We’ll never know the exact reasons why the Trump administration decided to bring the full force of immigration enforcement down on the Twin Cities and the rest of Minnesota last winter.

We do know they weren’t expecting the reception they got.

Operation Metro Surge and Operation Parris were the largest immigration enforcement operations in the history of the United States of America. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers came in the thousands, decked out with military gear, assault weapons, and surveillance systems built for a battlefield.

We’re proactively arming ourselves and our communities with the knowledge and tactics necessary to resist if President Donald Trump makes good on his threats on the sanctity of the midterms.

The Trump administration was counting on our residents believing, deep down, that immigrants and people of color are not really American. But they didn’t prepare for one thing: Minnesotans know that’s a lie.

It did not pass over our houses. Why? Because we were prepared. The preparation process must continue.

The structures that enabled the mass mobilizations that pushed ICE out of Minnesota were built long before officers touched down in late 2025.

The local immigrants rights movement built capacity and infrastructure for over two decades through the Dreamer’s Movement and the campaign for drivers licenses for all. And then during the Covid-19 pandemic, after George Floyd was killed by police in our streets, the Movement for Black Lives taught everyone in this state what mutual aid looks like at scale.

How to feed each other when regular systems fail. How to keep watch on a corner through the night. How to grieve and organize in the same breath. How to refuse the choreography of fear that a militarized response is designed to produce.

That’s the model we followed when launching Project Monarca in February of 2025. Over the next year we trained 50,000 Minnesotans in constitutionally protected observation.

In retrospect, a lot of those trainings looked like a rehearsal. We equipped our neighbors with a coherent analysis, a clear picture of the strategy being run........

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