At 11am on January 7^th, a friend texted me a Monarca Alert: “Massive fed presence, kicking in doors … 34 x 4^th Ave., Minneapolis … Observers needed.” “An observer was apparently shot at 34th and Portland,” she wrote, “a doctor tried to administer aid, and ICE drew a gun on the doctor.” One hour later, I saw with my own eyes Renée Good’s maroon SUV smashed into a telephone poll, bullet holes in the windshield, and FBI agents surrounded by barricade tape. A crowd gathered to square off with riot police. This encounter and many other points of contact with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers triggered my politicization to defend Minneapolis. To defend neighbors from being kidnapped. To defend democracy. Direct contact with ICE agents and their violence – like my first encounter – gives rise to social mobilization.

American Authoritarianism

Experts argue that Donald Trump plunged the United States into a form of authoritarianism in 2025. It’s called competitive authoritarianism, in which “parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition.” During his second term, the Trump administration regularly weaponizes state institutions such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to target immigrants at unprecedented rates. The Department of Justice shields Trump’s allies and prosecutes his opponents: journalists, law firms, universities. The list goes on. In these times, ordinary people risk becoming complacent and fatalistic. “Demobilization,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky and colleagues write, is “the greatest threat to democracy.” The Trump administration is accelerating US extralegal military operations on a scale and scope unseen in a generation. Checks and balances across branches of government are breaking down. Military “Operations” – Epic Fury in Iran, Midway Blitz in Chicago and Metro Surge in Twin Cities – weaponize violence at home and abroad. As a resident of Minnesota, I witnessed occupying cities as a spatial and media strategy to cement power in the acceleration toward fascism – what Trump has called the “war from within.”

Occupying Cities as a Sensational Strategy

The Trump administration experimented with a type of authoritarian power grab by sensationalizing the occupation of cities to explore the limits of military domination, court responsiveness, and public complicity. Operations targeted immigrants in Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul to test this approach on one of Trump’s strongest issues: immigration. In the first fourteen months of Trump’s second term, ICE arrested people in the streets at an unprecedented level, eleven times more than during the Biden Administration, according to UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project. Urban sieges concentrate arrests in cities, and escalation of arrests are clearly visible across the four urban occupations, peaking in the Twin Cities. Minnesota witnessed excessive racial violence, murder of legal observers, and the violation of nearly 100 court orders by ICE, as Judge Patrick Schiltz stated, more than other federal agencies throughout “their entire existence.”  

ICE Arrests Resulting in Detention by Area of Responsibility

(UC Berkeley Deportation Data Project)

The ideological justification of racist and xenophobic claims circulates in the media to legitimize urban occupations. Politicians across the political spectrum assume that increasing restrictions disincentivizes migration, a deterrence theory with little evidence to support it. It fosters the ideological shift right, for example, in which White House officials like Stephen Miller’s call for “a moratorium on immigration from third world countries until we can heal ourselves as a nation.” The administration claimed to target criminal immigrants, despite most people arrested not having criminal records. The regime employs violent arrests of racial minorities, disseminates white supremacist propaganda, cuts taxes for billionaires, and facilitates media ownership consolidation.

Operation Metro Surge sensationalized violence through multiple channels. First, the administration named the siege as a place-based invasion. Second, they deployed high profile officials to draw media attention, notably Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and commander-at-large of the Border Patrol Gregory Bovino. Third, the administration deployed an unprecedented number of over 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents, which even moderate Democratic mayor, councilmembers, and the governor referred to as an “invasion” and “occupation.” Fourth, ICE aggressively targeted South Minneapolis, the neighborhood of George Floyd’s and Renée Good’s murders, with a persistence and brutality that residents perceived to be a provocation to spark an uprising like that of 2020. Such a rebellion may have provided the political opening for the Trump administration to trigger the Insurrection Act and take control of the Minnesota National Guard, which would have significantly escalated repression, or worse, become the trigger of a full-blown civil war. Thus, the Trump administration employed a spatial-media strategy domestically across several cities, culminating in Minneapolis, to squash Democratic party control and take military control of cities.

Grassroots Urban Strategies for Fighting Authoritarianism

Minnesotans mobilized to fight ICE – rather than succumb to fatalism or complacency – with a scale, speed, and stamina unparalleled in US history. The Global Protest Tracker shows that anti-law enforcement mobilizations last longer than other actions and often elicit “violent government crackdowns.” The mobilization can be observed through three practices: building relationships and resource sharing, ICE Watch, and mass protests.

First, building and strengthening relationships united people to share resources for social reproduction and to create a collective force united against invading federal forces. This occurred through two dynamics: public assemblies and block-level organizing. Public assemblies became a powerful avenue to educate the public and disseminate information about the occupation widely, quickly, and through trusted sources. For example, in my neighborhood, on January 14^th, a neighborhood organization called the Whittier Alliance hosted a public assembly at the Whittier Elementary School that drew over 800 people.[1] With over 14,000 people, Whittier is the most populous neighborhood in Minneapolis. Elected officials, immigrant rights advocates, and clergy spoke about the crisis. “Every second spent [by ICE] on [legal] observers,” said State Representative Aishga Gomez, “is a second not spent rounding up our Black and Brown neighbors.” The assembly sparked a neighborhood-level movement to build on existing Cop and ICE Watch practices and trainings by groups such as Monarca and MIRAC. A decentralized, community defense infrastructure emerged. People divided the neighborhood into over a dozen semi-local groups to create a fractal of neighborhood organizing groups. Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne emphasized at the assembly: “We are going to win.”

Block-level organizing through “locals” became an effective strategy of coalescing local resources and action. Spatial organizing coalesced relationships for legal observing and mutual aid across four scales: building-level, hyperlocal (1-2 blocks), semi-local (4-6 blocks), neighborhood level. Locals serve as powerful organizing units to create direct relationships with neighbors. These units typically serve as an onramp for neighbors to join encrypted chats groups. Trust and camaraderie grow through group potlucks, door knocking outreach, and hosting community defense trainings. The proliferation of locals meant overlapping groups, which creates redundancy and limits the impact of federal agent or counter protest infiltration. Doxing of activists still occurred in this neighborhood, emphasizing the importance of anonymizing one’s identity on the encrypted messenger app Signal. Immigrant communities often self-organize novel resource sharing and community defense networks. Locals respond faster and in greater numbers than broader rapid response chats and served neighbors directly with food delivery, rent support, and rides to school and work.

Second, slowing down and documenting ICE activity constituted the foundational strategy of community defense. Legal observing – or the act of watching and documenting civil rights violations of law enforcement – is a protected activity under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Observers make noise, draw neighbors out of their homes, and add eyes on the street as an accountability method to shield against indiscriminate harassment and violence by law enforcement. Whistling, honking car horns, filming, and heckling officers draws in people to bear witness to ICE activity. The Uptown and Whittier neighborhoods had six primary chats on Signal, which max at 1,000, and dozens other local chats. This suggests approximately 5-6,000 observers, or at least 20-30% of Uptown and Whittier, where ICE murdered Alex Pretti. Immigrant Defense Network trained over 30,000 people on legal observing across Minnesota.

Legal observing occurs through two types of ICE patrols: stationary and mobile. Stationary patrols typically stake out high-risk places, such as immigrant housing blocks, businesses, bus stops, or schools. Mobile patrols may be walking, biking, or driving, and following major throughways or zigzagging through neighborhoods. Both seek to identify suspicious individuals, vehicles, or behavior and report them to rapid response networks. Observers identify, draw attention to undercover officers, and slow down ICE abductions.

Flashpoints constitute the moments of tension between neighbors and law enforcement, trying to slow movement, block abductions, and demoralize agents. Observing armed federal agents intimidating neighbors strengthens relationships and, after the skirmish subsides, provides opportunities to disseminate resources: whistles, Know Your Rights cards, and details on legal observer trainings. Organizers center the needs of impacted (abducted and harmed) individuals with legal resources (e.g., information on the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Program) and care resources. Some organizers carry megaphones to create additional noise, coordinate street action, and celebrate the blocking of abductions and scaring off ICE. I began to see flashpoints as key moments to expand political education for how to build collective power to fight the authoritarian occupation of the city.

Third, mass protests coalesce people power to challenge media narratives and state power. Two types of large-scale demonstration coalesced during Operation Metro Surge: home-grown and supported by broader institutions. Home-grown, large-scale mobilizations include the vigils and demonstrations following the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, as well as Singing Resistance, a project that employs call-and-response singing with large audiences. Singing Resistance actions drew crowds upwards of 10,000 to march through immigrant neighborhoods and target key infrastructure supporting ICE: places where agents took bathroom breaks or parking lots where they “staged” to prepare equipment before an abduction (notably Target), hotels, and car rentals. Actions supported by broader institutions include the January 23  union-led general strike that drew upwards of 50,000 protesters in the downtown Minneapolis, with polling finding that nearly one-in-four voters participating across the state, and the March 28^th No Kings rally in St. Paul pulling approximately 200,000 participants. Mass protests supported grieving, demonstrated large-scale nonviolent action, emphasized economic hardship, and challenged the legitimacy of the political regime.

Winning the Battle of Minneapolis

Ordinary people won the Battle of Minneapolis – an urban campaign of racial terror by the authoritarian Trump regime – by building relationships, tracking law enforcement agents, and mass protest. The victory stopped the administration’s strategy of city-based occupations, which Trump clearly needed, and some thought it could have escalated into more widespread conflict. During Operation Metro Surge, ICE arrests peaked in the Twin Cities following campaigns across other cities. Despite senior White House officials’ continued attempts to label the murdered legal observer Alex Pretti as a domestic terrorist, despite definitive video evidence of the murder, and the event became a tipping point of the public against Operation Metro Surge. Polling shows Trump’s approval rating and his handling of immigration both declined steadily since the launch of the surge. Bovino said it was the “most [resistance] I’ve ever seen.” The day after Pretti’s murder, Bovino departed the city. Two weeks later, border-czar Tom Homan declared the operation over, and the administration withdrew over 2,000 agents to a total number of around 600 units by mid-February. This figure is still four times the pre-Operation Metro Surge number of law enforcement, illustrating that the administration is continuing its campaign of ethnic cleansing without city-based sieges. Minnesotans won the Battle of Minneapolis and therein defeated the spectacle of urban occupations as a power grab on the Trump’s acceleration toward authoritarianism. In response, the administration is shifting strategies toward disaggregated abductions. Evidence shows that the total number of immigrant abductions from around the country is remaining steady. Despite the number of ICE agents declining, neighbors continue to organize to prevent kidnappings while ICE shifts its tactics.

“Most of the power of authoritarianism,” Tom Snyder writes, “is freely given.” The Battle of Minneapolis illustrates how to win by building relationships, creating encrypted communication channels, training people on legal observing, learning how to identify ICE agents, documenting human rights violations, and organizing mass protests. The resistance against Operation Metro Surge constituted a full-blown social movement. Protests demonstrate unity. Non-violent singing from churches to the streets and training legal observers symbolize worthiness and dignity of activists. Minnesotans showed commitment through three months of sustained mobilization, and early morning patrols in zero-degree-Fahrenheit winter weather.

Like witnessing the aftermath of Renée Good’s murder, contact between ordinary people and ICE create flashpoints or moments that disrupt the status quo of news cycles, social media, and electoral politics. Authoritarians want people to remain complacent. Flashpoints create perhaps the sharpest form of political education, as witnesses see the militarized weaponry and disregard for rule of law. When people spontaneously emerge to confront ICE in the street to block a kidnapping, they resist the normalization of authoritarianism and challenge its threats of repression. Relationships with neighbors transcend media propaganda and protests illustrate grassroots power. Mobilizing against ICE illustrates one example of how to stop the rise of authoritarianism in the United States. The administration will continue shifting strategies. Ordinary people must resist through a proliferation of strategies. People living in the United States who believe in democratic values need to continue to challenge the violation of the law, uphold due process, and innovate in their community organizing, political advocacy, and grassroots mobilizations to create a more democratic and inclusive systems for immigrants and all marginalized groups.

[1] Whittier Alliance is part of a wider infrastructure of neighborhood organizations, https://www.minneapolismn.gov/resident-services/neighborhoods/neighborhood-organizations/, accessed on 5/6/26.

About Kenton Card

Kenton Card is a community organizer, filmmaker, and Assistant Professor in the School of Planning, Policy and Environmental Studies at San José State University.