By N. IRAZU
Minneapolis is under a para-military occupation by the federal government. Since December, “Operation Metro Surge” has deployed upwards of 3000 masked gunmen from a number of DHS agencies, including ICE and CBP, more than in any other city. People are being kidnapped off the street, thrown into unmarked vans and disappeared. Cars are found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition, mementos to ICE raids. They are breaking down doors with no warrants and interrogating families to give up the location of their immigrant neighbors. Children are used as bait to lure out family members for deportation.
Two activists have been murdered so far, two more have been shot, and countless others have been teargassed and brutalized. In response, people in Minneapolis have organized street by street and block by block to support each other in confronting the violent occupation of their city. In their community organizations and labor unions, they have gone out to organize local and mass actions in the struggle to kick ICE out of their communities.
Anatomy of state terror
On Jan. 7, Jonathan Ross—a masked ICE gunman—fired three shots into Renée Good’s head and called her a “fucking bitch.” His fellow agents made sure she died by denying her medical attention, disregarding the pleas of a physician on the scene. As if that were not enough, the immediate reaction of the federal government was to defend the gunman to the hilt, portraying him as a person who “feared for his life.” How a 10-year veteran of the militaristic ICE such as Ross could be so scared of an unarmed mother of three who had just dropped off her son at school, who was simply observing their operation, would be bewildering if it were not a pathetic fabrication concocted to cover up state-sponsored murder.
This gruesome sequence of events was repeated on Jan. 24 when six ICE agents surrounded and beat up a 37-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti, before murdering him. Pretti was on the scene of a raid documenting ICE and attempting to help up a woman who had been thrown to the ground by the same agents. They then threw Pretti to the ground, beat him up and pepper sprayed him. While blinded from the pepper spray and laid out on the ground, an ICE agent emptied ten bullets into him, killing him. Although Pretti was armed, at no point did he unholster his weapon or present any threat to the agents, and was in fact disarmed by the same agents before being shot. Minnesota is an open carry state.
Once again, the federal government labeled a murdered victim of state-sponsored murder as a “domestic terrorist.” On Jan. 14, ICE agents attempted to murder Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. He was shot in the leg in front of his house, and again agents lied about the circumstances, until video came out demonstrating that Sosa-Celis had not been a threat to them.
In Minneapolis, working people experience daily repression and persecution. ICE agents have tear gassed a family of eight in their car, including an infant that required CPR. They have been invading schools and hijacking school buses to kidnap children. five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father were kidnapped on the way back from preschool and promptly sent halfway across the country to a Texas concentration camp. Detainee’s at this same camp protested against their incarceration, chanting “Libertad!”
There are reports coming from health-care workers in Minneapolis of masked agents staking out clinics and hospitals and following patients into the facilities, as well as professionals treating injuries inconsistent with what the authorities reported (read: ICE kidnapped people, abused them, and lied about the circumstances.)
The surge of ICE agents into Minneapolis has resulted in the kidnapping of over 2400 people in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul since the start of the operation. With thousands of agents crawling the streets. The Department of War has now threatened to send in an additional 1500 soldiers to participate in the occupation.
The political leadership
Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE agents who occupied Minneapolis in part because of an internet hoax that the Trump administration based “Operation Metro Surge” on. The hoax was made viral by Nick Shirley, a 22-year-old internet personality who made false claims about a multi-million-dollar scam in childcare services run by Somali immigrants.
All of ICE’s operations are in some way based on a false reality that portrays immigrant workers as criminals, distorting the image of who immigrants really are: an essential portion of the working-class, integral to the cultural and economic life of this country. Without this ideological cover it would not be possible for the government to maintain support for kidnapping and disappearing people.
The wool has to be pulled over the eyes of millions. Allies of immigrants against this terrorist regime, such as Good and Pretti, are liable to be murdered and themselves called “terrorists” by the Department of Homeland Security for not submitting to this narrative. Trump said that since Good was “highly disrespectful of law enforcement,” she deserved to die. The same has been said of Pretti.
After Good’s murder, Vice President J.D. Vance claimed that Jonathan Ross had “absolute immunity.” This was meant to be a green flag granted to ICE agents by the federal government that said, “do not be afraid to murder activists, go ahead and commit violence against the population of this country, and we will back you up.’”The federal government is on a warpath against working people, at home and abroad.
On the other side of the mainstream political ‘spectrum’ the elected political leadership of the city has left the people to fend for themselves. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, has mobilized the National Guard. However, any illusions that he is doing so to confront the federal occupation are misplaced. He is mobilizing the National Guard because he remembers the popular explosion of 2020 that had Minneapolis as its epicenter. He does not want a repeat of this experience that pitted masses of working people against Democratic and Republican politicians alike. Again and again, he urges those out on the streets to “keep calm.”
Walz assures us that although he supports peaceful protests, he seeks a resolution to this chaos through institutional bourgeois channels. He tells the people of Minneapolis to “go vote, we will fight in the courts, etc.” He means to steer the movement that has the potential of confronting the whole murderous state apparatus into a dead end. The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, has said many strong curse words against ICE, but in a world where actions are louder than words, the silence of his actions makes his injunctions bare whispers!
The Minnesota Fraternal Order of Police put out a statement saying they “stand with ICE,” and reports on the ground indicate that the Minneapolis Police Department covers the back of ICE agents as they teargas protesters. This should not be a surprise when we understand that the worker who crosses over to become a cop (or an ICE officer for that matter) betrays and abandons their class in the service of the capitalist state. No salvation will come from the politicians or institutions that stand on the same foundation of capitalist exploitation and oppression as ICE and Trump. Working people and oppressed people must rely on themselves and their close allies in their struggle.
Grassroots organizing
The streets of the Twin Cities have become a political and physical battleground between the occupation forces and the masses of people who call the city their home. On-the-scene reports indicate that within the widespread counter-offensive there is an effervescence toward action that has connected and reconnected workers, students, and communities to fight back, reminiscent of the response in the city following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
The organizations with the most name recognition and resources are able to carry out anti-ICE rapid-response training for thousands of people on a daily basis. Rapid-response groups have spread to spanning whole neighborhoods and single streets alike, with Signal chats of hundreds of neighbors. These are themselves interconnected with other neighborhood chats, creating an organizing network that allows immediate response to ICE activity anywhere in the city. When ICE shows up to a neighborhood, people can be there within a minute, and on occasions hundreds of people come out.
In a meeting of May Day Strong, an organizer reported that at least 4% of every neighborhood was involved with these networks. This means that the foundations for strong grassroots community organizing have more than been built. As activists, we need to organize to increase the size of these networks and move towards consolidating them through local mass assemblies open to all members of our communities. We could elect leaders, vote on our demands, coordinate mutual aid, and effectively defend our communities against the roving bands of masked gunmen occupying Minneapolis. These networks, if they can be consolidated into bottom-up community assemblies, linked up with each other, will be able to coordinate the struggle across the whole city.
State terror is the order of the day. The administration will not back down unless it is confronted with the true power of the working class. As it is workers’ hands that make the economy run, workers’ hands can shut it down. The organized working class has the power to throw a wrench into the gears of capitalist production and circulation, striking at the heart of the ruling capitalist class that supports the Trump regime. A glimpse of this potential was seen in the Day of Action in Minneapolis on Jan. 23.
The power of organized labor: Jan. 23
With temperatures going as low as -20 degrees Fahrenheit with windchill, tens of thousands of workers, students, small shop owners, and community members marched through downtown Minneapolis to repudiate the occupation of their city. While estimates range from 50,000 to 100,000 people in the streets, it was by all accounts a monumental show of force. “Everybody showed up,” In These Times reported.
The unbearable persecution, kidnapping, and murder carried out by the federal government in the Twin Cities magnified the numbers of people who feel it is their duty to do something, anything, to put an end to this barbarism. In the labor unions, leaderships felt the pressure from their ranks to participate in the movement.
The Day of Action was born out of a gathering of community, faith, and trade-union organizations after the murder of Good. They called for the Day of Truth and Freedom: “No Work, No School, No Shopping.” SEIU Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, CWA Local 7250, ATU 1005, and other local unions and community organizations endorsed the call for the Day of Action, with a 2 p.m. rally in downtown Minneapolis.
It was also endorsed by the AFL-CIO labor federation, which stated: “Working people, our schools and our communities are under attack. Union members are being detained commuting to and from work, tearing apart families. Parents are being forced to stay home, students held out of school, fearing for their lives, all while the employer class remains silent. Our labor federations are encouraging everyone to participate on January 23rd. It’s time for every single Minnesotan who loves this state and the notion of truth and freedom to raise their voices and deepen their solidarity for our neighbors and coworkers living under this federal occupation.”
The Jan. 23 Day of Action was in effect a mass sickout, as expressed by the president of CWA Local 7250 Kieran Knutson in a call with the writer of this article. He specified that while the union was encouraging its members to take a sick day and participate, it was not calling for a strike. Other unions did the same. ATU 1005 clarified on their Facebook page that while they supported the action, they could not tell their members to take a leave from work.
But that should not lead us to understate the importance of this day. Unionists and organizers on the ground report that a few workplaces completely shut down, while other shop floors experienced 30% abstentionism from work, while managers had to perform the job of workers to stay open. At the Minneapolis airport, the main thoroughfare through which kidnapped immigrants are being deported, a UNITE HERE steward told In These Times, “‘a lot’ of airport workers in her union didn’t go to work [on] Friday in order to support the shutdown, with many of them calling in sick.”
While the mass sickout and protest did not bring the economy to a grinding halt, talk about organizing a real political general strike is now on the table. The Day of Action opens up the space to talk to our coworkers about our collective power and to form worker committees to pressure our union leaderships to put our unions at the forefront of this struggle.
Imaginations have been fired up: We could build mass meetings of thousands of workers, representing hundreds of thousands of workers, in a mass conference of labor, discussing and deciding on how to carry out a general strike. Organized labor can and must be both the spear and shield of our communities against occupation. Much is to be learned from the historic Minneapolis general strike in 1934, when the Teamsters Local 544 led a battle against the bosses, cops, and fascist bands to turn Minneapolis from an open shop to a union town.
Called for by the labor movement, a political general strike would be a serious force that would stop ICE and the Trump administration in its tracks. It would throw the whole rotten capitalist system that is disappearing and murdering our neighbors into question. Who deserves to run society: the likes of Trump, Vance, and Miller, or the heroic working masses that are out on the streets every day to defend each other?
Photo: Tim Evans / MPR News