Photograph Source: Chad Davis – CC BY 4.0

During the three days I spent in Minneapolis, a week after the ICE murder of Alex Pretti forced the Trump administration to yank Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, it was clear that the federal occupation of the city was not over and that a clear-cut victory over ICE had not been achieved.

There was a confidence in the movement activists I spoke to–despite suffering two deaths at the hands of federal agents–that Minneapolis had created a political panic in the White House, with potentially disastrous political consequences for the Republican Party. And, while Minneapolis certainly propelled forward a movement against ICE across the country, no one I met thought the movement was over in Minnesota.

On the contrary, many people felt, not only that organizing on the community and workplace levels needed to deepen, but were waiting for the next shoe to drop under the new head of the federal occupation, the notorious White House “border czar,” Tom Homan. Homan recently announced that seven hundred federal agents will be withdrawn from Minnesota, leaving two thousand in place. He attributed this to “unprecedented cooperation” with state and local authorities.

Homan repeatedly declared that the Trump administration “is not surrendering.”

A city in political ferment

Visitors to Minneapolis immediately notice the frozen lakes and rivers. The successful and widespread community defense against ICE in such arctic conditions is remarkable even for hearty Minnesotans. The big march on January 23rd drew over 50,000, and possibly as high as 100,000 people, demonstrated how politicized and radicalized the population became during the ongoing federal occupation.

It’s obvious that Minneapolis is a city in political ferment. The type of widespread and sustained struggle involving “ordinary people” that we haven’t witnessed since the later years of the Vietnam War. Signs of this are everywhere. After Paul K-D, publisher of the Twin Cities Labor Report, picked me up at Union Station, we drove into Minneapolis to meet Kieran Knutson, the working president of CWA Local 7250, at a well-known pub called The Prodigal. It is located in the Whittier neighborhood, where Alex Pretti, the VA nurse, was murdered by federal agents four days earlier.

I didn’t realize that Pretti was murdered in a commercial district promoted by the city for tourism. The candlelight memorial dedicated to him was incredibly beautiful and solemn. There was a vigil happening where several people spoke and we stopped by for a few minutes in the frigid temperatures. I took a few pictures of it, available here. It’s worth noting that there are large and small posters of Renee Good and Pretti all over Minneapolis, another sign of how politicized daily life has become.

The Whipple Federal Building

On my first full day in Minneapolis on Friday, January 30th, Kieran took me to the daily, early morning pickets, involving a few hundred people at the Whipple Federal building, the staging ground ICE and the Border Patrol’s (BP) operations in Minneapolis. The wind chill was well below zero degrees (F). The federal building is a nondescript-looking structure just outside of Minneapolis. Every morning, hundreds of people picket and at times sit-in or block briefly Border Patrol (BP) and ICE........

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