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“Our days are riding on the learning edge of a whirlwind — crisis management, harm mitigation, helping everyone come to terms with new conditions and new impossible choices that they’re faced with,” says Minneapolis organizer Andrew Fahlstrom. In this episode of Movement Memos, Fahlstrom and local organizers Jordan and Susan Raffo talk with host Kelly Hayes about community defense in Minneapolis, the social fabric of collective care under federal occupation, and how people around the country should be gearing up for the long struggle ahead.

Music by Son Monarcas, Daniel Fridell, and Katori Walker.

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we are talking about the federal occupation of Minneapolis, where three people have been shot by federal agents – two fatally – and thousands of immigrants have been detained. We’ll be hearing from writer and healing justice practitioner Susan Raffo; Andrew Fahlstrom, a rapid response organizer with Defend the 612; and Jordan, an immigrant organizer whose works includes digital security and mutual aid.

In the Twin Cities and surrounding areas, we have seen an escalation of fascist violence that reflects the race war fantasies of men like White House adviser Stephen Miller, who would see immigrants and their defenders ground under. However, Minneapolis is also the heart of another arc of escalation — a mass activation of care and community defense and resistance that signals hope for us all.

Last week, some observers welcomed news that Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino was reassigned out of Minneapolis. The move followed the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents and a wave of public backlash. The conversation you’re about to hear was recorded the day after Pretti’s death, prior to the announcement about Bovino’s departure. Unfortunately, the issues we discuss here — the violence, the lack of accountability, and the urgent need for steady, strategic responses from movements and communities — remain as relevant in Minneapolis today as they were the day after Pretti’s killing. Activists on the ground in Minneapolis have described Bovino as a “sadist” and a “fascist abuser,” whose departure has been felt on a personal level, but note the character and intensity of their struggle has not changed in the wake of his departure. Brutal attacks on their communities are ongoing, while ICE attacks in other states continue to escalate as well.

This is a time to be strategic, and to learn all we can from each other, because all of our communities need to prepare for the kind of state violence that Minneapolis is facing right now.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Jordan, Raffo, Andrew, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Susan Raffo: Good to be here.

Jordan: Thanks for having us.

Andrew: It’s good to be here.

KH: To help frame this conversation for our audience, can each of you take a moment to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about the organizing work you’re involved with?

Jordan: So my name is Jordan. I’m an Ethiopian Eritrean immigrant from my mother and my father’s side. I am a transplant to Minnesota. I came here a few years ago. At this point, I feel like it’s my second home. I’m a two-culture kid in that way, but my family has been immigrating to Minnesota, but also the U.S. since the ’70s, the late ’70s and early ’80s.

My work, I feel like right now it’s shaped as a community organizer in 2026, but a lot of my work focuses on relationship building, setting up care infrastructures, capacity building, political education work. And most recently in the last three, four years, a lot of tech justice work with the heightened surveillance and just AI or production work. Yeah, that’s me. Nice to be here.

SR: I am Susan Raffo. I go by Raffo. I do a lot of my work through REP [Relationships Evolving Possibilities], which is a project that emerged in 2020 during the uprising. We do a lot of work around collective safety, both through political education and skills building.

In the moment that we’re in right now in the Twin Cities, there’s a lot of work that I’m doing that is about connecting people to care. So what are the things that we need that are going to make us sustainable for the long-term, recognizing that this is not stopping tomorrow. That includes everything from dealing with shock trauma, to grief circles, to supporting people who are doing on-the-ground work or frontline work in different ways. And that’s how I’m showing up in this conversation.

Andrew: My name’s Andrew. I have lived in Minnesota for almost 45 years now. And the work that I’m involved in, in this moment, besides parenting a teenager, trying to be in a healthy partnership, and live through occupation, has been in supporting the multitudes of community defense structures that have been blossoming and growing across Minneapolis, across the Twin Cities, across the entire state, inspiring each other, inspiring the country, inspiring the world.

And so that looks like being part of Defend the 612, which is a sort of entry point for people to get involved in their neighborhood work, whether that’s the local school patrols or their block groups, block captains, or the other patrols and monitoring that’s going on right now in the city of Minneapolis. And so I’ve been spending my time in that in addition to trying to live a life, have a day job, and survive under the conditions that Minneapolis is facing in this moment.

KH: Thank you all so much for being here and for making time during an incredibly difficult moment. We’re recording this conversation the day after Alex Pretti was shot and killed in the street by a federal agent in Minneapolis. As organizers and community members in this city, I know you’re all carrying a lot right now, so I want to begin by asking: how are you holding up?

SR: This is Raffo. The other two people on this call are people who are quite beloved to me. And I can feel in our voices and in the feel that we share the way that there’s a heaviness, and I don’t want to speak for Jordan and Andrew, but I know these two folks really well. I feel it in my own body.

So coming into this call, I had shared that I was excited, because in this moment there’s not a lot of space to just pause and reflect. And so I’ve been looking forward to that really straight up to listen to Jordan and Andrew as much as have time for my own, but I can feel it in my own body. There’s a tightness. My heart feels really heavy. I feel it between us. So thank you for naming that and starting it because, of course, it’s going to shape whatever we talk about today.

KH: Thanks, Raffo. Jordan, how are you feeling?

Jordan: Yeah, I definitely resonate with the heaviness. There’s this public escalation of the nervous system, but also there is so much like, “Okay, what is the strategy? How do we move?” And so I think we’re all holding a lot of that, but also I think sleep has been one of the hardest things that has been hard to come by. And so that’s where I am.

Andrew: Yeah, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t processed yesterday. I was on Nicollet Avenue not too long after the assassination of Alex Pretti with the crowds, with the people on the lines of Border Patrol and ICE agents, of anger at another killing in our neighborhood with the Minneapolis Police Department, Hennepin County Sheriff’s coming to support the presence of ICE after they killed another one of our neighbors. And I took a face full of pepper spray and the clouds of tear gas went for blocks.

So there’s both the physical trauma and the community trauma of so many people who are activated in this moment and so many people that want our conditions to change, the collective conditions that we’re living under. And so many of us searching for the moves and the processes and the togetherness and the hope that it can change and the hope that we can be part of that change and the fear that we may not be able to do all of the things that we want to see happen.

So I’m just sitting here with the enormity of that and the questions of what’s next, of where do we move together and how do we move? Yeah. So there’s some sadness, there’s some inspiration, there’s this line of courage that’s impossible to let go of because so many of us are holding it in this moment that even if you let go of it for a day or a week, it’s just always there because so many of us are holding it together. That’s how I’m arriving.

KH: Thank you all for your vulnerability and for helping our listeners understand what it means to live inside this moment in Minneapolis. Andrew, your words about that line of courage really resonated. Many of us felt a similar bond and sense of connection in our work here in Chicago during Midway Blitz, and I think a lot of us now feel that kinship with our siblings in struggle in Minneapolis.

To give our listeners some context, can you describe the arc of escalation you’ve seen in Minneapolis and the surrounding area? How did the current crisis take shape?

Jordan: I think the first point of escalation for me that I witnessed at least in Minneapolis was in October. There was a low-key arrest of, I think, four individuals from Central America. And neighbors definitely got in the way and investigated what went on. But to me, nothing is really isolated in the situation. Everything is a test to see how folks will respond, how neighbors will show up. And so they’ve been doing this test, honestly, for a while. I think the Twin Cities in general is a punk city and people resist. And I think people just know their neighbors a lot more than any place I’ve ever been in my life. I live in South Minneapolis in an area where it’s hugely, hugely immigrant and a lot of brown and Black people, but a lot of people that are not brown and Black people that know their neighbors pretty well.

In Minnesota winter, even if it’s negative-something [degrees], people are biking, people are walking, people are walking their dogs. People with kids and stuff usually are out playing in the snow, or when people shovel the snow, people are out in my neighborhood, so I think just the absence of people and the fact that the street is so empty except the people that are doing patrolling or they’re doing watch or legal observer, you don’t see as many people. When you go to the stores, it’s a lot more emptier because there’s this lingering fear and heaviness and grief that people don’t know what to do with.

I think the scale and the type of crisis is not necessarily new to me. I have a lot of family that has witnessed genocide in large ways, so even just talking about it, they’re like, “This is so familiar. This tastes so familiar. This feels so familiar.”

Andrew: Where to begin? Where do we start? I was actually talking with Raffo a few days ago about the Dakota conflict of 1862. Some people call it the Dakota Uprising or the Dakota War when the peoples who lived on this land rose up against the armies of the day in this place that we live. And sort of like the lineage of this place we call Minnesota, it doesn’t seem like an accident that the American Indian Movement was born on the streets of South Minneapolis, and the lines of continuity and connection between the ways our peoples came together when George Floyd was assassinated at 38th and Chicago, and what it meant for us to have to be our own fire department, be our own community protection services during that time when the police disappeared, when the fire department wasn’t responding on the streets.

We have escalated our togetherness and our community in the face of so many things. December 1st, all of a sudden, there were ICE everywhere in our neighborhoods. And the way I found out about that was a Subaru with an Uber light had taken two parents from a car and left a young child outside of a school in South Minneapolis in the cold. And from there, it has been, I think, 55 days of ramping up an escalation. And in a similar way, we thought it was bad the first four weeks, and then the next thousand came, and then the next thousand came.

And we know that they’re coming because we have been so organized. There have been so many people who already know their neighbors who are looking out and caring for each other, and we know they’re coming because they have been resourced by billions of dollars and that we are a testing ground and they’ll be coming for so many other places as they staff up their troops and their paramilitaries.

So it seems iterative and we learn and we practice and we try and we move with love and togetherness and more violence comes and we try to maneuver and they learn and we learn and they learn. It feels like we’re in this dance that can’t or won’t continue forever, but I don’t know how long it will go on. I would say, the escalation that I’m most grateful for has been the escalation of truth and vision of what’s being seen because of the courage of my neighbors.

SR: I’m totally going to pick up on that. And I actually want to use the word “exaltation” instead of “escalation.” And that sounds really silly, but it’s like I want to exalt for a second. There’s a story out there which is not untrue when you hear it in our voices about how we know our neighbors in........

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