteers. New people from anywhere in the city—or anywhere in the state of Minnesota—can be added and oriented to a list of chat options, and admins will add them to the open chats or connect them to the vetting and training processes for the more closed chats.
\n\nMost recently, dispatchers have experimented with a relay system in which patrollers who tail vehicles to the edge of their zone can communicate through dispatch across chats to pass off the vehicle to a patroller in the next region. This allows the patrollers to remain in tighter and tighter routes, which they can swiftly come to know intimately well in order to navigate them better than any ICE agents.
\n\nFinally, Spanish language relayers copy ICE alerts from dispatch calls and local chats, translate them, then send to large Spanish-language Signal and WhatsApp networks.
\n\nWhat might look from the outside like an over-formalization of chats for different kinds of information, or else like too little structure in the completely open calls that all patrollers for a given zone join in simultaneously, coheres into a highly effective, self-organized, and well-maintained communication ecosystem. Information moves reliably across scale through the chats and dispatchers, and patrollers quickly adopt cultural practices that enable them to avoid talking over each other and to relay information in a clear and organized manner. Volunteers self-select into shifts of varying lengths, deciding what routes to run based on their knowledge, skill, interest, and availability.
\n\nThis system is constantly shifting, highly adaptable, somewhat difficult to explain to outsiders, and surprisingly easy to integrate into—once you get over the shock of receiving over 1500 new messages per day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/a/4.jpg\")
\nThe response from ICE has been measurable. They have changed their tactics. They have been chased out of neighborhoods during operations. They have been caught discussing how scared they are and the fact that many of them have left.
\n\nThey’ve also continuously and aggressively escalated their violence against observers. Patrollers who follow ICE too closely or for too long will often be boxed in so that between four and ten officers can surround the car, beat on the doors, yell, film, and threaten them with arrest. Patrollers who have blocked ICE with their cars have been rammed, have had their windows busted in, have been pulled out to be detained or arrested. People have been put into ICE vehicles, driven miles away, then thrown out of the car. Agents have taken people out of their cars, then driven their cars several blocks away and left them running in the street. Recently, agents have been pepper spraying cars—sometimes trying to fill the interior of the vehicle in order to force people out of it, other times just using the chemical weapon to brightly mark the cars for further harassment and targeting.
\n\nRecently, ICE agents threw a tear gas canister out of their vehicle while driving on the highway to try to deter someone from following them. Agents have not only followed patrollers home, but have identified the driver or vehicle following them and led drivers to their own home addresses as a form of intimidation. Patrollers shared with us that agents have beaten them, have tried to run them over, have driven directly at their vehicles head on, held them at gunpoint, shot out their tires, and dragged them out of moving vehicles. While the murder of Renee Nicole Good shocked the nation, it came as no surprise to those who have been on the streets of the Twin Cities over the past six weeks.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/a/5.jpg\")
\nWhat sets apart the Twin Cities rapid response network and its surrounding ecosystem is not strict adherence to a particular structure. It is a clear analysis of their conditions, a willingness to adapt, and the courage to fight back as the violence increases.
\n\nThe people of the Twin Cities have paid close attention to their opponents. They know how ICE agents deploy, where ICE agents stage, how ICE agents dress, drive, and react. They live in a relatively small and densely populated urban area, walkable in many parts, gridded for easy navigation by car. People are connected to their neighbors, building on the connections that remain from past movements and uprisings. The mayor of Minneapolis is trying to maintain the liberal veneer of his administration; police are unlikely to deploy as reinforcements for ICE operations. These are concrete and observable conditions that have directly defined the design and implementation of resistance here.
\n\nThose embedded in the model are committed to agility and adaptability as conditions change. The city has neighborhoods with distinct demographics and characteristics, so the expansion of the model was built to vary from one neighborhood to the next. After the raids stopped, ICE deployed almost exclusively from one main location with limited entrances and exits, so organizers invested heavily in counter-surveillance there. When ICE operations switched to fast, random street abductions and door knocks, the only possible way to predict where they would act was to identify ICE vehicles as they approached, so people shifted focus to identifying ICE vehicles on the roads and staying on them. ICE needed to rely on surprise and ambush tactics, so responders employed noise—whistles and honking—to quickly give warning across distance. ICE officers don’t like to operate when outnumbered and don’t like to be surrounded, so patrollers amass cars and form impromptu traffic jam blockades.
\n\nFew of these conditions could have been predicted in advance. The only way to adapt effectively was to nurture an open, invitational culture that encourages taking initiative and welcomes self-organization.
\n\nWe cannot overstate the importance of the courage pouring into the streets of the Twin Cities. It can be easy to write off rapid response networks, because we know that simply filming and observing this accelerating campaign of violence is not enough. Many networks across the country have demobilized themselves before they even got going by trying to rigidly control what their participants could do, despite widespread willingness to escalate. Trainers often preach non-interference; some rapid responders police each other in the streets for throwing projectiles or even for yelling. In some cases, this comes from a self-preservationist fear about repression targeting the NGOs involved in rapid response. In other cases, it shows up as a well-meaning but misguided focus on “safety” that is simply paternalism, deciding what risk levels are appropriate for other people.
\n\nSuch overcautiousness can be found in the Twin Cities, too. There are trainers and dispatchers who, by default, tell people to disengage rather than supporting them in whatever they feel called to do. There are bystanders who get in the way of those who are taking action rather than in the way of ICE.
\n\nBut the fight here is defined by those who push the envelope. People use their cars and bodies to block agents and de-arrest targeted people. They throw snowballs and rocks; they kick back canisters of tear gas. They cover cars and agents with paint and break the windows of their cars. They don’t stop screaming in the faces of abductors when they are hit, pepper sprayed, or shot with rubber bullets. They are witnessing the masked abductions, undisclosed disappearances, and record-breaking deaths of this new emboldened ICE, and they are willing to take real risks to stop them. They are experiencing the retaliative violence, and they are more, stronger, and braver in spite of it.
\n\nBeing ready for the incoming surge of ICE enforcement in your city—and mark these words, it is coming—means studying the terrain you are fighting on and getting creative. What works best for your city likely won’t look exactly like these daily observation units at their headquarters and mobile patrols of rapid responders. It will require a thorough analysis of how best to use your strengths and exploit their weaknesses in your specific circumstances. Start studying, planning, connecting, and experimenting now.
\n\nWe look to the Twin Cities, not to replicate the details, but for their clarity of analysis, swift and decisive action, agile experimentation, deep care for each other, and infectious courage.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/a/6.jpg\")
\nThis report was submitted by visitors to the Twin Cities, who were kindly welcomed into the network for a few short days. Thank you to all those who showed us your city, talked us through the systems, and brought us along on patrols. Love and rage.
\n\nAfter Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot at least one person in north Minneapolis on the night of January 14, a crowd gathered and faced them down, confronting them and tearing down the yellow tape they put up around the area. Police reinforced the federal mercenaries, joining them in shooting a tremendous amount of tear gas and flash-bang grenades at demonstrators as well as at passing cars and houses in the residential district. Nonetheless, the officers lost control of the area and retreated, ceding the streets to those who had defied them.
\n\nIn the process, ICE agents abandoned several vehicles in the area. Demonstrators opened up the vehicles and found identity cards, paperwork, license plates, operational plans, tactical gear, and other items. Footage of demonstrators looking through these materials was broadcast live on the internet.
\n\nThis follows the atrocious murder, one week earlier, of Renee Good, perpetrated by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in the full light of day and captured on multiple videos. You can read an account of how demonstrators responded here.
\n\nOver the past month and a half, the Trump regime has sent more and more troops to the Twin Cities because they know that what happens there has implications for the whole country—and because they are losing. If the battle of Minneapolis in winter 2026 turns out the way that the battle of Portland turned out in summer 2020, it will bode ill for Trump’s ability to retain control by brute force.
\n\nIt is important to note the role that local Minneapolis police played in assaulting demonstrators tonight, despite their nominally answering to a Democratic city government that has paid lip service to opposing ICE. Police across the country have played an essential role in enabling ICE to terrorize communities. Without the continuous assistance and support of local police departments, federal agencies would already have been outmaneuvered by protest movements. When Democrat politicians claim that they need to “maintain order,” they are attempting to position themselves as junior partners in the consolidation of fascism. It may be in their interests to “maintain order” as mercenaries kidnap and murder people, but it is not in ours.
\n\nWe offer here an account from the protests following the shooting in North Minneapolis, sent to us anonymously.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/3.jpg\")
Demonstrators investigating the abandoned ICE vehicles apparently retrieved these “challenge coins” that ICE mercenaries receive when they kidnap people. This “coin” is decorated with a skull wearing a crown. ICE mercenaries serve king death.
\nI had two hours left at my work shift when my phone started blowing up. Several comrades didn’t know where I was and thought I might be out in the street.
\n\n\n\n\n“Where are you?”
\n
\n\n\n“You OK????”
\n
\n\n\n“Shots fired at 24th and Lyndale”
\n
\n\n\n“They just shot another person”
\n
Every rapid response group chat was talking about the same thing. All kinds of rumors were flying around. Did they shoot one person or two? Were the victims alive or dead? Somebody said ICE had shot a 12-year-old Venezuelan boy in the leg. Somebody else said the victim was hiding in his house for fear of arrest and desperately needed medical attention. I didn’t know what to believe.
\n\nIt’s always like that when a new emergency is going down. In the course of the past 45 days of federal occupation, scrambling through a fog of war to find out what just happened has become a familiar sensation. Somebody sent me a livestream of a crowd running away as ICE agents shot tear gas grenades and flashbangs at them.
\n\nTime slowed to a crawl. I hurried to finish up the drudgery I was working on as fast as I could. When I felt like I could get away with it, I told my coworkers I had a family emergency and I had to leave early. I jumped in my car and ran every stop sign on the way to 24th and North Lyndale.
\n\nI ran into a crew of street medics two blocks north of the crowd. They told me about what they’d seen before I got there. ICE had snatched two kids suspected of throwing a firework at them—20 masked thugs charging up to grab the kids, only to release them half an hour later under intense pressure from the rest of the crowd. The medics warned me that they were going to get out before the cops started mass-arresting people. In their opinion, I was walking into a kettle. The air already stank of tear gas.
\n\nAt 24th Street, I found a crowd of about a hundred people facing off against a skirmish line of Minneapolis Police Department pigs in riot gear. The feds had already left and handed over the situation to the local cops. Somebody was slowly beating a drum. To my right, kids stood up on an elevated front lawn, screaming “Fuck ICE!” and “Fuck 12!” down at MPD. Somebody was brandishing a tear gas canister that had been fired at them, showing it off to their friends. A TV news crew was there. They tried to talk to me. I pushed my way through the crowd to get away from the cameras. Beyond the skirmish line, a block south on Lyndale near 23rd, I heard the sound of shattering glass.
\n\nI doubled back and went around the block. I came out on the other side of the skirmish line. There was a crowd of young people on this side, too. They were smashing up two SUVs that I recognized immediately as ICE vehicles by their blacked-out windows and out-of-state plates. Guys were trading kicks at the glass. Somebody was proudly displaying a big Mexican flag. One young person jumped up on the hood and stomped her foot through the windshield. Somebody with a can of red spray-paint tagged “HANG KRISTI NOEM” on the side of the other car.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/header.jpg\")
A graffiti artist identified the ICE mercenaries for what they are: Nazis.
\nA few people pulled a locked gun safe out of the trunk of one of the cars. Somebody dumped a fingerprinting kit on the ground. Someone else was rifling through a folder of documents at a frantic pace, snapping pictures of each one with a cell phone. There was an ICE face mask in the driver-side door of the nearest SUV. Appropriately enough, there was an ice scraper on the floor of the vehicle.
\n\nSuddenly, I heard a loud bang behind me. The familiar acrid taste of tear gas filled my nostrils. I started running south with the rest of the crowd. When we got to the next intersection, however, I turned around and saw that the cops were pulling back, shooting projectiles at the crowd as they moved east on 24th. The crowd got its bearings and we turned around and ran back up to 24th. There were such huge clouds of tear gas to the east of us that I couldn’t see the cops anymore.
\n\n“This is one! This is ICE!” I heard somebody yelling excitedly. She was pointing at another silver SUV parked on 24th. I checked the plates against the database of ICE vehicles that activists keep, saw that she was correct, and instantly felt silly for doing clerical work in the middle of a riot. Someone started whacking one of the side windows with the ice scraper that had been in the previous vehicle, striking it as hard as possible. After a few swings, there was a satisfying crunch as the window gave in. People around me began kicking in these windows, too. Somebody got the driver’s side door open and threw a firecracker inside.
\n\nSome overzealous cameraman—I couldn’t tell if it was the same guy from before—muscled his way through the crowd to get a shot of the ICE vehicle receiving this treatment. “No video!” someone roared at him. “If you let him take pictures of this shit, somebody is going to jail!” A few people forcefully encouraged the cameraman to turn around and leave the area.
\n\nWhen the tear gas cleared, I saw that the cops were gone. It seemed too good to be true. I ran up a couple blocks to scout the perimeter. They were nowhere to be seen.
\n\nI went back to where the two smashed-up ICE vehicles were. A festive block party mood had set in. People were setting off fireworks. Somebody was trying to pry open the gun case. Someone was dancing on top of a vehicle again while someone else blasted “I Don’t Fuck With You” by Big Sean. Young folks passed around a bottle of Hennessy. A lane of traffic had opened up. Some passing motorists raised their fists out the window and shouted “FUCK ICE!”
\n\n“I’m so proud of my city,” I found myself murmuring out loud. After seven weeks of atrocities at the hands of these fascists, people were finally fighting back. I thought about the liberals who were at home wringing their hands about how we were supposedly giving the feds an excuse for a crackdown (what the fuck did they think was already happening?) and posting on Facebook about the “language of the unheard.” The newfound comrades I was partying with around the looted vehicles seemed perfectly eloquent to me.
\n\nThe George Floyd uprising of 2020 was never very far away. Its specter has haunted Minneapolis throughout everything that has happened for the last month and a half. Tonight, January 14, it finally assumed corporeal form again. People will remember tonight as the opening salvo of the people’s counterattack against a fascist invasion.
\n\nWhen history is written the way it ought to be written, it will not be our ferocity, but rather, the moderation and long patience of the Twin Cities that will make people shake their heads in wonder.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/15/2.jpg\")
\nOn January 7, 2026, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed our comrade Renee Good in cold blood. The following is an account of the events that immediately followed her murder from the perspective of an anarchist in Minneapolis. These words are dedicated to her memory.
\n\nRenee Good was murdered a mere six blocks from where George Floyd was murdered in May 2020. This feels significant in two ways. First, South Minneapolis has a history and memory of resistance. Thousands of people here still remember fighting the police in 2020. Secondly, a similar dynamic could play out today, just as in the fiery summer of 2020, when the unrest in Minneapolis acted as the spark that ignited a national uprising.
\n\nFor 38 days now, the Department of Homeland Security has been occupying the Twin Cities to terrorize our immigrant neighbors. This Monday, they deployed 2000 more ICE agents to dramatically increase the number of abductions. This is an unprecedented escalation. No other city has yet experienced an ICE occupation at this scale.
\n\nThis escalation is a reaction to the groundswell of resistance against ICE that our communities have carried out over the past several weeks. More than 4000 people have participated in at least 81 rapid response groups—patrolling, tailing, and boxing in ICE vehicles, warning our neighbors, protesting at hotels hosting ICE agents, and confronting them as they attempt to go about their evil business. The current surge in ICE attacks has not driven us to despair; we believe that it indicates that ICE is like a wild animal backed into a corner. Its erratic and violent behavior is beginning to suggest desperation. It is an agency in crisis, an agency that can be defeated.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/08/2.jpg\")
People stand vigil for Renee Good after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered her.
\nYesterday, on January 7, I went to the Bishop Henry Whipple building at 8 am with a friend. The Whipple building is the ICE headquarters for the entire Upper Midwest; it is where they stage before carrying out their raids. I took pictures of their license plates for about an hour. A third friend planned to join us. Then she texted me that she couldn’t make it because ICE had shot someone.
\n\nMy friend and I left Whipple and sped towards Portland and 34th, where the shooting had just taken place. When we arrived, Signal stopped working for both of us, as if our phones were being jammed. There was yellow crime scene tape up and dozens of MPD officers were protecting ICE officers in full tactical gear. The cops had a Bearcat with an LRAD on top. Greg Bovino himself, the “commander at large” of Border Patrol, was standing there in tactical gear. A crowd was forming—not just recognizable activists, but also ordinary neighbors who lived on that block coming out to cuss at them. We started a chant: “Cops! Pigs! Murderers!”
\n\nThings heated up when an agent tackled a protester about a block away. He grabbed them by their clothing and tried to force their hands behind their back in a snowbank. Somebody else body-checked the agent, knocking him down. A few people from the crowd ran over to see what was happening. A middle-aged local demanded to know why they were arresting the person.
\n\n“She was slashing tires,” the ICE agent answered.
\n\nThe man yelled back, “I’m gonna do that too, motherfucker!”
\n\nThere was a standoff for a couple minutes until the agent let the person go and retreated to the larger group of ICE agents.
\n\nThe crowd started to gain confidence, getting in the faces of the ICE agents and chanting more aggressively. MPD cleared an exit for ICE to leave by heading south on Portland Avenue; they began to drive their vehicles out. Some people started shouting for people to get into the street to block them. The crowd hesitated at first, but a few people got into the street and blocked an ICE vehicle. Seeing this, more people began to get into the street. MPD officers shoved them out of the way. People kicked the ICE vehicles as they sped off. One person almost got hit.
\n\nAs more of the crowd blocked Portland Avenue, the cops tried to clear a different exit for them, aiming to enable them to head west on 34th. People started chanting “Fists up, feds down, get the fuck out of town!” ICE guys with less-lethal launchers and shotguns were guarding an SUV as it tried to leave. People started throwing snowballs. The crowd surged forward and I came face to face with an ICE agent sticking the barrel of his launcher in my face.
\n\n“What are you gonna do,” I demanded, “shoot me too?”
\n\nHe shot the launcher at my face at point-blank range. My first thought was “I just lost an eye.” That’s how it felt. Street medics pulled me back and started flushing my eyes. Off to my right, I could see people chasing some ICE agents into an alley behind some houses. I saw the same middle-aged man who had intervened on behalf of the other protester also take a pepper ball to the face at very close range. The agents shot tear gas and tackled somebody else.
\n\nTwo comrades who were helping to give me medical treatment assisted me in moving to a house two blocks away to get cleaned up. I showered and put gauze on the wound on my face. When I got out of the shower, I saw more commotion down on the sidewalk. It was hard to tell whether ICE was chasing people or people were chasing them.
\n\nSome people erected a barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered. The barricade remains there today, with protesters camping out there—including some familiar faces who held down the George Floyd Square autonomous zone half a mile away for over a year.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/08/3.jpg\")
The barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered.
\nI went home to nurse my wounds and wash the pepper spray out of my clothes. A couple hours later, I heard reports that ICE was raiding Roosevelt high school and had rammed an observer’s car with one of their cars, weaponizing their vehicle as we’ve frequently seen them do. A fight broke out outside the main entrance. They arrested a protester, but they failed to catch the student they were trying to kidnap. This should remind everyone that they aren’t invincible: when we commit ourselves to our actions, we can beat them.
\n\nAt about 4:30 pm, a group of 30 or 40 protesters breached the doors of the Federal Courthouse downtown. As security guards pushed back against the revolving doors to keep them out, someone smashed out a window. No one was arrested there. The spontaneity of the moment and the sheer number of little protests flaring up around the Twin Cities made it impossible for the authorities to react to all of them.
\n\nThat night, there was a mass vigil to mourn Renee’s death. Some ten thousand people came out, crowding around burn barrels as they flooded Portland Avenue as far as the eye could see. It felt like everyone on the Southside was there.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/08/1.jpg\")
People stand vigil for Renee Good after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered her.
\nSince the beginning of the invasion of the Twin Cities, messy contradictions have abounded in the network of rapid response groups that has sprung up. In the early days, there were major clashes with ICE at the Bro-Tex paper factory and on the eastside of St Paul. Some weeks later, there was a clash at 29th and Pillsbury, where they tackled a pregnant woman. Following these, there was a lot of peace policing and debating about nonviolence. Liberal elements have gained ground, and things that we could take for granted in 2020 are no longer established.
\n\nA lot of the people in the rapid response groups come out of 50501 and the No Kings protests and are very green and inexperienced. This can be a blessing and a curse. There is a huge wellspring of creative energy; various neighborhoods are trying all sorts of different strategies for alert systems and mutual aid. At times, the liberals running dispatch have been doing de facto counter-insurgency by telling people not to go to the scene of an abduction. Well-attended patrol trainings have instructed people to stay at least 30 feet away from ICE at all times. There is a culture of referring to ourselves as “observers,” an insidious brainworm for those of us who want to do everything we can to disrupt and interfere with ICE operations. There is a heavy emphasis on collecting ICE license plates, which has proven less and less useful as agents switch out their plates and 2000 new vehicles infest our streets. We have found foot patrols around hotspots like Lake and Bloomington to be increasingly effective since the surge began on Monday. It doesn’t take long to find an ICE agent skulking around.
\n\nIn my opinion, we will have to fight on two levels to defeat the ICE invasion. We have to become more agile and more courageous at stopping abductions promptly and forcefully, and we also have to defeat them on a political level by popularizing the idea that ICE represents an attack on society as a whole. The conditions for another uprising like 2020 are bubbling just below the surface. It is a subterranean fire and the feds cannot put it out.
\n\nWe owe it to our fallen sister Renee Good to push on these tensions until we break through to the other side.
\n\nThe barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered.
\nThe barricade at Portland and 33rd, a block away from where Renee was murdered.
\nFuck ICE.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/08/4.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2026/01/08/5.jpg\")
\nOn the morning of November 18, news circulated that federal agents were gathered in St. Paul, Minnesota, presumably to carry out a raid attacking immigrants. Hundreds of people rapidly assembled to surround and impede them. Below, we present an account from a front-line participant.
\n\nThis is the second time that a large number of protesters have clashed with federal agents in the Twin Cities this year. When clashes briefly broke out in Minneapolis on June 3 during a federal operation, it contributed to a wave of momentum that led to an uprising in Los Angeles the following weekend. The fact that the Trump administration has not focused federal forces on provoking a response in Minneapolis since June contradicts the supposition—still widely held among liberals—that Donald Trump and his cronies are seeking to provoke riots and believe that they will benefit from them. On the contrary, it seems more likely that Trump only desires to provoke conflicts that he can win.
\n\nTrump’s popularity has hit its lowest point thus far this term, thanks to widespread economic hardship and Trump’s entanglement in the Epstein files. As federal agencies expand their anti-immigrant operations around the country this week—targeting North Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi—and people weigh how to respond, a great deal hangs in the balance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/18/1.jpg\")
Demonstrators take the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina against ICE on November 18, 2025.
\nToday’s events in the Twin Cities occurred alongside United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attacks in Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina, after ICE deployed forces to Charlotte, North Carolina last weekend.
\n\nLike Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Chicago, and Memphis, the previous targets of ICE crackdowns, Charlotte and Durham have Black mayors and majority non-white populations. One of the chief purposes of these crackdowns is to normalize using federal forces to terrorize people, especially people of color, in order to create compassion fatigue in hopes that people will not come together in solidarity against future federal operations intended to consolidate authoritarian power. What’s new about the focus on North Carolina is that it is a swing state.
\n\nWherever they have occurred, ICE crackdowns have not been popular with the general public or good for the economy. Kidnapping laborers who work for disproportionately low wages, who pay rent to landlords and spend their meager earnings at local corporations, is bad for business. Thus far, with the Trump has focused the crackdowns on cities controlled by Democrats as a means of exerting economic pressure while taking care not to impact his supporters. But North Carolina is among the states that the Republican Party needs to carry in the 2026 and 2028 elections—presuming that elections continue to determine who holds power.
\n\nOn the heels of Democrats’ electoral victories and subsequent spineless capitulation ending the government shutdown, the decision to begin targeting swing states suggests that the Trump administration is not concerned about electoral blowback—because whatever elections Democratic politicians might win, they have shown that they will collapse under pressure. This implies that the Trump administration does not intend to leave power voluntarily.
\n\nIf that is true, it only makes the acts of resistance that took place today in St. Paul more important. If Donald Trump and his henchmen intend to retain power by force alone, it is essential to build the capacity to confront them in the streets. Trump’s efforts to use immigration raids to subdue the population could have the opposite effect, bringing together communities through rapid response networks to become capable of mass resistance. If we do not wish to live under Trump’s reign for the rest of his life, this may be our only hope.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/18/2.jpg\")
Demonstrators take the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina against ICE on November 18, 2025.
\nOn Tuesday morning, November 18, immediately before 9 am, an alert circulated over a number of rapid response networks in the Twin Cities saying that cars belonging to ICE agents had been seen in the parking lot of Newell Park in St. Paul. By the time most people who responded to the alert got there, the cars had disappeared, with the possible exception of a few trucks.
\n\nThen a second alert circulated, telling people that federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and ICE had been sighted at a warehouse called Bro-Tex in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, a short distance away. People began to arrive there shortly before 9:30 am.
\n\nAs people arrived at the second location, they found an industrial area with freight trucks, warehouses, and large open spaces cordoned off with crime scene tape. Between twenty and thirty agents were gathered outside by their vehicles, representing multiple federal agencies including ICE, DEA, FBI, and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI, the principal criminal investigative arm of ICE). More and more protesters were showing up, filling in from every direction, until the number reached at least 200 people. It was hard to keep abreast of developments in the chaos across a fairly large area. More agents and crime scene tape were seen far down at the end of the industrial street, so some protesters moved there, hoping to block off all lines of escape for the agents.
\n\nFor approximately forty minutes, the federal agents simply maintained the perimeter while people yelled at them, chanted, and occasionally tore down the crime scene tape. Then other agents came out of the building and quickly got into vans. Some of them may have been able to leave quickly in a caravan, taking away an unknown number of detainees. This made people furious; the situation escalated as the protesters sought to prevent more agents from getting away. Some protesters moved into the cordoned-off areas, tore down the cordons, chased after the agents, and surrounded the agents in their cars as they attempted to leave.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/18/4.jpg\")
\nAt this point, the agents began to pepper-spray the crowd. They did so repeatedly. As people chased away federal agents in one car, someone smashed its back window and people kicked it from all sides. Scuffles broke out as people attempted to form chains to obstruct the cars, coming back together repeatedly after the agents forcibly separated them. Some people parked their personal cars in the path of the agents to prevent them from leaving. Eventually, the last two of an estimated total of twenty cars driven by federal agents were chased out as people kicked them, ripped off pieces of the vehicles, and yelled at the agents on foot around the cars. The final image that the agents saw as they sped away was an angry crowd screaming and throwing projectiles, as someone in a black ski mask with a black smoke bomb walked confidently towards them.
\n\nNear the end of the events, before we went back to check on those who had been beaten and pepper-sprayed, a few individuals in the crowd yelled out that all the broken windows and rock throwing were giving the feds exactly what they wanted. “Look what is already happening now,” others responded. “We are done with this shit. We have to fight back.” The violence that the Trump administration is perpetrating against people is not the consequence of the resistance that people are engaging in; it is the consequence of the fact that not enough people are engaging in open resistance yet.
\n\nThe crowd did not ultimately succeed in preventing the federal agents from leaving, though they were delayed. It is difficult to tell whether the response prevented any detentions. Nonetheless, it was a victory that so many people responded so quickly in the middle a workday and that so many of them were prepared to put up a fight to stop them from kidnapping our neighbors.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/18/3.jpg\")
Pepper balls strike demonstrators blocking federal agents driving vehicles as they withdraw from a raid targeting immigrants in St. Paul. Photograph by Nicole Neri, Minnesota Reformer.
\nToday’s events represent the fiercest rapid response to federal agents since people chased them out of Minneapolis last June. Other raids have occurred in the intervening months, but most people did not hear about them until they were over. The fact that this one was immediately reported, drawing such a quick response, suggests that the rapid response network has spread more widely and illustrates its effectiveness.
\n\nThis comes shortly after Kristi Noem spoke at press conference and briefing in the Twin Cities about ICE operations in the area. Many people took that to mean that a possible increase of ICE activity was imminent. At minimum, the feds were signalling support for ICE activity in our community. This spurred an increase in rapid response trainings across the metropolitan area, with protest trainings ranging from how to deal with tear gas to how to halt bleeding. There were autonomously organized trainings about what to do in response to ICE sightings; organizers distributed 3D-printed whistles to hundreds of people at each session. This escalation in preparedness may have contributed to popular readiness to respond to today’s raid.
\n\nSome tentative conclusions:
\n\nAs Dianne Di Prima wrote,
\n\n\n\n\n“NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/18/6.jpg\")
The faces of evil.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/11/18/5.jpg\")
\nAn array of federal agencies attempted to carry out a coordinated raid in Minneapolis on the morning of Tuesday, June 3, precipitating an angry response. Locals surrounded the federal officers and police, chanting “Get the fuck out!” and “Whose streets? Our streets!” Word of mouth traveled quickly in the dense neighborhood, drawing a crowd and precipitating confrontations in which federal agents shoved people and attacked them with chemical weapons. Nonetheless, the federal agents ultimately retreated from the scene.
\n\nThis comes on the heels of a raid in San Diego in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and Homeland Security Investigations agents shot flash-bang grenades at an angry crowd. All around the country, thanks in part to rapid response networks and community organizing, resistance to ICE is ramping up.
\n\nWe commend those who stood up to police and federal agents in Minneapolis. Here, we share some brief strategic remarks on these raids and how to resist them, followed by two firsthand accounts of the events of June 3.
\n\nThe crowd chants “Get the fuck out!” at the surrounded officers. Footage by Taylor Dahlin.
\nOn X/Twitter, a platform owned by a Sieg-Heiling fascist billionaire, the Minneapolis Police Department claimed that
\n\n\n\n\nMPD was NOT involved in any immigration enforcement activities today, nor were we given advance notice of any such operation… MPD responded to a request to assist with crowd control and to help ensure public safety. Officers supported federal law enforcement in safely departing the area.
\n
Maybe—and maybe not. We can hardly take it for granted that Minneapolis police will be honest with us. Under a federal government controlled by autocrats who have made mendacity a signature element of their political strategy, there is less and less cause to believe anything from any representative of the state.
\n\nSimilarly, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey denied that the raid was aimed at detaining immigrants, claiming instead that it was “related to a criminal search warrant for drugs and money laundering.”
\n\nMaybe—and maybe not. Federal agents could be concealing their real objectives from Frey and other local officials, or Frey could be lying to us. Considering that the federal government has reassigned a massive number of federal agents from a variety of agencies to ICE operations in hopes of increasing the pace of deportations, it would be unusual indeed if the operation in Minneapolis yesterday involved several ICE agents on a mission that had nothing whatsoever to do with immigration.
\n\nThere is no easy way to learn the truth—and in any case, it does not really matter. Owing to widespread anger about ICE operations, many of which have clearly been calculated to be as brutal as possible with the intention of terrorizing the public, and to the way that the gratuitous cruelty of Donald Trump’s administration has delegitimized the government in the public eye, more and more people feel tremendous urgency about resisting ICE raids. This is going to make it increasingly difficult for police and federal agencies to carry out operations of any kind, whether or not they happen to be trying to kidnap immigrants at a particular time.
\n\nAnd that is as it should be. ICE, US Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and other federal agencies all collaborate and share tasks. Alongside local police departments and the court system, all of these institutions comprise a single apparatus of repression. Until local police begin to actively resist ICE agents themselves, any distinctions between the two remain purely academic. When a sheriff or local cop arrests an immigrant, ICE agents can snatch them directly from jail or a court appearance. The structural white supremacist violence that drove people to revolt repeatedly against the police between 2009 and 2020 has not diminished at all.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/04/3.jpg\")
Demonstrators block vehicles involved in the raid. Footage by Taylor Dahlin.
\nHours after the incident, ICE Homeland Security Investigations St. Paul Special Agent in Charge Jamie Holt released a statement:
\n\n\n\n\nFederal investigators conducted a groundbreaking criminal operation today—Minnesota’s first under the Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) umbrella—marking a new chapter in how we confront complex, multidimensional threats. From drug smuggling to criminal labor trafficking, this operation showcases the breadth of our collective missions and the strength of a united front. This HSI led investigation wouldn’t have been possible without the extraordinary collaboration of our state partners and federal HSTF partners, including the U.S. Attorney’s Office, FBI, IRS-CI, DEA, ERO, ATF, USMS, DSS, U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Coast Guard, TSA and local law enforcement. Together, we are safeguarding communities, protecting national security, and setting a new standard of joint enforcement efforts.
\n
If this statement had appeared concurrently with the morning’s events, it might have been evidence that the operation was intended as a provocation, or to test the waters. However, the statement appeared after people chased off the federal agents and police, so it seems more likely that it was calculated to moderate the blowback from the rout that they experienced at the hands of the public. Surely, the ideal scenario for federal agents would be able to conduct operations like this without ever having to explain themselves to the public, accustoming us to doing nothing in the face of such raids.
\n\nSome liberals have spread a fearful narrative to the effect that the Trump administration is trying to provoke an uprising that they can crush by introducing martial law. But the chaos in Minneapolis on June 3 looks more like the consequence of disorganization and incompetence than shrewd provocation. It is a mistake to ascribe calculated strategy to a government that sets policy according to the whims of an elderly megalomaniac. For now, at least, it is by no means clear what the outcome of a large-scale confrontation would be; such a situation might finally force politicians who claim not to support Trump’s policies to actually break with them.
\n\nIf a clash is inevitable, it would be better if it happens sooner. The longer that the Trump administration holds power, the more they will consolidate control of the federal apparatus. They began by installing their own leadership at the top of federal agencies, but they are still in the process of purging and replacing the rank and file.
\n\nThere are worse scenarios than outright confrontation. If no one responds to state mercenaries in military gear kidnapping people off the streets, if we accept everything passively, there is no limit to how much violence the administration will carry out against a wider and wider range of targets. The important thing is not to avoid confrontation, then, but to be thoughtful, strategic, coordinated, prepared.
\n\nRather than waiting for ICE to strike and then attempting to respond, which leaves us always scrambling to catch up, it might be better to take the initiative, so as to determine the time and place of encounters with our adversaries. Demonstrators have done this before—for example, by establishing blockades at ICE facilities in 2018. Failing that, protesters could popularize a template for how to respond to raids after the fact, the way that the movement against white supremacy and police responded to police murders. As a minimum program, creating lasting disruption wherever a raid occurs would be a way to raise awareness about the raids, impose consequences for them, and discourage local authorities from tolerating raids in their jurisdictions.
\n\nTo learn more about what you can do to resist ICE attacks on your community, you could begin here. One of the simplest things you can do is to start an announcements-only group on the messaging app Signal and invite a large number of people of good conscience to sign up to it, so that you can immediately communicate information to them in the event of an ICE operation in your community.
\n\nAround 10:15 am, a group of federal law enforcement vehicles was spotted near Lake Street and Bloomington Avenue. I arrived at the scene at 11:00 am. A large multi-agency task force was conducting a raid at the taqueria Las Cuatro Milpas. Present were masked and heavily armed agents from at least Homeland Security Investigations (a part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the Department of the Treasury, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Hennepin County Sheriffs were doing traffic control. Minneapolis police were not initially present.
\n\nAn armored vehicle was pulled up outside the taqueria. A small crowd of onlookers was already present, and grew over time. Shortly after I arrived, Minneapolis Police Department officers arrived and conferred with the feds. Overhearing their conversation, it did seem possible that they were not informed of the operation in advance. The feds told them that the operation was “not immigration.”
\n\nI heard a number of conflicting descriptions of what the raid was about, but the most consistent was that it was a search warrant related to a human trafficking investigation being served. My own assessment is that this was a pretext to conduct a large paramilitary operation in an immigrant neighborhood. What the exact intention of this operation was is not clear to me, however. Near 11:30 am, the armored vehicles and a number of the agents departed and the swelling crowd crossed from the other side of the street up to the front of the business where a number of federal agents and MPD officers remained inside and immediately outside of the business. Tensions were increasing and the crowd refused to cross back across the street when the agents instructed them to.
\n\nAt this point, MPD seemed to decide that they did not want to be present, and departed. Some of the crowd moved to the back alley of the business, where federal agents were congregating. Additional federal agents arrived from north on Bloomington Avenue. Federal agents attempted to move a van from the back valley; the crowd impeded them. They began violently shoving individuals in the crowd. The scene became very chaotic and confused. Officers violently detained one individual at this point, who was later released. Multiple groups attempted to impede the progress of federal vehicles as they attempted to leave north on Bloomington and west on lake with federal agents shoving the crowds out of the way. This is when MPD arrived on the scene in significant numbers.
\n\nOn a few occasions, the federal agents and Hennepin County Sheriffs Officers deployed pepper-ball munitions and pepper spray. I did not see MPD do so. A woman fainted and fell on Bloomington and was later transported to the hospital. I didn’t see the exact circumstances that led to that. As the bulk of the feds were working away from the scene, [MPD police chief Brian] O’Hara arrived. After the federal agents extricated themselves, MPD rapidly left as well, leaving the crowd milling about in a stunned state. After accounting for my people as best I could, I departed at 1:20 pm. I did not see anyone from the business detained and I did not see anyone in custody taken from the scene.
\n\nMy working assumption is that this was a pretext to launch a large militarized display of force on Lake Street. I’m unsure if they understood how provocative the location was or whether they anticipated the degree of resistance they encountered. They were not prepared to carry out a large number of arrests or to do effective crowd control and frankly put themselves in a vulnerable situation. I also can’t say how aware MPD was of the operation. They did not seem like they were prepared to do crowd control either. In conclusion, it was a mess.
\n\n—Anonymous
\n\nThese are the despicable mercenaries who seek to profit on kidnapping and brutalizing our friends and neighbors. They are everything that they pretend to be protecting us from. Footage by Taylor Dahlin.
\nIt was a rainy day in Minneapolis. There was an air quality warning for wildfire smoke up north in Canada. Then a text arrived on a Signal loop:
\n\n\n\n\nFed raid underway, Homeland Security sighted at 29th and Bloomington.
\n
The fog of war kicked in immediately. Conflicting reports. Confusion. Eventually, we received pictures of a Bearcat armored vehicle marked “Homeland Security Investigations” and camouflage-clad SWAT officers in military garb, fully kitted out with assault rifles, plate carriers, and helmets. ICE badges were spotted on some of the officers and soon it was confirmed: Homeland Security Investigations, ICE, and other federal agencies were conducting some kind of raid on Cuatros Milpas on Bloomington and Lake in south Minneapolis.
\n\nThis raid took place four years to the day after a federal Justice Department task force conducted a raid on a parking garage in the south Minneapolis neighborhood of Uptown, shooting and killing Winston Smith.
\n\nA crowd quickly formed outside the restaurant, including trained observers from immigrants’ rights legal activist groups and independent media—and also local politicians1 intent on de-escalating the situation. The federal agents were assisted by Hennepin County Sheriffs Officers and Minneapolis Police Department officers, despite verbal assurances from the city government that Minneapolis is a “sanctuary city” and will not assist in federal immigration enforcement operations or deportation operations. MPD and HCSO eventually left the scene, leaving the federal agencies on their own to deal with the growing angry and confused crowd—confusion being the word of the day.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/04/1.jpg\")
Stand with immigrants, not mercenary scum. Footage by Taylor Dahlin.
\nBy the time I arrived, the federal agents had already left, chased away by the angry crowd. One person had apparently been detained but eventually released. Videos posted to social media show that a couple projectiles were thrown at the retreating feds, but nothing sustained, and none of them hit the intended targets. We heard a rumor of police using an irritant dispersal agent or chemical weapons, and this was eventually confirmed: federal agents apparently shot pepper balls at the crowd that was chasing them away.
\n\nA few moments after I arrived, a small group of people decided to attempt to block the intersection of Bloomington Avenue and Lake Street where the raid had taken place. A small group of leftist activists from groups like Freedom Road Socialist Organization and Party for Socialism and Liberation was present, but not in a presence large enough to direct the crowd or control the situation. There was really no direction coming from anyone, whether autonomous, anti-authoritarian, anarchist, or Marxist-Leninist.
\n\nWithout clear information or motivation, the crowd that wanted to block the intersection was unable to fully commit. In the end, a situation developed in which a dozen people were standing in the middle of the intersection while public transit supervisors directed city buses around the “blockade.” This nonetheless produced a traffic jam.
\n\nThe impulse to shut down the intersection was definitely a positive move from the crowd. It had some potential. But without enough momentum, it never took off.
\n\nPreliminary conclusions:
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2025/06/04/2.jpg\")
Every camera is a weapon. If you bring one, keep it trained on the police at all times. Footage by Taylor Dahlin.
\nIn short, it was a confusing and harrowing day involving upsetting events but also moments of inspiration and potential. A raid similar to this one just took place in San Diego, California with an almost identical response. Federal agents arrived, conducted their operation, miscalculated how the crowd would react, escalated with crowd control munitions (in that case, flash-bang grenades), then retreated when those measures had the opposite of their intended effect.
\n\nThe most powerful weapon the authorities wield against us is fear, intensified by the fog of war and the confusion of having to process so much unverified information at once. Whatever happens, we should remain calm, analyze what is happening, verify information that is circulating, assess the situation, and tailor our response to it. We have to resist efforts to provoke us, lest we play into their hands. At the same time, the most positive aspect of today’s events was how quickly so many people were able to mobilize, forcing the feds to turn tail and run. Here’s hoping we never have to deal with this again—or that, if we do, we come back twice as hard.
\n\n—An antagonist in the back of the crowd
\n\nAmong other politicians, Jason Chavez from the Ninth Ward, Council Vice-President Aisha Chughtai from the Tenth Ward, and mayoral candidates Dewayne Davis and Jazz Hampton were seen among the crowd. Their presence surely contributed to demobilizing the response to the federal raid. Jazz Hampton is on video running arms outstretched towards a person who had just thrown an empty trash can, attempting to squelch resistance; Jason Chavez posted a message trying to get people to leave the streets. ↩
\nThere has been lot of talk about police abolition over the past year and a half. But very different proposals coincide under this language. The coming years could see the phasing out of police departments—and in their place, an array of other agencies, activists, psychiatrists, and neighborhood watch organizations enforcing the same social order under a different name.
\n\nIn March 1856, in response to unrest throughout the Russian empire, Tsar Alexander addressed his fellow nobles, proclaiming “It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until it is abolished from below.” At the time, few Russians could imagine the abolition of serfdom; many believed that it would lead to crime and chaos. Yet by taking the initiative to introduce reforms himself, Alexander was able to do away with serfdom without abolishing the gulf between the poor and the ruling class. This staved off real social change in Russia for half a century.
\n\nIn Minneapolis, in response to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, people rose up and abolished the Third Precinct of the police outright, chasing the officers out of the building and setting it on fire. That was abolition from below. Politicians always run along behind social movements, promising to grant them whatever they demonstrate themselves to be capable of achieving through direct action; consequently, some Minneapolis politicians suddenly proclaimed themselves to be advocates of police abolition, and many critics of the police once more vested their hopes in state reform.
\n\nAfter a year and a half of obstacles, media fear-mongering, and vigorous PR campaigns from police departments around the country, a proposal to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with other agencies was put before the public in a referendum on November 2, 2021. At any time before May 26, 2020, if almost 44% percent of the voting population of any metropolitan area in the United States had voted to abolish the police, this would have been reported as a significant blow to the legitimacy of the institution of policing; Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860 with a mere 39% of the vote, and he was not even running on an abolitionist platform. This past week, however, centrists and conservatives claimed the defeat of the proposal in Minneapolis as a victory.
\n\nBut would the reform that we saw on the ballot really bring about the results that advocates of police abolition seek? In the following analysis, an author from Minneapolis reflects on the implications of this attempt to abolish the police from above.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1455769948924563457\n\n\n
\n\n\n“I’m not against police brutality, I’m against the police.”
\n\n–Frank B. Wilderson III
\n
The Minneapolis Police Department has not been abolished.
\n\nDespite the pledge of “a veto-proof majority” of city council members in the aftermath of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020, the MPD has not been abolished. Despite the subsequent onslaught of pearl-clutching media coverage about how the city government was going to abolish the police in the middle of a crime wave, the MPD has not been abolished. Finally, despite the massive campaign for Ballot Question #2, the referendum regarding whether to rename and reorganize the department, the MPD has not been abolished.
\n\nYet it was entirely possible that the campaign for the referendum could have succeeded and the city council members could have made good on their original promise to dismantle the department. We may well see this campaign emerge again during the next election cycle, in Minneapolis or elsewhere around the United States. This is why it is important to examine the underlying premise of these attempts at “police abolition”—and how they could contribute to the further entrenchment of police power and control, right under our noses.
\n\nEven residents could be forgiven for not following the last year and a half of discourse and policy around abolition in Minneapolis. In June 2020, nine of twelve city council members announced their intention to abolish the MPD. This was to take the form of an amendment to the city charter, which currently requires the city to fund a police department with at least a certain number of officers. Shortly thereafter, the city’s Charter Commission intervened to strike down the amendment, letting the politicians themselves off the hook.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/07/1.jpg\")
Minneapolis City Council members pledge to defund the police, June 2020.
\nIn late 2020, a petition began circulating to seek to enact the proposed amendment via a question on the 2021 ballet. Despite many obstacles, this vote took place last week on Election Day. The amendment would not itself have abolished the police. Rather, it would have replaced the MPD with a “Department of Public Safety” and removed the minimum requirement for the number of police officers.
\n\nThe ballot question did not succeed, but it did do relatively well for such a controversial proposition—well enough that we will likely see it again. But we’ve already started to see what kind of “police abolition” it would allow for, and it is not the abolition that so many of us risked our freedom to propose in 2020.
\n\nWhile these debates raged on—with tremendous quantities of ink spilled writing these policies, suing to stop them, and distorting their meaning in the media—the government of Minneapolis got started shaping what abolition from above will look like from this point forward, whether or not we ever see it officially introduced. We can identify two hallmarks of their approach, both of which are already being implemented today.
\n\nFirst, they are introducing closer collaboration with other police departments to supplement an MPD that is already logistically and emotionally weakened from the George Floyd rebellion—not because of any supposed “defunding,” but as a practical consequence of the grassroots resistance that their murders have provoked. Second, they are arranging for funded non-state groups to do the jobs of the police for them through the Office of Violence Prevention.
\n\nThis first strategy should be familiar to anyone living in a large metropolitan area in the United States. There are numerous departments with widely overlapping jurisdictions that can shoulder the tasks of police repression, even if one department were to disappear. Minneapolis Parks police, Metro Transit police, University of Minnesota police, Hennepin County Sheriffs, Minnesota State Patrol, the police departments of every surrounding city and suburb—these are some of the many departments that can take on the job of the MPD, that have been doing the same job all this time. Ironically, in many parts of the United States, the frameworks through which different police departments collaborate are called “mutual aid agreements.”
\n\nLast fall’s repression of illegal car meets—called “sideshows”—was an example of one such multi-agency collaboration. When MPD attempted to shut down these meets by themselves when people began to hold them again in spring 2021, the officers were quickly forced to retreat.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ViolentLeftist/status/1399267574198771714\n\n\n
Regardless of whether MPD is ever abolished, it is already taking a back seat in much policing. This past winter saw a large police operation against a spate of carjackings, assisted by the County Sheriffs and State Patrol. Then, during the lead-up to the trial of Derek Chauvin, Minneapolis mobilized countless agencies plus the National Guard to assist them in locking down the city—and that still wasn’t enough when a Brooklyn Center (not Minneapolis) police officer murdered Daunte Wright in April, leading to a week of unrest. It was the State Patrol and National Guard, not the MPD, that headed up the response to that unrest.
\n\nIn June, a task force comprised of sheriffs and federal marshals murdered Winston Smith in Minneapolis, illustrating the extent to which policing in the Twin Cities is already distributed across a wide range of institutions. This has been especially necessary since hundreds of MPD officers have left the department since the uprising of 2020.
\n\nThe second strategy is more insidious. A number of preexisting community groups have been tapped to assist the police or even take over their roles entirely in situations that might be sensitive for uniformed officers. We saw the most brazen example of this when the Agape Movement assisted city employees in dismantling the barricades around George Floyd Square—the site of his death, which mourners had barricaded and transformed into a memorial. The police did not even have to be on site for this, though they were seen in nearby areas in case their intervention was necessary. As it turned out, they were not needed—all it took to desecrate the memorial to George Floyd was for a “community group” to take over the role of the police.
\n\nIncidents like this have become more and more frequent. In response to police killings in April and June of this year, state-funded community groups like the Minnesota Freedom Fighters violently adopted the role of “peace-police,” a term used to describe people who interfere with and sometimes assault those who resist the police or engage in other confrontational actions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/07/2.jpg\")
City workers clear the roadways in George Floyd Square thanks to Agape facilitation.
\nThe most insidious aspect of this approach is that the groundwork for it was laid in the very discourse of abolition that arose in the uprising. During the rebellion, when countless people ceased to accept the legitimacy of the police, many people and organizations arose to fill their place, using the language of abolition to justify their role as “the community policing itself.” Notably, the Minnesota Freedom Fighters were one of the most prominent groups doing this at the time. This same tendency towards self-policing emerged in George Floyd Square with the Agape Movement; up until the removal of the barricades in June—and even since—the Agape Movement was a clear part of the Square’s composition. In the “Justice Resolution” published in August 2020 by activists seeking to represent the Square and the movement that arose from it, Agape is mentioned by name twice, once acknowledging their role in “providing safety” in MPD’s absence, and again in demand number 18 (of 24), which calls for them to receive a permanent space within the Square to continue to operate.
\n\nThis idea of self-policing, of the community policing itself, forms the nexus in which police abolition and police enforcement fuse and become one. Unfortunately for earnest abolitionists, the city is well ahead of us in developing this model. The coming years could plausibly see the phasing out of anything called the Minneapolis Police Department—and in its place, an array of officers from other agencies, activists, psychiatrists, neighborhood watch organizations, and others enforcing the very same violent law and order that MPD did.
\n\nIf we recognize this now, we can begin to prepare for this potential future. We need to be able to identify policing, whatever form it assumes, however it is disguised. We need an analysis and a language with which we can point out new forms of policing as they are introduced. We need to popularize visions of what our lives could look like without policing and open up spaces in which to experiment with making that a reality.
\n\nIt is not the uniforms and badges that make police so destructive to our communities and our aspirations. It is the role that police play in maintaining structural white supremacy and other forms of oppression. It is the way that they concentrate power and legitimacy, monopolizing force and using it to enforce the agenda of the ruling class, focusing violence on targeted communities and those who practice self-determination rather than permitting the ruling class to dictate all that they can do and be. All of the roles that police currently play can be passed on to badgeless, uniformless “community groups” without the results being any less pernicious. We don’t want a society in which the police have been formally abolished but everything else continues as it did before. We want to abolish the disparities and alienation that the police exist to enforce.
\n\nMovements for police abolition will remain trapped in this nexus as long as we imagine abolition as a policy proposal to be implemented by a government—as long as we conceive of the police as something distinct from the laws they enforce. The effective police abolition that we saw prefigured during the George Floyd rebellion was not represented by citizen patrols—rather, we glimpsed it in the crews of rioters and revelers who transformed the city over the course of a few days. Acting in defiance of the law, they collectively expressed that the power to shape our lives should be in our hands, not monopolized by the city government, or developers, or banks, or anyone else. Everything we’re usually forced to pay for—necessities, luxuries, spaces, and togetherness itself—was liberated and shared with all.
\n\nLikewise, true police abolition demands a deep engagement with the ideas of accountability and transformative justice. Horizontal violence will not automatically disappear if we defund and disband the police. If we want to diminish the amount of violence and suffering in our society, we have to abolish all the other systems that create and enforce inequality, as well.
\n\nUltimately, we aspire to cultivate new ways of living together that allow us to address harm without reinventing laws and police under new names. This must occur in our daily lives, not just in exceptional moments of rupture like the George Floyd rebellion. If we succeed in developing new ways of addressing harm, we will become more capable of defending ourselves and each other against the police, and we will be able to offer more concrete alternatives to those who still cling to the only order they know. Only by building communities worthy of the name can we abolish the police once and for all.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/11/07/3.jpg\")
Upscale housing construction begins to burn in Minneapolis during the rebellion, May 2020.
\nOn June 13, a driver attacked a demonstration in Minneapolis, killing Deona Marie Erickson. This is the result of years of right-wing efforts to normalize—and even legalize—vehicular attacks. Now the corporate media has ceased to prioritize covering them, paving the way for more killings. In dialogue with our comrades at It’s Going Down and on the ground in Minneapolis, we have prepared the following reflections on the implications of this.
\n\nShortly before midnight on June 13, while demonstrators gathered at Lake Street and Girard Avenue to protest the murder of Winston Smith by sheriff’s deputies and US Marshals, a man named Nicholas Kraus drove his SUV into the crowd at high speed, killing Deona Marie Erickson. One Black anti-fascist militant who was on the ground at the time of the attack reports that it was clear to those present that it was an intentional attack: “You heard his engine from three blocks away.”
\n\nAccording to Unicorn Riot,
\n\n\n\n\n“Deona Erickson’s car was parked on the side of the street in a way that would protect the people who were gathering. She was sitting down on the sidewalk about 15 feet from her car moments before the perpetrator smashed directly against her car at a very high speed. Witnesses say she was then hit by her car and sent flying. Street medics on the scene resuscitated her but she later died at the hospital.”
\n
Deona Marie Erickson had two daughters. She worked as a program manager at a center for disabled adults. Today would have been her 32nd birthday. She gave her life to protect those who protest police murder.
\n\nDemonstrators detained the driver, Nicholas Kraus. Eyewitnesses dispute police allegations that he was “pulled from his car”; reportedly, police did not respond until after the attack, sending riot police to threaten the crowd before an ambulance could arrive. Under the circumstances, the demonstrators’ response was measured, to say the least.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/aishaforward10/status/1404509174516625408\n\n\n
Let’s put this attack in context.
\n\nFox News and the Daily Caller circulated a video encouraging their viewers to carry out vehicular attacks against protesters months ahead of the fascist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville at which a self-identified neo-Nazi did exactly that, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 35 people. Afterwards, leaked chats showed other neo-Nazis also planning to use vehicles to attack protesters.
\n\nIn summer 2020, vehicular attacks surged in response to protests against the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. Over a dozen people were killed in these and other attacks on the movement.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1404699241570705408\n\n\n
Today, legislators around the United States are taking steps to criminalize protest activity, introducing a wide range of anti-protest bills. Foremost among them, Oklahoma and Florida lawmakers have passed laws guaranteeing civil and criminal immunity to drivers who hit demonstrators with vehicles, effectively granting vigilantes the right to crash cars into demonstrators. At the same time, Florida has introduced penalties of up to 15 years imprisonment for blocking traffic.
\n\nThe message is clear enough. In short, lawmakers and police seek to crack down on pedestrians acting collectively to oppose state violence, while extending additional privileges to drivers who act individually to support state violence via their own attacks. The official institutions of the state have failed to leverage enough violence to suppress movements against police violence and white supremacy, so they are deputizing others to do so—a longstanding counterinsurgency strategy reflective of the colonial heritage of the United States.
\n\nOn a fundamental level, the form of subjectivity that these lawmakers are promoting is what we might call a motorist subjectivity: consumerist, individualized, invested in the smooth functioning of the existing order, and regarding all other possibilities as threats. Structurally speaking, for the motorist, all other human beings—traffic as well as pedestrians—are obstacles, and the only imaginable journeys are dictated by the routes established by the state and the economy. The motorist wants to see the laws enforced on others, on the premise that it will reduce the ways that others might inconvenience him, but he doesn’t want the laws enforced on himself. Conceiving of our society as an entirely mapped world—the way that Google Maps does—in which all means of locomotion, all forms of agency, are individualized according to financial means, the motorist cannot imagine why people would assemble, off road or not, to challenge law enforcement itself.
\n\nAs shocking as vehicular attacks are when they occur, they are an extension of the society in which they take place. They are anti-social, but they express and intensify the anti-social premises of our day-to-day relations with each other. Motorist versus pedestrian is a classic class opposition in a society in which transportation and mobility are fundamentally racialized. People who were raised on advertisements depicting jeeps off-roading across the suspiciously vacant landscape of the frontier only to find themselves sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway for an hour every day look around for someone to blame, and—as if by design—blame those with even less power than themselves. Road rage.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/06/16/2.jpg\")
Right-wing online chatter in Minneapolis ahead of the attack that took Deona Marie Erickson’s life.
\nIn this context, the chant “Whose streets? Our streets!” asserts another form of life, another way of relating to each other and conceiving of what our lives could be. Rather than framing vehicular attacks as aberrations from an otherwise peaceful social order—to be addressed, for example, by more policing—we have to understand them as one of the ugliest manifestations of a social structure that is fundamentally racist and anti-human, which can only be addressed via new forms of togetherness.
\n\nHonoring those whose lives have been taken by police and pro-police vigilantes is a first step towards this, and it is important that people have been doing this through shared presence in particular physical spaces. The internet—the information superhighway—tends to reinforce the motorist mentality of abstract competition and hostility. One of the most basic steps we can take towards creating a new social fabric on egalitarian terms is to encounter each other in person in ways that affirm the specificity of place.
\n\nThis gives us more perspective on the ongoing efforts of city officials to evict the autonomous zone at the site where George Floyd was murdered, in order to open it up for “the free passage of traffic.” Rhetoric about “culture wars” is usually used to evoke a conflict between those on the fringe of the left and right, but here, we see centrist officials forcibly imposing a particular model for what our lives, relationships, and forms of grieving should be, even as they purport to be neutral.
\n\nNicholas Kraus, a man with a history of domestic violence and abuse, is representative of the sort of dysfunctional, alienated men that far-right provocateurs aim to weaponize to carry out stochastic attacks on social movements.
\n\nThis is effectively a watered-down version of the same strategy that ISIS has used in the Mideast in territories it does not control: taking advantage of the desperation, prejudice, and mental health issues of an entitled but disenfranchised population, the far right aims to disrupt popular mobilizations through consistent but deniable terror attacks. Their goal is to raise the risks of public organizing to such an extent that it becomes hard for movements to maintain momentum, in order to support state repression while opening up space for fascist groups to recruit and mobilize. In Turkey, this approach helped the despotic government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to crush what had been powerful social movements. The ultimate beneficiaries of this are not just far-right politicians, but also centrist capitalists who do not wish to see fundamental changes that could threaten their power.
\n\nVigilante attacks are also advantageous for the city officials who would like to present themselves as “neutral” while suppressing the protest movements against the murders that the police they oversee regularly carry out. Vigilante attacks enable these officials to change the subject from the violence of the institutions they represent back to the question of how to “maintain order.”
\n\nIf the goal of those who seek to encourage vigilante attacks is to discourage movements based in direct action, this dovetails with the goals of city officials who seek to use the Non-Profit Industrial Complex to buy off a layer of activists to oppose and undermine effective strategies from within the movement. In that regard, one of the most important ways to prevent the attackers from achieving their goals is to preserve the horizontal, grassroots structure of movements against police, while continuing to emphasize systemic forms of white supremacist violence alongside vigilante attacks.
\n\n\n\n\n“Some of these people with the megaphones, I guess their role is to get people riled up and get them in a space and march them around and educate them and tell them what their next big plans are and who they’re backing politics-wise and things like that.
\n\n“I like community, organic—no microphones, no megaphones, like right now. It’s about fifty people—but fifty people got Lake and Hennepin shut down right now, you know what I’m saying? We’re moving and grooving right now. As opposed to two or three hundred people holding signs, marching around, and then feeling accomplished, patting themselves on the back and then leaving—ain’t shit get shut down really. Police don’t even monitor the marches no more. No change will come from that.”
\n\n-Anonymous Black anti-fascist militant in Minneapolis, evening of June 15, 2021
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/06/16/1.jpg\")
\n\n\n\n“You protested because it was trendy and ‘everyone was doing it.’ I protest because people are out here dying!”
\n\n-Deona Marie Erickson, June 10
\n
In 2021, many liberals and progressives have left the streets, relying on the Biden administration to roll back the policies of the Trump administration. Consequently, the murder of Deona Marie Erickson has attracted considerably less attention than it might have just last year. This withdrawal from social struggles creates the conditions for more attacks like this to take place.
\n\nThis reminds us of the situation before the murder of Heather Heyer made world news, when the far right carried out a series of murders around the United States without drawing the attention of corporate media. Corporate media outlets were only forced to cover the events in Charlottesville because it was not possible to sweep under the rug the fact that a thousand fascists had gathered in one place and killed a white woman. Because the events took news editors—though not anti-fascists—by surprise, they were not prepared to spin the story according to the preferences of their corporate backers; so for a week, fairly honest coverage of the threat represented by the far right suddenly appeared in a variety of news outlets. Subsequently, although this coverage was tempered by efforts to demonize anti-fascists, centrist media outlets continued to report on far-right attacks in order to associate them with the agenda of Donald Trump’s administration.
\n\nBut now that centrists can’t leverage Deona Marie’s death against Trump, they are prepared to treat it as simply another sad facet of American life, to sweep it under the rug once more.
\n\nThis coincides with widespread emotional numbness arising from several years of constant tragedies. The COVID-19 pandemic has already accustomed many people to thinking of human life as expendable. Last weekend saw multiple mass shootings across several states. Poverty has reached the highest levels since the beginning of the pandemic. These are the forces that drive desperate people to adopt far-right politics wherever there are no models for a collective pursuit of liberation, creating a feedback loop that will generate more and more tragedies.
\n\n“We keep us safe.” “We protect us.” These slogans spread far and wide in the course of the movements that burst onto the world stage in Ferguson, Missouri because it has become eminently apparent that no one else is going to protect us. Deona Marie died doing her best to keep her companions safe—to open up a space in which people can come to know each other on different terms, as part of a community premised on shared consideration for all human beings, not individualized capitalist competition. We should do the same, so that everyone like her, and like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Winston Smith—might live. We should do the same, because the alternative means isolation, means eventually being treated as expendable ourselves.
\n\n\n\n\n“If the fascists would have run over Deona Marie and we would have not been holding space, not erected the barricades that the city just tried to tear down, then Deona Marie’s voice would be in vain. We’ve got to be out here. That fascist wins—that fascist who drove his car right here, he wins. ‘Oh, I got them off the street. They’re gone now. My fellow white supremacists can enjoy Lake Street now, because I got them fuckers off the street,’ you know what I’m saying?
\n\n“We’re out here stronger now. We have to be.”
\n\n-Anonymous Black anti-fascist militant in Minneapolis, June 15, 2021
\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/TigerWorku/status/1404329351211016192\n\n\n
From an internationalist anarchist woman in Rojava:
\n\n\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/06/04/george-floyd-square-autonomous-zone-survives-an-eviction-attempt", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2021/06/04/george-floyd-square-autonomous-zone-survives-an-eviction-attempt", "title": "George Floyd Square Autonomous Zone Survives an Eviction Attempt", "summary": "On June 3, public officials attempted to arrange the eviction of George Floyd Square, an autonomous zone in Minneapolis. Here is why they failed.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/06/04/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/06/04/header.jpg", "date_published": "2021-06-04T21:37:00Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:50Z", "tags": [ "police", "Minneapolis", "autonomous zone" ], "content_html": "From half a world away, I hear about this sacrifice, this martyrdom. I use the words sacrifice and martyrdom and not the word “tragedy” because I am hearing about a woman comrade who chose to defend her community, and there are few things more beautiful and free in this world than that choice. She thought beyond herself, felt beyond her own personal safety, to defend those who struggled together side by side with her for freedom.
\n\nWhen a life is given and taken in struggle, it’s not an easy thing for those of us left to continue. It would dishonest for me to say this is not something heavy, but we do not have to let the weight of it become a burden—this weight can give us strength and power, and with it, we can continue her struggle.
\n\nEvery martyr is another reason to continue, another example to hold ourselves up to. For every woman whose life they take, for every comrade, for every person who stands up to defend their community, whose light they try to extinguish, we can make sure that a hundred rise up in their place. The time when we could be separated on the basis of race, class and gender is coming to an end. When we sacrifice for each other in this way, as comrades, as people who share a freedom struggle, the methods of our enemies turn to dust.
\n\nThis is the time for us to defend our communities like Deona did. Anything else, and we won’t have risen to her standard. Her choice to defend was a sacred act of love—let us all be led by it.
\n\nRevolutionary greetings, respect, and love from Rojava.
\n
On June 3, public officials in Minneapolis attempted to arrange the eviction of George Floyd Square, the autonomous zone at the place where Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020. In hope of dividing the coalition that has maintained the Square from its support base, they worked with a local organization named Agape Movement. However, this effort failed, setting an important precedent for resisting co-optation and repression for movements around the so-called United States.
\n\nAs we reported in April,
\n\n\n\n\nSince 2020, opponents of police violence have maintained an autonomous zone at George Floyd Square. In the days following the murder of George Floyd, people erected a wooden sculpture of a raised fist in the square, when that square was arguably the focal point of the resistance. Since then, the George Floyd Square Autonomous Zone has been defended by the community and other groups as a space for organizing locally and throughout Minnesota. Community defenders of the George Floyd Square Autonomous Zone brought the sculpture of the fist to the vigil in memory of Daunte Wright, representing collective defense of all Black lives and defiance of the system that takes them.
\n
For a year, the George Floyd Square Autonomous Zone has served as one of the beating hearts of resistance in Minneapolis. At the same time, there have been ongoing attempts from within to subvert its potential as a cop-free zone. Various militant groups including anti-fascists, anarchists, Indigenous water protectors fighting Line 3, people organizing against borders and deportations, and local Black militants have utilized the space. Some of the residents and defenders who are more invested in reforms have been pushing “Justice Resolution 001,” a list of 24 demands, the last of which reads:
\n\n\n\n\n“Continue the closure of the intersection of 38th Street East and Chicago Avenue South until after trial of the four officers charged for the murder of George Floyd.”
\n
Most of these demands have yet to be met, and few relate directly to police abolition. Parts of the resolution reinforce the post-uprising trend of non-state organizations taking on policing duties. One passage commends the city-funded Agape group: “Whereas, Agape has provided safety for the community in George Floyd Square in absence of MPD presence.” Demand #18 calls for the city government to “Provide Agape Movement a space for their operations within the George Floyd Square Zone.”
\n\nThe involvement of collaborationist organizations like Agape has been one of the main tensions impacting the Square’s “community of communities.” Radical youth-led factions have consistently opposed efforts to smooth the way for “community”-branded counterinsurgency.
\n\nGeorge Floyd Square is arguably the only autonomous zone arising from the George Floyd uprising to have survived into 2021. Every day begins with morning meetings. Some decisions are made via direct democracy; much of the activity in the square depends on the participation and free association of residents and outside supporters. The distribution of food and other resources according to the principles of mutual aid takes place regularly. Many different movements hold their meetings here.
\n\nOn June 3, 2021, Minneapolis city council members Andrea Jenkins and Alondra Cano, mayor Jacob Frey, and police chief Medaria Arradondo attempted to arrange the demolition of the autonomous zone that has existed at George Floyd Square since May 2020. They sought to frame their actions as “community supported” by working with the Agape Movement “violence interrupters” (a group affiliated with the city-funded umbrella initiative MinneapolUS). Agape is a Black-male-led organization, comprised primarily of formerly incarcerated gang members connected with the local Bloods. They have been deputized by the city to patrol the streets to “prevent” street crime. However, they have often been deployed against radical abolitionists and militant Black and brown youth, both within the Square itself and at multiple actions across the city.
\n\nLast fall saw brief riots in downtown Minneapolis and youth-led marches on the 5th Precinct. Agape worked alongside the police during both. The fallout from that has ruptured the sense of collective struggle and solidarity at George Floyd Square, fracturing the uneasy alliance between reform-minded activists, local home-owners and property-owners, and radical youth collectives. Now the contradiction of an autonomous zone hosting a state-funded organization has become clear. During the April demonstrations in response to the murder of Daunte Wright, the Minnesota Freedom Fighters—a group similar to Agape that has occasionally been present at the Square in a “security” capacity—was exposed for doing the cops’ job for them. Employing older Black men to surround and intimidate young, predominantly BIPoC militants has become a standard practice. This is a classic divide-and-conquer strategy: use one part of the working class to oppress another part of the working class.
\n\nArriving between 4:30 and 5 am, MinneapolUS and city workers armed with earth movers began removing the concrete barricades around the Square and spread out throughout the area to identify and defuse any resistance. Later, they began demolishing the garden and removing the sheds; at one point, they asked if they could rotate the greenhouse to get more road. Those who have been holding space frequently in the Square, including neighbors who support the continued road closure, began to confront, record, and address the city workers and the “community-led organization” escorting them in. Many of these folks had heard about the impending upheaval and had been holding space regularly there through the night. They were indignant but not confrontational, telling the workers and those representing MinneapolUS that they didn’t care about the barricade structures, since those belong to the city.
\n\nAt some point, workers began to impound the sheds and conflict began to escalate. Still, the people present, many of whom were women, and a small crew of resistors, some of whom attached themselves to the roundabout fixtures, did not physically stand in the way of the workers.
\n\nCity workers left the bump-out section largely untouched, as they eventually moved the barricades to surround the greenhouse and the site of Floyd’s death, making it impossible to enter the memorial from Chicago Ave on foot except by crossing over them. Starting in the early morning, a nearly all-white-and-male crew of city workers began to take the offerings from the roundabout and gently put them in boxes; as appalled onlookers repeated “that shit ain’t yours,” the workers repeated that the offerings would be treated carefully and deposited across the street. Suddenly, they brought out several planters and welding equipment it became clear that they aimed to “shrink” the roundabout around the fist to allow “the free passage of traffic.”
\n\nThey began moving the cinder blocks and prepared to uproot the garden. At this moment, a truck pulled into the square driven by Jay the Gardener, a frequent contributor to the space with a green thumb. He entered the garden that he has been taking care of for months and took a stand against its destruction. It is unclear whether there was any physical confrontation; regardless, the city workers ceased further attempts to reduce the roundabout.
\n\n“I put a chain on the fist and they didn’t know how to get it off. It took ten dudes to remove what one man had done!” Jay recounted later, at the rally that evening. “I was on my phone immediately with [city council member] Cano and she told me that she would do anything for me and that my garden’s not going anywhere!” Jay described his interactions over the afternoon dividing the city council and helping to confuse their resolve. “Agape is out here and I came at them with love cuz nobody is going to bring that fist down, I mean nobody!” In spite of a scuffle or two, barricades being destroyed and rebuilt, and persistent tensions throughout the day, community defenders led the standoff with MinneapolUS, ultimately retaking the space.
\n\n“The city killed George Floyd for $20! You know what we get for $20? We get this land!” Jay expressed the resolve of the community defenders. “This is our land now, for all the people the city has murdered—and we aren’t giving it back!”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/06/04/1.jpg\")
Square defender Jay established the garden around the fist; he was one of the first people to respond to oppose the city’s dawn raid on the space.
\nAt 11 am, the mayor’s office made a press release pausing the actions of the supposed “community leaders” MinneapolUs in “reopening” the square and “honoring the memory of George Floyd,” while praising Agape MinneapolUs as a “community-led public safety effort.” The press release did not mention that Minneapolis police had set up a perimeter of SWAT vans all around the square, or that Agape has received a $25,000 grant from the city with an additional “up to $359,000” promised if they can “reopen” the square. This is clearly an attempt to legitimize the city’s authority and provide cover to the Minneapolis Police Department as its officers steadily continue committing murder.
\n\nShortly after 2 pm, US Marshals shot and killed Winston Boogie Smith Jr., a 32-year-old Black father, near George Floyd Square at the intersection of Fremont and Lake streets. Wanted on suspicion of illegal possession of a firearm, Winston Smith was surrounded by seven unmarked cars and was shot before he had a chance to exit his vehicle. Mercenaries were also present at the scene of this shooting from the sheriff’s offices of Hennepin, Anoka, and Ramsey counties, the Minnesota Department of Corrections, and the Department of Homeland Security. This tragedy underscores the fact that state forces continue to murder Black men consistently and with impunity, despite the conviction of the officer who murdered George Floyd. It also illustrates the wide range of different institutions involved in this.
\n\nIn response to the raid, BIPOC women who hold space at the square made a public call for a gathering at 5:30 pm. In response, hundreds of community members gathered at the George Floyd Square autonomous zone. BIPOC women, young people, queer folks, Natives, Lantinx southsiders, and others from every part of the community responded to this attempt to reassert state control of the area. Jeanelle, Marcia Howard, and many others challenged the narrative that MinneapolUS was anti-racist and standing for George Floyd and the community.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/06/04/2.jpg\")
Janelle, another square defender, made a defiant speech to the city and its employees, sounding off about how little the city cares for Black people. She recognized square defenders of all colors, giving shoutouts to many people from around the neighborhood.
\n“You say you’re for the community, you say you’re for George Floyd, I’m just not feeling that right now. I mean, how are you going to come in here and tear all this down, saying you’re here for George Floyd! The city is showing us right now that they don’t care about Black people!” Jeanelle passionately stated to the Agape MinneapolUS would-be occupiers. “This isn’t over, a conviction isn’t enough! We need our Black men, we need our Black men to have opportunities, we need our Black men not to be killed out here! They just killed another one of us today! This ain’t over, we aren’t leaving!” Jeanelle also spoke about the shooting around Girard and Lake earlier that afternoon.
\n\nThe fist and the Pan-African flag waving over the square remained. The garden was still green. The city had failed to seize the space, they had failed to co-opt the narrative—even by paying off Black “community members.” The last speaker at the rally was a leader of the Agape MinneapolUS crew that had tried to take the square.
\n\n“Well, I learned a lot today. I learned a lot about love, because Agape is about love. We didn’t mean to… you know, we stand with the community and we are going home. What you all are doing out here is about love and that’s all we’re about, so we support you.”
\n\nAfter securing the square, hundreds of people took to the streets, marching towards Girard and Lake where US Marshals had just carried out their latest killing. People looted about a dozen shops and the intersection of Fremont and set a fire at the intersection of Girard and Lake Street. Clashing with police, chanting “Winston Smith, say his name,” “All cops are Nazis!” and “No justice, no streets,” young people rekindled the spark of the Minneapolis uprising. At one point, someone yelled “Are there any good cops?” and without prompting, the crowd answered with a resounding “no!” Minneapolis police eventually recaptured the area, making approximately a dozen arrests.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/MnUrising/status/1400668536448692230\n\n\n
The model in which city officials establish a financial relationship with an organization like Agape that can present itself as the face of the movement is a tried-and-true method for co-optation and counterinsurgency. Such patron-client relationships are often an essential part of the process through which social movements are channeled back into perpetuating the prevailing order. Consequently, the spaces of confrontation that the movement opened up are craftily shut down—not by a violent raid, but by a snazzy non-profit that interfaces with the community on behalf of capitalists. The Non-Profit Industrial Complex effectively lures people, including BIPOC folks who are potential rebels, into salaried jobs that offer individual material security at the expense of the risks of pursuing collective liberation.
\n\nIt can be easiest to identify outright collaboration when there is a flow of money. Sometimes, those who grab the mic and lead the chants are navigating their day-to-day lives through a career-oriented lens, in their choice to commit to the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which reinforces state power. It is our responsibility to recognize when people who utilize community-oriented language are doing so as a means of employing soft state power. It is up to us to look at their actions and where they make their money.
\n\nIn this case, however, other BIPOC participants in the movement were able to outflank the organization that had taken the side of city officials. Specifically, the courage of women owning their power and refusing to back down trumped misogynistic aggression from all sides. The square defenders—in spite of the many contradictions that led to the raid—have demonstrated how important it is for movements to maintain autonomy from all state and financial institutions. A principled collective opposition to collaborationism must be at the forefront of every fight for freedom.
\n\nThanks to their brave efforts, George Floyd Square still exists. There was an assembly there this morning, as on every previous morning. The barricades are back up around the liberated zone. But the barricades do not make the zone—the community does. Originally, the barricades were comprised of repurposed dumpsters and the cars of militants, not barriers provided by the city. No matter how many times the city pays its detractors to remove them, the people of Minneapolis will rise to the occasion of keeping George Floyd Square closed until justice arrives—on our terms.
\n\nThe struggle continues.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/06/04/4.jpg\")
\nOn April 11, 2021, a police officer in the Twin Cities suburb Brooklyn Center pulled over Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, allegedly on account of expired tags. Taking place in the midst of the trial of the police officer who murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis last May, this murder shows that the situation for Black people threatened with police violence has hardly changed since May 2020. There are important conclusions to be drawn from this.
\n\nKim Potter, the police officer who murdered Daunte Wright, was the president of the Brooklyn Center Police Officer’s Association; she has worked for the department for almost 25 years. Although the mayor of Brooklyn Center has tried to excuse the murder as an accident, in the body camera footage, she can be seen handling the gun for several seconds before shooting him. The murder of Daunte Wright is not the result of a lack of training or experience or proper protocols. It is the predictable result of sending armed mercenaries out to terrorize communities with impunity.
\n\nOfficer Kim Potter and Police Chief of Brooklyn Center Tim Gannon resigned today, but this does nothing to diminish the likelihood that such murders will recur. This is not a matter of a few bad apples.
\n\nLast summer’s demonstrations against police murders were ultimately defused in part by politicians’ promises to defund police departments. None of these promises have resulted in meaningful change. Today, those who oppose police killings must recognize that the instructive precedent from the movements of 2020 was the actual destruction of the Third Precinct by grassroots efforts, not any of the reformist efforts that followed. Police abolition is not going to come about via the same channels that maintain the police in the first place.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1381455817388531714\n\n\n
The anarchist news source It’s Going Down offers an overview of solidarity demonstrations that have taken place around the country in response to the murder of Daunte Wright. While the immediate conditions that caused tens of thousands to enter open struggle against the police in May and June 2020 have shifted with the end of the Trump administration and the receding of the pandemic, the confrontational approach that people employed last summer has become normalized, and the range of tactics that are widely considered legitimate has expanded. This represents a new baseline for struggles against white supremacy and police violence from here forward.
\n\nIn the following account from Minneapolis, we review the events of the past 48 hours, including the vigil in memory of Daunte Wright.
\n\nA cold, rainy spring in Minnesota. A young couple going out, a traffic stop, a life. Daunte Wright, 20 years old, stopped for expired tags, murdered by the state. At the official press conference, in addition to releasing the bodycam footage, Mike Elliot, the first African American Mayor of the suburb Brooklyn Center, claims to believe that the officer, Kim Potter, made a “tragic” mistake, intending to fire her taser but instead firing her pistol in an “accidental discharge.” Yet another accident for the police—yet another death for the people.
\n\nJamar Clark, November 16, 2015—
\nPhilando Castile, July 6, 2016—
\nGeorge Floyd, May 28, 2020—
\nDaunte Wright, April 12, 2021.
All young Black men, all in Minnesota, all in Hennepin county, all murdered by police.
\n\nWhile Daunte Wright was going about his day not knowing it would be his last, people around the nation were watching the trial of George Floyd’s murderer. When the police officer pulled him over, the prosecution led by Minnesota Attorney general Keith Ellison was concluding their case to the jury.
\n\nThe first Muslim to be elected to national office, Keith Ellison represents the best of what electoralism has to offer and is the most progressive part of the Democratic party. His son, Jeremiah Ellison, has been leading the call within the Minneapolis City Council to defund the police; his ex-wife is on the school board, pushing through a new plan to address the achievement gap in Minnesota. Ellison has been a friend to labor and is endorsed by the Farmer Labor party, Minnesota DFL. The Democratic Socialists of America endorsed him in his bid to become Chairman of the Democratic Party in 2017.
\n\nThe community rose up in response to the murder. Many people took to the streets on Sunday night, with locals and young people in the front. The police response was heavy handed: they attacked the demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets, and batons, firing indiscriminately into the residential apartments and low-income housing surrounding the Brooklyn Center police station. Residents fought back, enraged by this blatant disregard for their safety. Pitched battles raged into the night while local businesses burned. The next morning, the news spread that Daunte Wright’s family had called a vigil for 7 pm Monday evening at the intersection of Kathrene Drive and 63rd, where the police had gunned Daunte down in front of his girlfriend.
\n\nThe state responded by putting a curfew into effect starting at 7 pm and running until 6 am. The vigil was moved to 6 pm.
\n\nSince 2020, opponents of police violence have maintained an autonomous zone at George Floyd Square. In the days following the murder of George Floyd, people erected a wooden sculpture of a raised fist in the square, when that square was arguably the focal point of the resistance. Since then, the George Floyd Square Autonomous Zone has been defended by the community and other groups as a space for organizing locally and throughout Minnesota. Community defenders of the George Floyd Square Autonomous Zone brought the sculpture of the fist to the vigil in memory of Daunte Wright, representing collective defense of all Black lives and defiance of the system that takes them.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/13/1.jpg\")
The fist from George Floyd Square.
\nMourners gathered from all across the Twin Cities metropolitan area, descending on the Brooklyn Center police station. Local residents enraged by the police tear-gassing and shooting up their homes with rubber bullets took to the street in the hundreds despite freezing rain. The protest swelled to over 1000 participants by 8 pm; the police precinct was surrounded. Hundreds more protesters circled the area in their cars, honking, blocking traffic, and hampering the police from marshaling their forces. The crowd was lighting off fireworks; the authorities feared another total breakdown of control.
\n\nMayor Mike Elliot called on Minnesota’s Democratic Governor to call in the National Guard as well as officers from other local jurisdictions. Ahead of the verdict in the George Floyd murder trial, an entire emergency plan had been drawn up involving the deployment of over 1000 National Guard troops. Now, as night fell and local residents of the predominantly Black low-income community vented their sadness and rage, the progressive state Democrats decided to unleash the full power and fury of the National Guard and an army of local officers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/04/13/2.jpg\")
People gathering for the vigil for Daunte Wright.
\nMarching with batons out, the police assaulted mourners and press alike, firing gas, rubber bullets, cracking heads with a methodical fury in order to divide the protesters while armored vehicles established a perimeter. Hundreds were dispersed. Protesters in their cars were pursued and arrested. Repeatedly, when the police stopped a car, they surrounded it and pointed assault rifles in the face of the driver.
\n\nIn the midst of the chaos, at approximately 11 pm, Mayor Mike Elliot and Attorney General Keith Ellison showed up to plead with the crowd.
\n\nFlanked by guardsmen, riot cops, and private armed security, the representatives of the state addressed the demonstrators. “We hear you, please go home,” mayor Mike Elliot pleaded, wearing a military grade helmet, sweating in the freezing rain.
\n\n“Get your pigs off the streets!” responded angry mourners.
\n\n“I can’t do that, we need—everybody needs—to go home. We hear you.” begged Elliot.
\n\nKeith Ellison jumped in. “You know where I was today. You know justice will be served.”
\n\n“Like the justice you’re getting for Floyd? We just lost another man out here!” came the response.
\n\n“Look, justice will be done, the curfew has been called and y’all need to get back home! We don’t want no more casualties, we don’t want no more martyrs, we don’t want nobody else getting hurt out here tonight!” Ellison withdrew behind the police line.
\n\n“We don’t need any more martyrs.” A subtle threat from Attorney General Keith Ellison.
\nWe don’t need any more martyrs. In this exchange, Attorney General Ellison said everything you need to know about electoral reformism and the state. He would have us believe that even as Attorney General, standing with the Mayor, he has no authority over the police or the National Guard. His statement was a threat, implying that lethal force would be used to enforce the curfew if necessary and that he could do nothing to stop it—or else, that he chooses not to.
\n\nThis helps to explain why demonstrators have continued to utilize tactics that can exert pressure even in the face of coordinated state violence. On the evening of April 11, at least 52 businesses throughout the Twin Cities area had experienced vandalism or looting. By the end of the night following April 12, dozens of businesses had been vandalized and looted once again, including a Target store, a cell phone store, a Dollar Tree at a strip mall at which all the shops were looted, and several other targets in uptown Minneapolis and additional strip malls.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1381813459092959237\n\n\n
In the end, justice is just us. We are the ones who must determine what the police can get away with, what the consequences are for them and the government that pays them—not the courts run by the same system that sends them out to attack us.
\n\nWe are standing up in Brooklyn Center. We are standing up in George Floyd Square. We are standing up everywhere.
\n\nThe verdict on the George Floyd murder case is in—along with the cases of Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, and Daunte Wright. These were not accidents, but the inevitable result of the white supremacist violence at the core of the governing institutions of this society. We have to abolish these institutions and the order they maintain. Everyone who stands in the way of this is accessory to murder.
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/10/01/the-truth-about-the-truth-about-todays-anarchists-the-ex-worker-responds-to-the-new-york-times", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/10/01/the-truth-about-the-truth-about-todays-anarchists-the-ex-worker-responds-to-the-new-york-times", "title": "The Truth about “The Truth about Today’s Anarchists” : The Ex-Worker Responds to the New York Times", "summary": "A detailed rebuttal of Farah Stockman's poorly researched opinion piece in the New York Times blaming anarchists for countrywide unrest.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/01/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/01/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-10-01T17:04:48Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:46Z", "tags": [ "anarchism", "media", "Black Lives Matter", "violence", "Minneapolis", "new york times" ], "content_html": "Yesterday, Farah Stockman from the New York Times editorial board published an article claiming to be “The Truth About Today’s Anarchists.” It draws on the work of an amateur conspiracy theorist, a poorly researched report from a nonprofit including a former Republican state attorney general and a former NYPD chief, a couple interviews with politicians and reformers, decontextualized and misleading references to two of our own publications, and regurgitated right-wing talking points to argue that violent anarchists are somehow controlling the ongoing countrywide protests but don’t care about Black lives.
\n\nWhat follows is a detailed refutation of this dangerously irresponsible article. Fortunately, initial reactions on social media suggest that the reading public has largely seen through its distortions. Nonetheless, we want to take the opportunity to reply in full—because despite its absurdity, the article touches on critical issues that deserve to be addressed. This is an opportunity to set the record straight, to explain why many anarchists have participated in these protests, and to elaborate our vision for a freer world.
\n\nFor more on this subject, consult our earlier article, “This Is Anarchy: Eight Ways the Black Lives Matter and Justice for George Floyd Uprisings Reflect Anarchist Ideas in Action.” For our own account of how the uprising spread and why the authorities themselves were chiefly responsible for the widespread adoption of confrontational tactics, read “Snapshots from the Uprising.” If you want to know more about what anarchists believe and desire, start with To Change Everything: An Anarchist Appeal.
\n\nHow did Stockman learn this “truth”? She appears to have spoken to at least one experienced activist in the course of her research, though she didn’t use any of the information or contacts that person offered her. There are thousands she could have approached—but she didn’t include perspective from any of them.
\n\nInstead, the article’s primary source is Jeremy Lee Quinn, an amateur conspiracy theorist posing as an investigative journalist who has no more familiarity with anarchists than one can gain from standing around at a couple demonstrations. Admitting he has no prior background on the subject, he claims to have “gone undercover” during black bloc protests in several cities over a period of months, and has now posted a website full of videos and disjointed rants as “a non-partisan source of information on riot Direct Action [sic] and how it may succeed under the cover of protest.” Last week, this self-described “centrist” reached out to Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys, the group of violent extreme-right thugs who Trump called on to “stand by” during his debate with Joe Biden on Tuesday. Addressing Tarrio, Quinn claimed that “the establishment media has completely dropped the ball” and implied that he had penetrated “a fog of propaganda that obscured how the insurrectionist Anarchists (Antifa) have worked.”
\n\nStockman bought Quinn’s story wholesale, casting him as the humble hero of a crusade to save a peaceful protest movement from violent mobs of white anarchists who are working to undermine it for their own agendas. In her account, these anarchists are actually coordinating the unrest through social media, “hiding in plain sight” and conducting a “violent insurgency” under the guise of the legitimate peaceful movement, while relying on the liberal media and duped public to minimize the threat they pose. Black protest leaders who are working for constructive change resent these efforts to appropriate their struggles, but are powerless to stop them. Unless they are checked, Stockman implies, they will not only delegitimize the movement in the eyes of the public, but escalate their violence and mayhem.
\n\nDoes this sound familiar? That’s because it comes directly from President Donald Trump—who began tweeting that anarchists were behind the protests within their first days—and Attorney General Bill Barr and Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf, who have worked tirelessly to divide and conquer the movement against police and white supremacy by continuously trying to change the subject to alleged anarchist criminals and antifa “terrorists.”
\n\nThe problem is that it’s nonsense. Worse, it’s a pack of lies. Any self-respecting journalist who repeats it should be ashamed.
\n\nPermit us to detail why.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1311599760432721920\n\n\n
Our colleagues at It’s Going Down have published a lengthy thread going into many of the specific problems with Quinn’s reporting in detail, most of which we will pass over here.
\n\nSo why is a seemingly critical journalist repeating these absurd and harmful stories? On what basis does she make these claims?
\n\nRhetoric about the role of white anarchists as “agitators” surfaced in the first days of the rebellion in Minneapolis. It had existed as a trope for years before the Floyd protests, often used as a wedge to shut out militant participation and centralize control over tactics in protest campaigns. As the rebellion spread from Minneapolis across the US and beyond, participants actively discussed racial, political, and tactical dynamics in the streets. Despite initial reports blaming white agitators for violence, most subsequent accounts recognized that the riotous crowds have been multiracial; that “outside agitator” narratives were false; and that anarchists made up only a small part of most large demonstrations. Black anarchists have been actively participating in the rebellions from the very beginning, making it clear that neither Black reformists nor white anarchists are calling the shots. Even the government’s own reports acknowledged that their “antifa” bugaboo had no significant organizing role in the protests, while emphasizing that both countless threats and numerous acts of actual violence were carried out by Trump’s extreme right defenders.
\n\nOf course, some anarchists have participated alongside thousands of other people in black blocs that have confronted police and attacked symbols of state violence. The use of confrontational tactics continues to be a controversial issue as the movement evolves. But any moral calculation would recognize that the real issue here is the widespread and thoroughly documented violence committed against protesters, rather than by them. While a range of opinions exists in the movement over how effective confrontational protest tactics usually are and how best to respect our different approaches without undermining others’ goals, it’s clear that our most urgent shared need is to defend ourselves against the attacks intended to terrorize the movement. Protestors have suffered tens of thousands of arrests and countless acts of unprovoked brutality at the hands of police across the country, including the murders of over a dozen people by police, National Guardsmen, and right-wing vigilantes. For self-styled “journalists” like Quinn, these facts are unworthy of mention, eclipsed by a single-minded insistence on blaming the “violence” of the protests on anarchists.
\n\nStockman disingenuously reports that Quinn’s investigations were prompted by his concern that anarchists’ militant tactics “would set off a backlash that could help get President Trump re-elected.” It is unlikely that this was a sincere concern for someone so eager to collaborate with the Proud Boys. Quinn’s shocking conclusion, Stockman breathlessly reports, was that the “mayhem” following Floyd’s murder “wasn’t mayhem at all”—rather than the “spontaneous eruption of anger at racial injustice” that countless reports described, the uprising was “strategically planned, facilitated and advertised on social media by anarchists.”
\n\nThis claim is absurd—and frankly racist. To insist that a small group of white anarchists somehow managed to coordinate a multiethnic movement that brought tens of millions of Americans into the streets and direct it to their own ends smacks of the worst conspiracy theory thinking. Anarchists of various ethnicities certainly supported, promoted, and participated in the protests, and in some instances modeled confrontational tactics that became contagious. But the most spirited efforts would have been meaningless without the autonomous efforts of countless millions of others. Groups of anarchists planned their own participation, but none directed the movement as a whole. Anarchists provided material support and ideas—but they provided them to a horizontal movement drawing on the skills and energy of countless others. Anarchists advertised protests through social media, like most of the other participants, but by any reckoning the participation of self-identified anarchists, online or in the streets, was dwarfed by the crowds with whom anarchists shared many values and desires but no distinct ideology. To claim otherwise misunderstands the nature of leaderless movements, overestimates the power and influence of a single strand in a diverse web, and denies the agency and leadership of countless others without whom the movement could not have happened.
\n\nQuinn’s transparent agenda as an attention-seeking aspiring pundit explains his efforts to deceive. But why did Stockman fall for it?
\n\nShe cites an account CrimethInc. published describing the siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis—though she either failed to understand the text, or willfully misrepresents it. She summarizes the text as a prescription for “Asymmetric Warfare 101,” suggesting that black bloc property destruction was used to prompt police violence against “innocent demonstrators” in hopes that this would delegitimize police. In fact, the anonymously submitted text describes how, without central coordination, shared goals, or political ideology, a wide range of different people spread out over a vast area achieved one of the most memorable victories of the entire movement, inspiring resistance around the globe. In misrepresenting her sources, Stockman echoes Fox News, which also misrepresented this report as a prescriptive program to provoke violence, citing an account of an event marked by the diversity of its participants as evidence of a shadowy anarchist conspiracy pulling the strings.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1311791649505378310\n\n\n
So if Stockman did not talk to anarchists and did not pay much attention to the anarchist sources she cites, what information convinces her to believe Quinn’s account of the anarchists as puppeteers controlling the protests?
\n\nStockman uncritically repeats the conclusions of a report by the Network Contagion Research Institute, a non-profit that claims to have “no political agenda.”1 The report’s co-authors include a former Republican state attorney general, a former NYPD chief, and a handful of academics, none of whom have ever studied anarchism. It uses a range of dubious associations through word clouds and quantitative analyses of tweets and Reddit posts to imply that what it calls “militant anarcho-socialists” are “using social media to instigate widespread violence against political opponents and law enforcement.”
\n\nOver the past months of protest, no one has documented “widespread violence” by anarchists against political opponents or law enforcement, while the widespread violence by far-right groups and law enforcement against protestors has been widely documented. So how do they make this case?
\n\nTake Figure 4, a “word cloud” showing associations between different key terms on Reddit. The term cop, it turns out, is associated with “reactive outrage and violent depictions in terms like ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘gestapo.’” That’s right—when anarchists post online that cops are indiscriminately beating protestors and using gestapo tactics, according to these brilliant researchers, it’s the anarchists who are being violent. It would be less violent, presumably, to pretend that police never beat anyone at all.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/01/3.jpg\")
First of all, Chapo Trap House fans on reddit are hardly identical with the US anarchist movement. But what do you expect from throwing money at a former Republican state attorney general and a former NYPD chief to study a topic they know nothing about?
\nSection 2 warns that anarchists are spreading memes that include “tactical information” such as links that promote “the use of encrypted communication.” So when anarchists share information on how anyone can protect their privacy against surveillance, this is presented as proof of violent intentions.
\n\nSection 2.1 shows that during the protests, “anarcho-socialists” used online forums “to recruit support and followers like other extremist groups do.” Very insightful! Clearly, the fact that many people were curious to hear from radicals who want to see an end to police violence during a wave of protests against police violence is hard evidence that anarchists are equivalent to jihadi and white supremacist groups. Figure 14 shows that the number of tweets about July 25, which some had identified as a day of protest, peaked on—you guessed it, July 25. Brilliant work here, folks. Worse still, the hashtag in question, “#J25,” could have been used by anyone on the internet aiming to designate this date, not just protesters.
\n\nFigure 17 reproduces a tweet calling for the Seattle police chief to be “sacked,” like an earlier chief who was fired during protests in 1999; but the report’s caption falsely claims that the tweet “calls for sacking the police precinct,” then blames this tweet for having incited violence against the building. So when anarchists call for a public official to be fired, we are inciting violence? One might more precisely speak about the violence being done to common sense in a report of this caliber.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/01/2.jpg\")
This is particularly embarrassing—they misrepresent the explicit meaning of the tweet, conflating sacking—i.e., firing—a police chief with sacking—i.e., laying siege to—a police precinct.
\nThe report with “no political agenda” concludes by echoing Trump’s line equating white nationalists to anti-fascists, ominously predicting that “attacks on vital infrastructure” and “the possibility of a mass-casualty event” may be imminent if these nefarious anarcho-socialists are allowed to continue unchecked. There have been no precedents for “mass-casualty events” linked to anarchists in the United States for a full century, though white supremacists have carried out a large number of mass killings in the past decade alone.
\n\nApart from the willfully poor-quality “research” in this absurd report, its framing and conclusions are lifted straight out of Attorney General Barr and Fox News’s playbook. When anarchists call out state violence, accuse them of being violent for doing so; when anarchists share non-violent self-defense tactics, cite this as evidence of violent intent; make spurious comparisons between diametrically opposed groups based on superficial similarities to heighten fear; pack in some misleading numerical data, and conclude by projecting sensationalized fantasies of apocalyptic violence to justify repression.
\n\nThis is the report that New York Times editorialist Stockman urges us to “check out.” She is correct in noting that the report “will almost certainly catch the attention of conservative media and William Barr’s Department of Justice,” whose agenda she is apparently keen to promote.
\n\nSo shoddy research, copyediting, and argumentation are not the sole province of self-styled amateur sleuths like Jeremy Lee Quinn. These characterize practically all of the material available from hostile think tanks, as well. In both cases—as in the case of Stockman’s own work—the studies only exist to fulfill an external agenda, so there is no incentive to rigorous research.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/01/1.jpg\")
Would you look at that—the frequency of tweets with the hashtag “J25” peaked around… July 25. Clearly this must be hard evidence of central coordination and terroristic intent!
\nThen comes the strangest part of the article. In a rare moment of honesty, Stockman soberly assesses the impact of the riots, and concludes, “Anarchy got results.”
\n\nOf course, as we’ve pointed out, it would be absurd for anarchists to take credit for a widespread, wildly diverse rebellion that was not led by any group nor driven by any single ideology. But it would be accurate to describe the decentralized, leaderless, tactically diverse, direct action-based movement as “anarchy.” This is what anarchists have been calling for all along: egalitarian, horizontal, voluntary movements.
\n\nWhile lamenting the destruction caused by rioting in Minneapolis, Stockman acknowledges that she was wrong to think that “looting and arson would derail the urgent demands for racial justice.” In fact, media attention was captivated and public support soared precisely in response to the fiercest moments of struggle.
\n\nBut, Stockman notes, more recently, there has been a decline in public support (which is to say white support; Black support has held steady, according to the poll she cites) for the Black Lives Matter protests. What’s the reason for this?
\n\nFor Stockman, it’s because “insurrectionary anarchy brings diminishing returns.” In other words, it’s the fault of those who continue to courageously confront police in the streets. Apparently, the same public that once praised rioters now increasingly condemns them as time passes.
\n\nBut this doesn’t make much sense. The fiercest rioting by far took place in the first weeks of the uprising, when public support was solidly at its highest. While a few locations such as Portland have maintained continuous militant protest, they’re the exception; the widespread looting and property destruction that marked the early days in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York City, and beyond have ceased. It seems senseless to lay blame for any shift in support at the feet of the small number of militant protestors who are still involved.
\n\nWhat has changed, rather, is that Trump, Barr, and the right-wing media have conducted a relentless campaign to discredit the protests. It’s a classic counter-insurgency strategy: if you can’t repress a movement, try to delegitimize, divide, and conquer it. The primary tactic they have employed has been labeling anyone who opposes the status quo “anarchists” or “antifa,” spelling out the implication that they are all terrorists and criminals, and spreading the lie that anarchists are somehow in control of the whole thing. This has been surprisingly successful. They’ve managed to get everyone from Joe Biden to liberal protest leaders to join them in condemning the most radical participants, sowing discord and weakening the movement. This is the key reason why support for the protests has declined among white people specifically—and to be even more precise, only among white Trump supporters.
\n\nStockman’s editorial plays right into this counter-insurgency strategy. Her text perfectly exemplifies the dynamics that have led to a decline in conservative white support for the movement. It is a part of the exact problem she bemoans.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/10/01/4.jpg\")
\nAt that point, Stockman levies serious charges against anarchists: anarchists “complicate life for those working within the system to halt police violence.” She cites a few Black politicians and activists who disagree with or have been criticized by anarchists.
\n\nThis is important, and we should not sweep it under the rug. There are serious differences of opinion in the movement regarding strategy and tactics, regarding working within systems versus rejecting and dismantling them, and regarding whose perspectives should be centered in resolving these disagreements. In these debates, many white radicals, including some anarchists, have been obnoxious or arrogant, unaware of their privilege, and disrespectful to more experienced or directly impacted organizers. This is inexcusable, and it should be challenged. Anarchists’ desires for a world without hierarchies should inspire them to forge interdependent, accountable relationships with other communities in struggle, to listen respectfully and learn from others in the movement even when they disagree, and to be conscious of how their actions impact others. There is a long way to go to build the bonds of trust across lines of difference necessary to forge durable, powerful movements that challenge the dynamics of white supremacy within and beyond them.
\n\nBut Stockman’s discussion does not help us to do this constructively. It ignores the many important conversations that have happened in the streets, community meetings, and online regarding how best to resolve political differences. It neglects how the movement’s divisions over strategy and tactics do not break down neatly as a split between white anarchists and Black peaceful protestors, but between older and younger Black activist generations and along other lines as well. And Stockman’s account champions a single path to social change around racism and policing—reform in collaboration with police and local government—which has proved remarkably ineffective at actually stopping racist police violence.
\n\nFurthermore, it assumes that all anarchists are white and that we are not directly impacted by police violence or white supremacy. Vanessa Taylor’s brilliant article on Black anarchists in the recent protests explains how the presence of Black anarchists
\n\n\n\n\n“complicates the notion of an ‘outside agitator’—to describe anarchists as random white people outside of Black and otherwise oppressed communities is to erase Black anarchists—as well as the ‘peaceful’ protester narrative that others try to conjure to oppose Trump.”
\n
But, she provocatively asks, “Why is there an obligation to be peaceful if you are dying?” According to a Dallas anarchist named Tina,
\n\n\n\n\n“Trump labeling protesters as anarchists is another form of white supremacy at work. Blackness is already anarchy in white folks’ minds. I don’t think a Black person necessarily has to call themselves an anarchist to be one, because in the land where whiteness is law and order you are already one.”
\n
Centering Black anarchist experiences breaks down the binary logic of Stockman’s article, forcing us to understand political differences in a multiracial movement through a different lens.
\n\nTo Stockman, because anarchist approaches aim to prevent the consolidation of power in the hands of politicians and activists, they can only be destructive, never constructive. On this basis, she accuses anarchists of being “fickle allies,” since even “if they help you get into power, they will try to oust you the following day, since power is what they are against.”
\n\nThis is as close as she gets to the truth. Anarchists are not trying to get anyone into power over anyone else. Anarchists are trying to get everyone into power at once—to create egalitarian relationships based on cooperation and mutual respect, not force and domination. This is a real difference between Stockman and the anarchists she smears. The question is how to resolve it.
\n\nStockman’s concluding assessment accuses anarchists of being “experts at unraveling an old order but considerably less skilled at building a new one.” Yet had she actually spoken to a single anarchist in her exposition of “the truth” about them, she would have gotten quite a different picture. From the first moments that the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in North America, anarchists immediately mobilized to form mutual aid networks, drawing on extensive experience doing disaster relief and protest support. These became some of the most popular and urgently needed institutions helping to ensure community survival while our rulers bickered and dragged their feet. Beyond their immediate practical value, mutual aid networks model an anarchist vision of a self-organized world of freely shared resources rooted in an ethic of solidarity—a vision anarchists have been promoting for decades through Really Really Free Markets, Food Not Bombs meals, and many other institutions meant to build a new world.
\n\nStockman did not trouble herself to learn who anarchists are, what anarchists actually believe, or how anarchists put it into practice. It was easier for her to copy and paste from Trump’s playbook, backed up by her source—who, his claims to be an “infiltrator” notwithstanding, clearly knows even less than she does.
\n\nBut Stockman has saved the worst for last. The article concludes by claiming that for anarchists, “it’s not really about George Floyd or Black lives, but insurrection for insurrection’s sake.”
\n\nThis kind of demonizing, divide-and-conquer language is offensive and harmful to all who are striving to cooperate across lines of difference. It’s also absurd and inaccurate.
\n\nFirst and foremost: Stockman herself acknowledged just a few paragraphs before that anarchy got results—her words, not ours! How can she possibly justify claiming that anarchists are only interested in insurrection for insurrection’s sake? Given that the reforms she praises have been tried many times without making a dent in police killings, it might be more accurate to conclude that reformers are the ones who are only interested in reform for reform’s sake—perhaps because they want to preserve the positions of the reformers in the power structure. By contrast, one could argue that the people who rioted after George Floyd’s killing, including the handful of insurrectionary anarchists among them, apparently did so because that was the most effective thing they believed they could do to force a national reckoning with racist police murder. As Stockman herself admitted, so-called peaceful protests didn’t attract media attention, didn’t result in institutional changes, and didn’t compel the country to confront the racist brutality that characterizes Black experiences with police every day.
\n\nIf Stockman had the courage to take her own observations seriously, then, she might be in the streets rioting, rather than drawing a salary trying to sow division in movements that have finally started to push back effectively against police violence.
\n\nInsurrectionary anarchists believe that disrupting the normal functioning of the state and the economy can open up spaces of possibility for people to relate to each other differently, to imagine a different world, to experiment with new ways of organizing daily life. The uprisings have shown that this is possible. From protests to autonomous zones to police-free neighborhoods, the spaces that confrontational tactics have opened up over the past year have helped transform abolition from a pipe dream to a possibility that warrants serious discussion and debate. They’ve served as laboratories for freedom—obviously not utopias, but places we can start to remake the world together. There are serious problems, including how to preserve safety and resolve conflict, how to accommodate differing visions, and how to meet everyone’s basic needs outside of the economy. But it’s a start—rather than repeating the old rituals endlessly, always reaching the same dead ends—and it’s only possible as a consequence of making a dramatic break with the present.
\n\nWe can’t speak for other anarchists, but we can speak for ourselves. Yes, we have goals that extend beyond obtaining justice for George Floyd alone. We want to see a world in which all Black lives are valued and no one need fear being killed or terrorized by police—and we believe that to get there will require directly confronting the violent systems of power responsible for Floyd’s death, everywhere, not merely securing criminal charges for the latest killers. We live in a world in which the capitalist economy keeps almost all poor people under the heels of bosses and landlords—particularly Black and brown poor folks. So we’re fighting to transform the economy, too—because Black Lives Matter is just an empty slogan if we ignore the poverty that makes so many people’s lives a constant struggle. And while we’re at it, we can’t forget the ways that the same structures of policing hold our borders in place, dehumanize migrants, and inflame xenophobia—or the role of the US military in policing the entire globe to secure access to oil and raw materials—or how incipient fascism in the United States imitates similar authoritarianism from Brazil to Turkey to Russia.
\n\nThe point isn’t to distract from the central issues that prompted the uprising. The point is to tackle these problems at their roots, we have to understand that there are no single issues, and truly systematic change involves more than charging a few killer cops or passing a few local reforms. To change anything, we have to change everything.
\n\nOn the subject of insurrectionary anarchism, Stockman cherry-picks two sentences from Episode 9 of the Ex-Worker podcast, released seven years ago:
\n\n\n\n\n“We are not sure if the socialist, communist, democratic, or even anarchist utopia is possible. Rather, some insurrectionary anarchists believe that the meaning of being an anarchist lies in the struggle itself and what that struggle reveals.”
\n
She takes these lines out of context to accomplish her purpose: implying that anarchists only care for destruction. In context, however, this quotation describes the process of how movements grow and evolve. As the Zapatistas say, we make the path by walking. That is—what shows us how to move forward isn’t an abstract utopian vision, but the concrete experiences of people resisting oppression together in the streets and in our everyday lives.
\n\nThis doesn’t mean that we don’t fight to win or that we don’t care about the outcome. Of course we do! Our lives and the lives of our loved ones, our dignity and our freedom, our most cherished ideals—we know that all of these are at stake and more.
\n\nRather, it means that we recognize that the struggle for freedom was going on long before we were born and will continue long after we’re gone. If you think the US is a fundamentally just society and all that is needed is just to make a couple tweaks to keep cops from killing quite so often, then you can imagine political struggle as a simple means to a simple end. But for those of us who intend to spend our whole lives working towards a freer and more egalitarian world, we have to find meaning in the struggle itself lest despair consume us. Like the fighters in the French resistance to the Nazis, we don’t need hope to keep fighting; resistance to tyranny is a way of life. The anarchist hypothesis is that we can still find ways to forge meaningful lives in the struggle against police brutality, racial injustice, economic exploitation, ecological destruction, encroaching fascism, and worse. This does not come from believing that total change is just around the corner—though we cherish the moments when it feels that way. It comes from believing that acting against oppression is always ennobling and worthwhile, and provides the most meaningful foundation we can imagine for our relations with others.
\n\nSo let the New York Times side with Trump, Barr, and other right-wing conspiracy theorists. It won’t stop us, and it won’t stop the movements that we have always supported without ever seeking to control. We know what matters. We have not forgotten all the lives lost to the everyday violence of American policing, nor the sacrifices of those who came before us.
\n\nAs we head into the frightening weeks ahead, with fascism or civil war looming closer than ever, we don’t know how things will turn out. But whatever happens, we will be in the streets, fighting for freedom while there is still breath in our lungs. To all the readers of the Times who have the sense to see through Stockman’s shoddy journalism—who seek the real truth about today’s anarchists—we look forward to meeting you there.
\n\nIncidentally, the NCRI is funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. Not only have anarchists never received the checks from George Soros that right-wing media assured us he would be sending, he’s actually underwriting “research” intended to justify the repression of social movements. ↩
\nAcross over two months of protests, demonstrators in Portland have experimented with a variety of tactics and strategies. The clashes in Portland drew international attention starting in mid-June, when footage spread of federal agents in unmarked cars snatching demonstrators off the sidewalks and Donald Trump announced that federal agents would be using this model to intervene in other cities around the United States. After Trump’s announcement, the demonstrations in Portland grew exponentially, drawing thousands each night, until the governor of Oregon declared that federal agents would be withdrawn from the streets. In the following overview, participants in the Portland demonstrations describe some of the tools and tactics they have seen employed there.
\n\nMany of these tools work best in combination with each other. As usual, diversity of tactics is key—not just tolerance for different approaches, but thinking about how to combine all of them into a symbiotic whole. Soon, we aim to follow up this cursory review with a more thorough accounting of the full range of street tactics and equipment relevant to today’s demonstrators.
\n\nThe Portland protests have also produced some new terminology, such as the expression “swoop,” which describes what happens when a reformist with a megaphone makes a power play to hijack a gathering organized by people who want to see the police abolished. As demonstrators expand their notions of what tactics are appropriate in this swiftly polarizing society, we hope they will also expand their visions of what is worth fighting for, adopting horizontal models of organization and learning how to identify and resist power plays.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/5.jpg\")
Ready or not—the war is on.
\nDigital Security
\nMasking and Proper Attire
\nRiot Ribs, Food Carts, Infrastructure
\nLeaf Blowers
\nUmbrellas
\nShields
\nSports Equipment
\nBalloons and Bubbles
\nLasers
\nGraffiti
\nPaint Bombs
\nFireworks
\nFire
\nFence Toppling
\nDe-Arresting
\nCrowd Movement
\nDisabling Cameras, Breaking Windows
\nLegal Support, Jail Support
\nhttps://twitter.com/dougbrown8/status/1288732683917332480\n\n\n
This thread spells out how to protect your privacy via proper phone safety at demonstrations—before, during, and after the protest. You can find a lot of important information about general security in protest situations here.
\n\nWearing a mask is responsible from a medical perspective—in the era of the pandemic—but also for security reasons, to protect your privacy. Nowadays you don’t just have to worry about the police filming and arresting you, but also about far-right internet trolls trying to identify you from video footage.
\n\nIf demonstrators are dressed appropriately in black bloc fashion, it should be difficult to make out identifying particulars.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/arunindy/status/1288717970416398336\n\n\n
Pay attention to detail. Cover your tattoos and other unique traits. Cover your whole face, not just your mouth. There should be no visible logos on your clothes, shoes, or backpack. Read this for more details.
\n\nIt is really good for morale to have a group of people providing food and other needed resources. Portland protesters have been deeply thankful that Riot Ribs have come out to feed everyone free food. This enables people to stay longer and helps them to feel that it is worth the effort and risk to support the movement that nourishes them.
\n\nYou can read about Riot Ribs here.
\n\nFeds and cops know how important these mutual aid efforts are and intentionally target them in hopes of breaking the will of the demonstrators:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/griffinmalone6/status/1288757440729628673\n\n\n
Here you can “before” and “after” shots of the infrastructure one night that federal mercenaries attacked it:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/bitchwitch20/status/1287826105496346624\n\n\n
Unfortunately, uniformed officers are not the only danger threatening community infrastructure. In late July, Riot Ribs experienced a coup involving physical violence and intimidation. Wherever money is involved in activism, there is great risk of infighting unless the goals, structures, and expectations have been set very precisely in advance. The original Riot Ribs folks have left town, apparently taking the concept of Riot Ribs on the road to other cities as Revolution Ribs. Someone should write in detail about the rise, fall, and rebirth of Riot Ribs.
\n\nLeaf blowers can dispel tear gas or smoke.
\n\nTear “gas” is actually a fine particulate matter—imagine a bag of flour exploding, but much finer and lighter. When this particulate lands on you, it stays there and can be re-activated later, especially by water or sweat. For this reason, demonstrators have used leaf blowers to blow tear gas off of people after exposure—it is the same concept as taking a shower at the beach to get the last of the sand off your body.
\n\nBe careful not to blow tear gas in a direction where it could affect other people.
\n\nA single leaf blower can serve to blow gas from a single canister away from people until others can extinguish it, as demonstrated in this classic video from Hong Kong:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/demosisto/status/1188518932031762432\n\n\n
But for best results, use several leaf blowers together:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1288715582112591872\n\n\n
When you’re choosing a leaf blower, make sure it has a good fan and a wireless power source.
\n\nLeaf blowers work well in combination with umbrellas and shields. While the shields protect demonstrators against impact munitions, the leaf blowers keep the gas moving away from protesters until someone can run up and extinguish the canister or throw it back at the assaulters who shot it. Teamwork!
\n\nYou can see an example of this approach at the beginning of this video:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1289649707048869891\n\n\n
This article traces the origins of the leaf blower as a tool of struggle, from Hong Kong to the debut of the “dad bloc” in Portland.
\n\nIn some cases during the clashes in Portland, demonstrators with leaf blowers and other tools were able to keep the tear gas that federal mercenaries deployed entirely within the fence surrounding the so-called Justice Center:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/griffinmalone6/status/1287301017558687746\n\n\n
A few people in Portland have employed other less effective tools—such as box fans—for the same purpose:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/iwriteok/status/1287315866963460096\n\n\n
Not wishing to be outdone, federal mercenaries in Portland used a fogger to spray demonstrators with poison:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/dougbrown8/status/1288767229476012032\n\n\n
Umbrellas can serve several functions at once. An umbrella can block a stream of pepper spray. A full line of umbrellas at the front of a demonstration can block the view of unwanted cameras and police spotters stationed on rooftops—for example, concealing efforts to attack the joints of the fence, or making it safer to change clothes or employ other tactics. While not a reliable substitute for a shield, an umbrella can also aid in deflecting police bullets, green and blue powder marker rounds, and the laser spotters used by police to identify troublemakers.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/6.jpg\")
Umbrellas in action together.
\nOn January 20, 2017, during the fierce resistance to the inauguration of Donald Trump, a single umbrella played a crucial role in enabling a large number of demonstrators in the black bloc to break out of a police kettle and escape arrest. Previously seen in demonstrations in Hong Kong, the umbrella has become an anti-fascist symbol of sorts.
\n\nIn Portland, people with umbrellas have worked shoulder to shoulder with those carrying shields, creating a phalanx that can hold a line in a street, offering cover and protection to those behind them. In at least one case, demonstrators have forced federal mercenaries to retreat back into their courthouse by slowly advancing in a line like this.
\n\nUmbrellas, shields, and leaf blowers together, at the toppled fence:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/1misanthrophile/status/1287303576214106114\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/1misanthrophile/status/1287304370913124352\n\n\n
For their part, police haven’t hesitated to randomly steal demonstrators’ umbrellas.
\n\nSo far, in Portland, shields have mostly been used in defense against attacks from a distance—such as impact munitions, tear gas grenades, and the like—rather than against batons or police charges.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/3.jpg\")
\nDifferent shield designs are better for different situations. Like umbrellas and leaf blowers, shields can do things in large numbers that they cannot do alone. If you want to form a shield wall, ideally your shield should be big enough to cover your body. But the bigger your shield is, the heavier, bulkier, and more difficult to transport it will be. Smaller shields can be lighter and easier to sneak into a protest area. Many people have been carrying smaller shields with them while playing other roles besides maintaining the shield wall. Having even just a little bit of protection has saved people from serious injury and provided the confidence to hold territory they might not otherwise have been able to.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/4.jpg\")
If you don’t have anything else on hand, a skateboard can serve as a small, mobile shield.
\nA common Portland shield design involves cutting a plastic barrel vertically into three or four curved rectangles, leaving the circles from the top and bottom of the barrel for making smaller shields.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/ghostmobpdx/status/1289684460485500929\n\n\n
On the other hand, to form a shield wall, it is best to be able to line up shields so that they overlap slightly, as even slight breaks in the wall can present a vulnerability. Consequently, plywood may be preferable to barrels for that particular application.
\n\nSome in Portland have experimented with using lubricant on the edges of shields to make it more difficult for police to grab them during charges.
\n\nMake sure you’re using an effective technique when taking blows. If you are using a tall shield, hold it very tightly against your body where the center of your chest is; that makes you harder to move, preventing your adversary from pushing you around by your shield and ensuring that even if your shield moves, it still covers your body.
\n\nA shield wall in Oakland in solidarity with demonstrators in Portland:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/sarahbellelin/status/1287226244833202177\n\n\n
You can use sporting equipment to catch tear gas and throw it back. Just as you would when using a leaf blower, make sure you’re communicating well with other demonstrators and have a well-thought-out plan regarding what you are going to do with the canisters.
\n\nSome of the most effective tools for this purpose include lacrosse sticks, wiffle ball scoopers, and kitchen mitts—anything that enables you to engage with the canisters without touching them directly.
\n\nDemonstrators have used hockey sticks to hit the canisters back, too. Some people have been upgrading their umbrellas—for example, duct-taping an umbrella upside down on a lacrosse stick or hockey stick handle. The user can flip the tool around and use the side that makes the most sense in a given situation:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/pdxcarmedic/status/1288643538347933696\n\n\n
Although there are many videos on the internet of people attempting to cover tear gas canisters with traffic cones and the like, it is a much better idea to extinguish them in containers of water. This twitter thread shows how to extinguish tear gas canisters:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1265808184519864320\n\n\n
Demonstrators have used balloons to show which way the wind is blowing—in order to know which way tear gas will blow—and identify a rallying point on the ground.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/proudbulba/status/1287291571646259200\n\n\n
They have also employed bubbles to mock the force of the police:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mrolmos/status/1287306738106949633\n\n\n
In Portland, demonstrators have used lasers to disorient police and federal agents; they can also disable security cameras. It’s worth noting that pointing a laser at someone’s face is expressly illegal in Oregon and can draw a more aggressive response from police than defensive tools such as gas masks, shields, and leaf blowers. Those who have employed lasers by themselves have been targeted for arrest or shot with pepper balls and rubber bullets, as it is easy to trace the source of the laser unless the person directing it moves around rapidly between applications.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/7.jpg\")
Someone directing a laser at a mercenary who is discharging a chemical weapon at demonstrators.
\nAlmost all the lasers seen in Portland during the last weekend in July were the cheaper green ones, the 303’s (~50 mW), which can be deployed en masse to provide cover and irritate police. But the more powerful blue ones (~1w to 4w) are more effective against police, helicopters, and drones. They cost roughly $45 to $100.
\n\nPortlanders have also combined laser usage with high-powered flashlights on strobe function, in an effort to prevent the police from getting a good visual read on the crowd. Using bright lights to backlight a crowd might make it difficult for officers to pick out individuals at the front.
\n\nPolice also use lasers to identify demonstrators for targeting.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/2.jpg\")
Police employing lasers to target protesters.
\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mrolmos/status/1288016965148110849\n\n\n
This is so obvious that it almost doesn’t bear mentioning, but demonstrators have painted inspiring messages all over the area in which these clashes have taken place, underscoring the determination of the participants. Federal agents have intentionally refrained from cleaning graffiti off the courthouse in order to pose as helpless victims, when in fact their violent provocations have been the chief cause of the entire sequence of conflict. Nonetheless, although images of graffiti on federal property may serve to outrage far-right voters who already supported Trump and his goons, these images also convey the courageous defiance of those who are standing up to the authorities.
\n\nDemonstrators have used paint to reduce the vision of officers wearing visors or utilizing transparent shields. Officers need clear vision to be able to go on attacking people.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mathieulrolland/status/1287511718499766272\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/_whatriot/status/1288741205379956738\n\n\n
One of the classic models for making a paint bomb is to inflate a small balloon and dip it into wax over and over until the wax can hold shape by itself, then pop the balloon and fill the vessel with paint. Other containers, such as hollow Christmas tree ornaments, can serve the same function. You can find more information here.
\n\nThe use of fireworks as projectiles to disorient or discourage police and federal agents has made for fantastic visual displays, both in the moment and in the footage that circulates afterwards. Ordinarily, it is irresponsible to aim fireworks at human beings, but the state mercenaries here are equipped with so much taxpayer-funded protective gear that this arguably does more to prevent them from harming others than it does to put them at risk.
\n\nOn the other hand, many demonstrators are reporting that the booms of fireworks trigger their PTSD as a consequence of the ongoing trauma created by the booms of flash-bang grenades deployed by police. There are tradeoffs to everything.
\n\nProtesters in Portland have used fire to distract officers or to create an ambience of celebration. It’s important to be very conscious about safety issues when people are doing this; in some instances, trees or human beings have been exposed to flame. Some protesters have used mortar fireworks to set fires from a distance.
\n\nThe question of whether fire is appropriate at these protests has been hotly contested between demonstrators who are oriented towards symbolic displays and those who are focused on direct confrontation. Self-appointed protest police have been quick to put out fires, talk people out of setting them, and hassle people who have started them.
\n\nAll of the fires in question have been purely symbolic—in contrast to the burning of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis, nothing significant has been burned. Fire has been employed to burn flags, trash, the elk statue and its location after it was removed, and on one occasion a tiny pile of pamphlets or something like that in the police union (PPA) building. So all the debate is about symbolic fires.
\n\nProtestors scrambling to put out a small symbolic fire:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/human42lm/status/1289855658565632001\n\n\n
Symbolic fires:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/econbrkfst/status/1277384499953688576\n\n\n
Since the end of May, the police have installed several fences in Portland in attempts to control demonstrations, and demonstrators have repeatedly attempted to topple or relocate them. The earlier fences were mostly of the ordinary chainlink variety; protesters dubbed a series of such fences “The Sacred Fence.”
\n\nA word of caution about those previous fence relocations. Sometimes the fences that were torn down were left discarded in street intersections, creating a hazard of tripping or injury, especially when officers subsequently attacked with tear gas, forcing blinded demonstrators to retreat hastily. Be mindful about where you put a fence after you dismantle it.
\n\nIn late July, the authorities built an industrial barrier around the federal courthouse with a sturdier frame, fencing, and smaller holes, anchoring it with concrete blocks at the back. On subsequent nights, the blocks were moved the front side; protesters and reporters frequently stood on these blocks, but federal mercenaries would target those who did so with considerable fire from impact munition weapons.
\n\nOn July 25, some demonstrators equipped with power tools including a portable angle grinder managed to topple a section of the fence. The angle grinder was used effectively on the corner of the fence, but ran out of batteries before the job was finished. Lesson: charge up first and bring spare batteries.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/alexmilantracy/status/1287283495266525184\n\n\n
The use of power tools was new. Umbrellas and shields were critical in protecting the operator from press cameras and impact munitions, while leaf blowers kept the smoke away.
\n\n“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” as Archimedes said. Ultimately, the section of fence was pulled down toward the protestors side by a wide line of people, after earlier attempts to pull it apart at the place where the angle grinder had been employed, using a line of people pulling on ropes.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/oregonian/status/1288502532705259521\n\n\n
Possible improvements could include finishing the cuts into the hinges or using a sledgehammer to bang through an unfinished cut. It could make sense to arrange to have two sets of ropes pulling on both the left and right sides of a seam where the cut was made: two deep lines instead of one wide line. As people have discovered in the process of toppling statues, it is important to use a strap or chain that has no elasticity, rather than a rope that has too much give.
\n\nProtesters have used sections of the chainlink fence as “shields,” but these do not block gas or impact munitions. They have also used them, at least symbolically, to “barricade” the courthouse doors closed from the outside. This never actually stopped federal agents, as no one ever attempted to block the doors at the back of the courthouse.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/08/03/1.jpg\")
Symbolically blockading the front of the courthouse.
\nAt one point, demonstrators filled parts of the fence with expanding foam to prevent federal agents from shooting through it:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/iwriteok/status/1287276794710618113\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1287280037863895043\n\n\n
Whether it was acceptable to shake or topple the fence became a point of contention between the protest police and front liners:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/pdocumentarians/status/1289469522756345857\n\n\n
After the fence came down:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/clypian/status/1287315331594117120\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/7im/status/1288534589011406848\n\n\n
During the clashes in Portland, demonstrators have repeatedly freed people from police and federal mercenaries who were attempting to kidnap them. Successful de-arrests are usually only possible when demonstrators massively outnumber those attempting to kidnap them. To succeed, the action has to happen so fast that there isn’t time for police or federal reinforcements to respond.
\n\nDe-arrests are risky and can result in much higher charges than the original arrest. It is not a tactic to employ lightly. However, if the balance of numbers and power are in the demonstrators’ favor, successful de-arrests can show state or federal mercenaries that it is not worth grappling with a group of protesters, convincing them to shift to dispersal tactics.
\n\nGenerally speaking, as long as the police are not prepared to kettle and mass-arrest everyone, the surest way for individuals to avoid arrest when police are pressing into a crowd to split it up is to follow the largest part of the crowd. This is because—all other things being equal—the biggest crowd is usually the hardest for them to deal with. This insight scales up, since the best approach for crowds is to stay as large as they can.
\n\nWe have seen this with the crowds in Portland, where people have learned to stick together in large groups when the police attack, moving slowly and calmly rather than running and not retreating more than necessary—one block is typically the most that the police in Portland will advance at a time. There are chants about this: “Stay together, stay tight; we do this every night,” reminding everyone that there is no reason to take exceptional risks to one’s personal safety if one can return the next night to accomplish the same action more safely with more friends.
\n\nThere are other factors to bear in mind, of course. It’s better to be with a group that is aware of its surroundings, quick on its feet, and capable of defending itself than to be with a group that is sluggish, confused, and easily intimidated.
\n\nIn Portland, we have repeatedly seen police employ a “bull rush” in which they charge at full clip while using some combination of tear gas, pepper spray, impact munitions, and batons on everyone in their path. If you are not part of a crowd big enough and equipped enough to prevent the police from injuring or picking off individuals, it’s important to be ready to run. Cops can’t sprint very far.
\n\nA bull rush on June 12:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mrolmos/status/1271715330188967938\n\n\n
A bull rush on June 27:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/johnnthelefty/status/1276854263747014659\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1277159562563317760\n\n\n
A bull rush on June 28:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/rosecityantifa/status/1289956848158642177\n\n\n
A bull rush on July 18:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1284731897143160832\n\n\n
A bull rush on July 25:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/donovanfarley/status/1287309238134423552\n\n\n
A bull rush on August 1:
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/pdocumentarians/status/1289792025580023808\n\n\n
People have used paint and other tactics to prevent surveillance cameras from filming demonstrators. Some demonstrators have also broken windows—a tactic that can serve to draw the attention of the police away from what they were trying to do before. If you are engaged in any sort of activity like this, it is especially important to dress properly (see above). It can be worthwhile to dispose of all the clothes you were wearing after an incident. What’s more expensive—another run to the thrift store, or bail money, court fees, and a lawyer?
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/iwriteok/status/1286585525365768193\n\n\n
It has been very important to organize proper legal support in Portland with federal mercenaries arresting people every night. Even if you can’t go to the actions, you can help bail people out of jail or raise money to contribute to bail funds.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/mrolmos/status/1286941911631056898\n\n\n
A movement that combines a wide range of the tactics described here—the way demonstrators have done in Portland—can hold space in the face of considerable state violence. Unfortunately, this may soon be necessary all around the United States.
\n\nBe like water—keep your mask tight—and destroy what destroys you.
\n\nFor extra credit: cartwheels!
\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/07/22/from-portland-to-the-world-a-call-for-solidarity-with-the-struggle-against-the-federal-occupation", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/07/22/from-portland-to-the-world-a-call-for-solidarity-with-the-struggle-against-the-federal-occupation", "title": "From Portland to the World : A Call for Solidarity with the Struggle against the Federal Occupation", "summary": "Portland organizations entreat everyone who is inspired by their struggle against federal occupation to spread it countrywide.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/22/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/22/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-07-22T11:02:58Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:45Z", "tags": [ "Portland", "fascism", "police", "riots", "Uprising", "Minneapolis", "Trump" ], "content_html": "Since the end of May, demonstrators opposing police violence and white supremacy have thronged the streets of Portland, Oregon, clashing with law enforcement officers. Last week, aspiring autocrat Donald Trump escalated the situation by announcing that he would be sending federal agents around the country to assert his authority through acts of violence against protesters. The past few days have seen thousands sweep into the streets of Portland to defend those who were already protesting and demand the departure of Trump’s federal agents from their city.
\n\nNow participants in the movement in Portland are calling for solidarity actions starting this Saturday, on July 25. The following statement from several Portland organizations—including (Pop)ular (Mob)ilization, Portland Rising Tide, the Revolutionary Abolitionist Group, Colectivo X, and Symbiosis PDX—entreats everyone who has been inspired by the determination and endurance of demonstrators in that city to spread the struggle countrywide, just as Donald Trump hopes to deploy federal forces everywhere.
\n\nPlease circulate this video and statement—and think about how you can prepare to fight against the escalation of state tyranny wherever you are.
\n\nHere is a list of solidarity events around the country.
\n\nWe love that people are thinking about the ways they can support the people in this city, especially those who have been pressing hard in the streets for the past seven weeks in support of the struggle for Black lives and for freedom for all—and despite the brutally repressive tactics of police and federal forces. We want to accept your support—and we say the best way to support us is to take inspiration from Portland and bring this fight to where you are in any way you can.
\n\nGo as hard as you want, use every tool in the toolbox, and employ every tactic you can. Our fight is your fight and we want to share it with you. Our common struggle against fascism and against the police and federal officials defending white supremacy are intertwined. The movement is moving: solidarity is spreading and the bigger we get the faster we win.
\n\nWe will stay in the streets until every institution in our society reflects the acknowledgement that BLACK LIVES MATTER—and we hope you will too.
\n\nEndorsed by:
\n\n(Pop)ular (Mob)ilization
\nPortland Rising Tide
\nThe Revolutionary Abolitionist Group
\nColectivo X
\nSymbiosis PDX
\nhttps://twitter.com/PNWYLF/status/1285806490180128770\n\n\n" }, { "id": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/07/17/solidarity-with-the-people-in-the-streets-of-portland-against-the-federal-occupation-and-the-police", "url": "https://crimethinc.com/2020/07/17/solidarity-with-the-people-in-the-streets-of-portland-against-the-federal-occupation-and-the-police", "title": "Solidarity with the People in the Streets of Portland : Against the Federal Occupation and the Police", "summary": "Having failed to mobilize the military, Trump aims to deploy DHS agents around the US. Looking at Portland, we can see what this will mean.", "image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/header.jpg", "banner_image": "https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/header.jpg", "date_published": "2020-07-17T11:22:01Z", "date_modified": "2024-09-10T03:55:45Z", "tags": [ "Portland", "police", "riots", "Uprising", "Minneapolis", "Trump" ], "content_html": "
On Thursday, both Donald Trump and his white nationalist and nativist advisor Stephen Miller announced that they will begin deploying armed officers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the streets of cities that have seen large-scale protests—specifically, cities governed by Democrats. According to The Daily Mail, Trump stated he would “be looking at Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland, and Chicago.” To understand what the stakes are, we focus on Portland, where DHS agents have already been brutalizing demonstrators for weeks.
\n\nAt the beginning of June, when Trump tried to mobilize the military against protesters, he discovered that they were not willing to use up their credibility propping up his administration. Trump’s order to attack DC protesters so he could stage a photo op and his push to invoke the Insurrection Act only further diminished his polling numbers, illuminating some of the fault lines within the state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/4.jpg\")
Trump trying to look tough at his presidency’s weakest point thus far.
\nIn the month since, Trump has worked out which of the armed elements of the federal government are loyal enough to him to go to war against US citizens on his behalf. As demonstrators pulled down statues outside the White House and his faithful Fox News spin doctors labored overtime to come up with new narratives justifying violence against civilians, Trump called for Department of Homeland Security agents to deploy to places where statues were under attack. Now he is expanding their mission, challenging local and state authorities’ control. It is a classic Trump move to sidestep the bad press resulting from his ruinous response to the COVID-19 crisis and his efforts to cover up the mounting death toll by redirecting the news cycle to his grudge match with the Democrats, “antifa,” Black Lives Matter, and other such bugaboos. But deploying DHS forces is also an opportunity for him to test out a new strategy, attempting to set a new precedent for militarizing and politicizing the suppression of protest.
\n\nIf this succeeds, Trump will continue to push the envelope. Today, it is beside the point to compare developments in the United States to the situation in Germany in the early 1930s; we are already seeing the outlines of 21st-century fascism, or else of civil war. If they remain spectators, those who anticipate the presidential election as a referendum on Trump’s brand of government may discover in November that the future has already been decided. And if there are not serious consequences for this decision, then regardless of whether Trump wins the election, we will see DHS forces regularly deployed in this manner more and more, intensifying the police state.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/1.jpg\")
The foot soldiers of autocracy.
\nStarting in late May, Portland police mobilized riot troops daily to push protesters off the street, targeting and brutalizing journalists and turning the downtown into a shooting gallery with tear gas and “less lethal munitions.” DHS agents first joined them in brutalizing protesters weeks ago. According to the Williamette Weekly,
\n\n\n\n\nFor the past two weeks, federal officers have patrolled the blocks surrounding the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse. That’s thanks mostly to President Donald Trump, who deployed the Department of Homeland Security to at least three U.S. cities that had seen significant street protests—Portland, Seattle, and Washington, DC.
\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/itsmaregine/status/1283862881633632257\n\n\n
In a DHS memo explaining the deployment to Portland, described by the Portland Mercury as “an inflammatory statement riddled with inaccuracies and spelling errors” and in some cases lacking even the most basic punctuation, acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf repeats the phrase “violent anarchists” 72 times, using this phrase to designate a total of several thousand people. In many cases, he brands a group of hundreds “violent anarchists” on account of the alleged actions of just a couple individuals. Of course, secretary Wolf and his cronies have no way of knowing the politics of every person involved in the protests. Rather, their goal is to carry out classic totalitarian propaganda: in repeating this phrase endlessly, they seek to invent an enemy to justify a militarized takeover.
\n\nAs the Portland Mercury pointed out,
\n\n\n\n\nWolf did not mention that the majority of violence Portlanders have witnessed over the past 47 days has come from the hands of the police.
\n
While DHS officials publish fear-mongering announcements about “violent anarchists” painting messages on the plywood covering the windows of the Hatfield courthouse in Portland, federal agents have been set loose on demonstrators throughout the city. On July 11, federal agents in Portland shot 26-year-old Donavan LaBella in the head with an impact munition, fracturing his skull. LaBella required facial reconstruction surgery and was still in serious condition at the hospital days later.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/sparrowmedia/status/1283869468658147336\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1284021166277947394\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/TheRealCoryElia/status/1282555597322194944\n\n\n
According to a report on Oregon Public Broadcasting,
\n\n\n\n\nFederal law enforcement officers have been using unmarked vehicles to drive around downtown Portland and detain protesters since at least July 14. Personal accounts and multiple videos posted online show the officers driving up to people, detaining individuals with no explanation of why they are being arrested, and driving off.
\n
We should take care not to treat the intervention of federal agents as exceptional; it is just the latest chapter in a story involving state repression at every level. As the Portland Mercury reports, Portland police have been inflicting plenty of violence themselves:
\n\n\n\n\nOn Tuesday, a PPB officer was caught on film removing a protester’s protective face mask to pepper spray a protester in the eyes. This morning, the public witnessed a gaggle of PPB officers chase and tackle a person who was biking down SW 4th in downtown Portland—despite that street being open to public use.
\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/matcha_chai/status/1283328232033411072\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/DanMcKATU/status/1283748895600721920\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/kboo/status/1282954116424073217\n\n\n
\nhttps://twitter.com/pdxrosieriddle/status/1284020202145902593\n\n\n
For years, the Portland Police and the Department of Homeland Security have worked with fascist and far-right organizers to coordinate their demonstrations and facilitate their violence against anti-racist and anti-fascist counter-protesters as well as the general public. In June 2018, DHS worked directly with far-right leader Joey Gibson to plan a rally in downtown Portland during which fascists were permitted to attack counter-demonstrators with impunity. In early 2019, texts between Gibson and members of the Portland Police Bureau came to light, revealing that the police were feeding Gibson information, letting him know when his colleagues that were on probation needed to lay low, and informed him in advance about anti-fascist events and activities. Police faced no consequences for this.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2017/06/05/1.jpg\")
Already in 2017, when fascist Jeremy Christian murdered two people after attending a far-right rally in Portland, we were compelled to publish this poster explaining how fascists and Portland police work together.
\nFor now, Trump and his supporters are making great efforts to justify the intervention of federal officers in Portland, to such an extent that the governor of Oregon has accused him of simply attempting to pull “an election stunt.” But if this becomes normalized, one day, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies will intervene all around the country on a regular basis, without need of justification—attacking and permanently injuring protesters, kidnapping activists in unmarked cars, and suppressing protest by lethal force if necessary. Trump is not just a rogue demagogue; he is testing the balance of power on behalf of the entire ruling class, trying to figure out just how much they can get away with.
\n\nThe brutality of the DHS and the Portland police illustrates why people rebelled in response to the murder of the George Floyd in the first place. There is no question of the government or the police being accountable to us. The only way we can gain leverage on them is by becoming ungovernable, making it impossible for them to keep their economy running at our expense. The answer is not to petition the authorities for more stringent rules governing state and federal intervention—a doomed venture—but to delegitimize all the forces of oppression, from the federal to the local level, and organize together to make it impossible for them to rule us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/3.jpg\")
A demonstrator in Portland on the night of July 16.
\nWhile it currently seems unlikely that Trump can craft a consensus among the ruling class to hold on to power—democratically or not—for four more years, it is certain that the marauders who make up his administration are in no hurry to lose their grip on the reins of the state. As the rifts within the ruling class widen alongside the gulfs in our entire society, some of them may be legitimately concerned that they could share the fate of those of Trump’s closest associates who have already been found guilty of crimes. If deploying DHS against “violent anarchists” goes well for Trump, he will move on to his next adversaries, and the balance of power may begin to shift in his favor.
\n\nRather than imagining that elections and “the rule of law” will protect us from tyranny, we must understand how representation and law are themselves bound up in the perpetuation of the institutions via which tyrants like Trump rule. The only reason we have elections or rights in the first place is that our predecessors fought a revolution and then a bloody civil war. The work of liberation that they began still waits for us to finish it today.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/07/16/2.jpg\")
For a world without police.
\n![blockades](\"https://itsgoingdown.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/map-blockades-barricades-repression-oaxaca-2016-1024x663.png\"){kind=link}