People partake in a "National Shutdown" protest against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minneapolis, on January 30, 2026. | Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images

While the Trump administration continues its immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, anti-ICE protests continued in Minneapolis and around the country — from Los Angeles to rural Maine — over the weekend.

In the Twin Cities area, meanwhile, this activism is well-organized; but it’s not a traditional, anti-government protest movement of the likes we saw during President Donald Trump’s first term. Some have called this new model “dissidence” or “neighborism” — or, more traditionally, “direct action.” As one organizer described what’s happening in the city, “it’s kind of unorganized-organized.”

To better understand this new development and its possible ramifications, Vox spoke with Harvard University’s Theda Skocpol, a renowned expert on political organizing in the US, who has written seminal analyses of the decline of the labor movement, the rise of the Tea Party movement, and the strengths and weaknesses of the resistance movement that arose during Trump’s first term.

When Vox last spoke to Skocpol, in the days after October’s No Kings protests, Skocpol emphasized that the point of protest isn’t to keep growing the number of people in the streets. It’s to create opportunities for organizing and to build lasting political power.

Key takeaways

In her view, Minnesota is meeting that model for opposition: “Minnesota has emerged as a heroic example of state and local and neighborhood-level resistance in the name of core patriotic and Christian values. And that is an extraordinarily powerful counterforce that will transform what other states and localities do.”

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What were your initial reactions to how Minneapolis responded to the ICE surge this year, and to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti?

The Trump administration made a huge mistake in thinking that Minneapolis would be an easy display case for overwhelming an urban area. They must have thought this would be an easy place to demonstrate overwhelming force........

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