Thousands of people protested against ICE at Powderhorn Park in Minnesota. Photograph Source: Fibonacci Blue – CC BY 4.0
United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol began “Operation Metro Surge” targeting the Twin Cities nearly two months ago. Since then, they have taken the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti while terrorizing Minnesota’s immigrant communities.
The massive deployment of immigration officers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul has been met with an incredible response from the community. Neighbors have come together to develop complex rapid response networks to track ICE and notify vulnerable people, keep immigrant families fed and protected with strong mutual aid networks, and make their opposition to what amounts to a full-scale federal invasion clearly visible.
This past Friday, unions, faith leaders, and community organizations organized a day of mass protest and economic disruption, punctuated by a rally and demonstration in well below sub-zero temperatures attended by tens of thousands.
What’s next for organized resistance in the Twin Cities? To get a picture of the situation on the ground, Inequality.org checked in with experienced labor organizer and activist Kieran Knutson, the president of Communications Workers of America Local 7250 in Minneapolis.
Chris Mills Rodrigo: What has your experience been like on the ground in Minneapolis over the last two months?
Kieran Knutson: It’s unlike anything I’ve ever lived through before. There are 3,000 ICE agents in the Twin Cities metro area, just by comparison the Minneapolis Police Department is between 800 and 900 cops.
You see them frequently and they’re constantly active, whether that be abduction raids, missions where they have the name of someone they’re trying to grab specifically, or just straight up racial profiling while ripping people out of gas stations or as they’re picking up their kids from daycare.
And confrontations with ICE have been intense. They’re deploying tear gas, rubber bullets, flash grenades. Brutalizing people. It’s hard to describe, it really just strikes me as a fascist paramilitary force, a force of occupation.
CMR: How has that presence affected the community you live in?
KK: One the one hand, huge numbers of Latino workers in particular are just locking down. People stopped going out altogether. Imagine being stuck inside, not being able to go to the bar, go see friends, run errands, none of that stuff. I think there’s this level of terrorism that even if you don’t ever run into ICE you do fear it.
On the positive side, in the neighborhood that my wife and I live in, for example, there are 700 people in the rapid response network. And my understanding is that there are eight or so similar neighborhood networks across the Twin Cities — that means there’s thousands of people participating in this movement. Tons of people here are outraged, the whole society hates ICE here and that’s heartening.
