Lurie Breaks It Down

Lessons and Resources from Minneapolis
This is a memo, written in haste, about the ongoing conditions of the ICE and military
occupation of Minneapolis. For context, the author is a former Minneapolis (Mpls)
resident who lived and organized in abolitionist, labor and migrant defense movements
for 8 years who is in close contact with organizers on the ground in Minneapolis. The
information here is compiled from firsthand accounts and has been vetted by four
comrades in the Twin Cities (TC).The memo is not meant to be exhaustive and merely
offers one starting point for others to record and share best practices and lessons.
The memo covers four things:
1) What the conditions are like in Minneapolis right now, as a possible reference
point for what may unfold elsewhere
2) How community is responding
3) Reflections on what we might learn from rapid response and ICE watch
organizing in Minneapolis
4) Resources and trainings from Minneapolis
1) Conditions in Minneapolis
What is unfolding in Minneapolis in “Operation Metro Surge” is nothing short of a federal
occupation, an invasion by a poorly trained paramilitary force of ICE troops who are
heavily armed, masked, and mobilized in nearly every neighborhood in the Twin Cities.
There are 2,800 armed and masked federal agents in Minneapolis right now, with Noem
promising to send 1000 more. It is at a scale that is unprecedented thus far. They have
been abducting people off the streets, many of them US citizens, based on the color of
their skin or perceived ethnicity. All over the city, large SUVs with tinted windows, full of
masked ICE agents are cruising through neighborhoods and back alleys, looking for
people to snatch. Friends of friends have witnessed ICE agents stuffing people into
these cars in front of their houses. To give you a sense of how bad it is, a friend
witnessed two children under the age of 13, out walking their dog, get abducted and
placed into a van in the middle of the day. Their friend got pepper sprayed for trying to
stop it. No part of the city is immune; not the primarily white, affluent neighborhoods, not
the uptown commercial district which got tear gassed yesterday, nowhere. From
accounts gathered from friends and trusted sources:
● Rapid-response community safety groups and immigrant rights orgs estimate
there is violent federal escalation happening in their communities every 15
minutes, based on the verified reports they’ve received since last Monday.
Targets:
● Businesses: ICE agents are cruising areas with immigrant-owned businesses,
and kidnapping patrons and employees alike. This week they abducted two US
citizen employees at a suburban Target, one who was begging them to allow him
to go get his passport to show them. In another episode, someone with a
passport in their pocket was abducted. Lawyers have advised shifting from Know
Your Rights to Know Your Risk trainings; even they realize there is no rulesbased order to rely on anymore.
● Schools: ICE is targeting schools and school buses, and especially ESL
schools. They pepper sprayed teenagers and abducted two school staff
members at a high school up the street from a friend’s house on Weds. They
have abducted whole groups of children from bus stops. The Minneapolis Public
Schools are still in person, but are offering optional online learning for the next 4
weeks so that children who feel unsafe coming to school can shelter in place.
While that has helped, several parents reported that during their kid’s hybrid
classes, they have watched other kids’ apartment buildings raided on screen.
● Hospitals and Clinics are experiencing raids. Patients are scared and are
canceling their appointments or just not showing up. Kids are missing their
checkups and vaccines, folks aren’t getting their cancer care, etc.
● Immigrant neighborhoods, subsidized housing, mobile home parks, and
other affordable housing. These have been the primary targets. There is, for
eg, a plan to raid the towers, a massive housing estate for Somali refugees this
week. ICE agents have been casing several mobile home parks. The main
targets are areas of high housing density, known immigrant neighborhoods.
Somali refugees who have staus under the UNHCR process (a very high bar to
hit) are getting abducted and deported despite valid work visas
Racial Profiling:
● ICE is going door to door in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, asking
residents where their immigrant neighbors live (Asian, Latino, and Somali have
been the explicit targets). Yeah. Read that again.
● ICE is increasingly picking up Native Americans— targeting folks based on skin
color alone. The irony is not lost on anyone.
● ICE brutality: They are arresting and beating legal observers; some have had
their arms broken, many are being pepper sprayed, even 50 feet away from
people they are abducting. Folks are showing up at local hospitals, brought in in
ICE custody, with severe injuries that are absolutely inconsistent with mechanism
of injury reported by ICE. (Eg: patient appears to have been beaten unconscious,
while ICE agent says he slipped and fell.)
● They are smashing windows in cars and homes. They are chasing down cars
with drivers they perceive as Somali or Latino, smashing into those cars, and
pulling people out and abducting them on the street. Last night after shooting a
man in the leg on his doorstep, they flash bang grenaded one car, and
teargassed another with six children in it. There are abandoned cars, all over the
place: at gas stations with their nozzles still attached. On the side of the road.
Doors open, abandoned. It is unclear whether families know when their relatives
are abducted; Minneapolis groups are full of people reporting their relatives
missing.
● Shifting ICE tactics: Some reports suggest tactics have begun to shift. There
have been reports of ICE vehicles sporting free Palestine stickers, placing soft
toys on their dashboards, using Subarus, changing their license plates; and
hanging handicap symbols on rearview mirrors; ICE agents wearing civilian
clothes and no identifying vests, and more ICE agents being recruited who are
Black and brown folks. *There is no confirmed verification about these new
tactics at this point of writing*
● These ICE agents do not have warrants. There are 2,000+ agents and they are
simply hunting for anyone that’s not white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a
green card holder, they will kidnap you first and ask questions later.
● Right wing militias have descended on the city from the outskirts of the
Midwest. They did so in 2020 as well, lighting fire to cherished old bars and
intersections. Their stated role this time is to protect ICE agents and “prevent
riots from happening again”. A large right-wing rally to “stop Islam from invading
Minneapolis” has been called for Jan 17.
● Processing: Many of the abducted are getting processed at the Whipple federal
building and being shipped out of state as soon as they are processed. Once
buses or planes leave the state, it becomes very difficult to stop the deportations,
and this is part of ICE’s strategy. ICE has also just announced that they will be
placing ICE agents on sky bridges at the Minneapolis-St Paul airport.
2) Types of community response in Minneapolis:
- The community response is at an extraordinary scale. Many people have the
muscle memory of neighborhood watches formed during the George Floyd
uprising and have revived old systems and signal chats. Normal people with boat
shoes are coming out of their houses using baking pans as armor. The primary
forms of organization are as follows:
Large intakes of newly politicized people are getting trained via Non-Profit
coalitions:
- Training and integration into rapid response groups is being systematically led by
a few well-run non-profit organizations who are tapped into the neighborhood
groups. These Community orgs have been leading know-your-rights sessions for
months, often to packed venues. Their intake right now is at about 1000 people
per night. People who have never been remotely politicized before are getting
trained. These large organizations then direct newly-trained people into
autonomous neighborhood groups based on their assessed risk level.
- Minneapolis is distinctive in its organizing infrastructure because it is a small
enough city that there tends to be more community-labor coalition crosspollination than I have witnessed in other places. This has been especially useful
as large catchments of newly-politicized, middle-class white people have looked
for ways to plug in: they go to the large organizations that have a longstanding
reputation for doing immigrant work (CAIR, Unidos MN, Immigrant Movement
MN, and the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee - a FRSO front org I
was involved in for some years; notably, DSA is not really on this list and not
really where the majority of people go). A significant number of faith based and
interfaith organizations (ISAIAH) are involved. These orgs have a couple of
centralized trainings that they have been running nightly; the friend who leads
them reported 1500 on the night that Renee Good was killed, and hundreds
every night since. These are two of the primary trainings being used:
- Basic 101 ICE Watch training - for anybody and everybody new to
movements
- STAC Base Ice Watch Training - from PRP/STAC
- Minneapolis is also unique because of its demographic composition: It has one of
the largest state populations of people Indigenous to North America, some of the
largest refugee populations (primarily Hmong and Somali), and one of the most
active populations of people descended from enslaved Africans. These are people
who have borne generations of imperialism and state violence, and are some of the
most risk-taking and trauma-tolerant ICE responders in the city. The autonomouslyorganized neighborhood defense groups are thus incredibly diverse and driven from
and by refugee and immigrant working class people defending their own
communities and neighbors. These neighborhood networks, mutual aid, and
school defense networks have also taken on a life of their own far beyond the
non-profits, and are doing intake and autonomous trainings of their own. It’s all
hands on deck, and people are getting tapped in from all directions.
Autonomous formations:
- Safety Brigades: Mobile teams of volunteers that are dispatched to locations
where ICE presence has been reported in order to verify those reports. If they
witness an active operation, they document, report it to a hotline, and send out
an alert to the neighborhood signal group. Drivers are following ICE vehicles,
blaring their horns in warning. Some are doing bike patrols following guidelines
started by Chicago:
- Siembra Safety Brigade Orientation
- Copy of PRP Building Community Defense Networks (MN)
- Bike-Patrol-Guidelines-(copy).pdf
- Neighborhood rapid response groups: Largely autonomously-organized by
neighborhood. Every neighborhood has one. Friends say every single
neighborhood has upwards of 400-2000 neighbors in their chats, trained and
ready to mobilize when a rapid response call is put out. These RRNs try to get
out ahead of ICE arrival to warn immigrant neighbors to stay in their homes, but
most of the time, are responding when ICE agents have already appeared to
intervene. In many cases depending on tactical comfort with risk, these RRN
volunteers pull abductees away from vehicles, chase ICE out by showing up in
droves with a mass response, and in most cases, recording and reporting. The
scale of this mobilization is astonishing; it is enough neighbors trained that when
ICE appears, people have been capable of mobilizing in a matter of 1-12
minutes. Whistles are being distributed by the thousands (by the local Ace
hardware and by a queer sex store!), carried on keychains and worn on coat
zippers, always at the ready to be blown in warning if ICE is spotted.
- Here are best practices for neighborhood or area patrols that are being
shared in these groups
-
- It’s notable that there is now (unlike during George Floyd) an astonishing
willingness across the political spectrum to embrace a diversity of tactics. In
neighborhood response groups, most people show up to block doors and
restaurants, swear at cops, blow whistles and make a lot of noise, but others
have exercised their second amendment rights, and de-arrests are very
common. When another person was shot last night in North Minneapolis,
responders set off fireworks under ICE vehicles, graffitied and damaged them,
and took equipment, documents and cameras, all while being tear gassed. A
comrade’s very normie sister said yesterday: “You can’t draw a box around
resistance. I support everyone doing anything to get ice out.” The ground has
shifted for regular liberals in the face of fascist state violence, and very quickly.
- School guards: Neighbors get out of their houses in the early morning to stand
guard at schools and daycares to monitor arrival and departure. There have been
yellow alerts and lockdowns two days in a row at Edison high school (an ESL
school) because of ICE sightings. ESL schools have been especially hard hit.
Parents and neighbors are standing guard outside schools, organizing carpools,
and escorting kids to and from school on foot.
- Stationing at vulnerable locations: Safety brigades are also stationing at
vulnerable locations that are more likely to be targeted by ICE or Border Patrol to
help deter them from coming. This includes apartment buildings and
neighborhoods, immigrant-owned businesses, large shopping centers or
Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot parking lots, and more. Since November, Siempre
Safety brigade has spent extended periods of time in these places, building
relationships with neighbors, to help them feel more secure.
- Business safety brigades: Businesses are locking their doors even while open
to keep employees and customers safe. Neighbors stand guard in front of the
locked doors of neighborhood immigrant-owned restaurants, burrito joints and
bakeries, so the employees can focus on their jobs. There have been many
organized efforts to patronize immigrant-owned restaurants to keep places in
business and to keep white people in the restaurants to respond if ICE comes.
- Native-led community defense: as during the GF uprising, AIM members and
native organizers have formed a coalition called the Indigenous Protectors
Movement. They stage out of the AIM center’s coffeehouse, are coordinating
supply donations, and are leading armed patrols of predominantly native
neighborhoods, including Little Earth, a subsidized housing complex that houses
primarily native people.
- The role of the police: Interestingly, Minneapolis police have been escorting
school buses so that kids can get to school safely. Many on the left remain
critical of the MPD, but others have been taking on the “enemy of the enemy is
my friend” position on the MPD’s role in these times. It’s worth noting that the
police chief most recently brought in after the GF uprising was explicitly given the
charge of relegitimizing the MPD, and has done so by preaching the importance
of de-escalation trainings. There is lots to think about here for abolitionists.
- Mutual Aid: Churches and community groups are holding fundraisers to buy and
deliver groceries to families who don’t feel safe leaving home. Notably, a local
queer sex shop (Smitten Kitten) has become one of the central mutual aid
distribution centers for receiving aid and sending it out.
- Mutual aid money is being raised for supplies, groceries and crucially, funds are
being focused for rent for families sheltering in place because they can’t work or
because a breadwinner was abducted, or who need a warm place to stay after
their home’s windows were smashed.
- People’s Laundry, which formed during the GF Uprising amidst the pandemic, is
collecting and washing clothes for families who can’t go to the laundromat.
- Labor: A general strike has been called for Jan 23. A comrade in Minneapolis
notes: “There was a large MN AFL CIO meeting where they kicked around the
bush about a general strike and then the community orgs and religious groups
with a few of the more militant locals went ahead and had a press conference.
It’s got very building as we go vibes. But I personally feel this can only be a good
development in the long run.” Labor organizer friends in Minneapolis note that
several locals have signed on, and others have told their members that although
they cannot legally strike, they encourage them to take the day off in whichever
way they can. There are numerous rank and file trades loops and worker chats
that are distributing flyers, and carpenters and other unions with conservative
leadership are working on organizing rank and file to wildcat.
- Tenants Unions: TUs and their neighbors are raising money to cover people’s
rent while they shelter in place; this has been a huge focus of fund raising. TUs
have also gone to city council to push them to pass an eviction moratorium given
how many people are sheltering in place.
- Weather: This is mostly a source of amusement, but it’s a notable mode of
relationship to place that Minnesotans hardened by the harshest winters in the
country know how to handle ice and deathly cold and are equipped and willing to
patrol, mobilize, and engage in confrontation in 0 degree Fahrenheit weather,
while agents keep slipping on sheets of ice, roll their cars down hills, and are ill
equipped to confront the cold. It’s a not-insignificant cultural factor in Minneapolis’
show of force. The flyover states don’t get a lot of recognition in the pantheon of
leftist writing that overly skews to the coasts, but Minnesotans are bad bitches
and are showing the world that they cannot be fucked with.
3) Some reflections on what we can learn from Minneapolis
What should we learn from Minneapolis? Some thoughts.
First, Rapid Response networks (RRN)s are important, but there are many needs
on the front and back end of RRNs, and cities should not neglect developing
these systems. Often, RRNs are best equipped to respond after a sweep has begun,
when the most effective action requires a response within 30s of ICE showing up; this is
not always possible. While Rapid response is the primary thing that most people
gravitate to and it’s where the MPLS left has been best positioned to train and bring
people into movement spaces, unfortunately, it is ill-equipped for two things:
- Preventive measures: to get in front of ICE, regular patrols by bike, car and foot
have been effective interventions that regularize monitoring ICE presents and get
ahead of potential sweeps early. Mpls workers have been driving immigrant
coworkers and neighbors to work, and escorting vulnerable colleagues home;
standing guard in front of large housing complexes in shifts, etc. I would be
curious to hear what else people have been doing on this front.
- Legal support: ICE is catching and processing people at such rapid rates through
Whipple, the Federal building, that there aren’t enough lawyers to support and
stay deportations at the rate at which they are being swept into the system in the
hundreds per day. The strategy has been to put people on buses and send them
out of state ASAP, and once they cross state lines, deportations are very difficult
to stop. There is a need for recruiting immigrant lawyers to provide pro bono
defense and to train people to file Habeas petitions. These front and back end
forms of immigrant defense are as crucial as rapid response, and comrades
should be recruiting people into and developing these functions as much as they
are developing RRNs.
Second, RRNs, as important as they are, are reactive forms: they emerge in
anticipation of and during raids, but are not ongoing or durable forms of political
organization. Our role as communists is to not only respond in moments of crisis
but find ways to bring those newly politicized into durable mass organization. A
comrade raised an important point that in the aftermath of these crisis moments, it will
be easy for many newly-politicized people to lapse into complacency or think the worst
is over. As he put it: These are defensive fights, and we should not be so disillusioned
as to think we will win in any significant way. Our task, which we will have to take on
with intention, is to figure out how to build durable forms of entry- and mid-level
organizing (that is *not* a boring DSA GM with 800 procedural proposals, sorry to say!)
that continue to develop folks politically. In Minneapolis, I saw the consequences of
there being too few durable organizing projects in the wake of the George Floyd
uprising: many on the left who were heavily involved in various elements of uprising
organizing and rapid response felt traumatized and much of Minneapolis drifted back
into small friend groups, held dance parties, and tried to heal. There was a dearth of
durable organizing projects that people could plug into, nor a sense of what the longterm organizing project could or should have been after Mpls lost the referendum to
restructure the MPD.
Third, another great point raised by another comrade is that while every city should be
getting ahead of the curve and training people well before an ICE occupation is
announced, it may well be the case that people will get trained and never have to
respond / that ICE will not descend in the way they have in Minneapolis. This can
sometimes be deflating. Other tactics and ways to bring people into organizing will
be necessary so that people new to the left can feel engaged in enacting a politics
that isn’t just a situation of ‘just in case’ – such as organizing boycotts (one comrade
suggested organizing boycotts of Target and Home Depot, who have allowed ICE to
stage in their parking lots), or building R&F labor coalitions and union trainings around
supporting immigrant co-workers, or filing habeas petitions. I’m sure there are other
ways to do this, and I think comrades should be intentionally figuring out how to link
these crisis mobilizations to durable mass organization. For example, labor organizers
could flyer and organize co-workers towards solidarity with the Minneapolis Jan 23rd
general strike – this is one possible way to show solidarity with Minneapolis and also
take action before an ICE response. How can we pull on primary existing socialist
formations — Tenants unions and labor movements — to do such kinds of work?
Fourth, we need to be organizing to make the occupation of Minneapolis an issue
in cities outside of it. What is happening there is a canary in the coal mine for what will
certainly unfold elsewhere. Since we don’t know when ICE might arrive in our cities, if at
all, it may be more useful to think about DSA’s role in organizing solidarity actions with
Minneapolis. A comrade in Minneapolis emphasizes this point:
“I think the thing to impress upon people is the scale of what is happening here and the
unprecedented nature of the onslaught. Most of the structures that have been
established in Minneapolis rely on assumptions about the law that may no longer be
valid by then. Things are rapidly evolving and conditions that unfold in different cities
may be radically different than they are now. The comrade notes that while we should
set up infrastructures for RR networks in other cities, they are of the opinion that the
most important thing at this point is to figure out ways to organize in solidarity with MN
right now so that this shit doesn't spread and so that the surge ends there asap.
How can we organize within the DSA to put the pressure on so that all eyes are on MN?
What solidarity actions can be taken now in order to draw attention to the struggle here
and amplify networks of resistance? Minnesota needs to be the focus. This is about
resistance to an imperialist invasion, but a domestic one. That's my two cents.”
Fifth, it’s important to be realistic about the scale at which DSA chapters are able
to organize: in many cases, DSA does not have widespread membership in
concentrated areas, meaning that something like a DSA Rapid Response chat will be
too geographically distributed to meaningfully respond on time and at scale. In most
cases, it has also been the case that whatever reservations we are sure to have about
the peace policing tendencies of these orgs, the large non-profit coalitions are going to
be the primary catchment areas for the intake of mass numbers. RRNs are a scale
game, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves about being able to compete, for example, with large coalitions with staff resources and time to train people en masse. This raises the question then of what role a socialist organization like DSA can and should play in these moments. The reality is that most chapters have not done a good job of seriously building programs around recruiting and building working-class formations of immigrants and people of color; as a result, DSA will not be the primary organization that the most affected communities will trust to submit ICE reports nor are immigrants likely to be a core part of the DSA response. Instead, it may make sense for DSA chapters to position themselves to plan entry-level political education meetings shortly after big marches, rallies, or rapid response meetings, to invite new folks to those meetings, and to offer a
more durable infrastructure for them to come into socialist movements, to stay politicized after a surge, and to continue their political development. One example is the way that East Bay DSA has organized a “Socialism Beats Fascism” series designed to draw folks in who are new to socialist organizing. Additionally, how we reckon with our ongoing failure to build a strong working class of color organization, and what this moment raises for those prospects, should be an ongoing topic of strategy and discussion..

Sixth and finally, the rule of law is out the door. The state has shown its face. There are no protocols, no respect for procedure, and no pretension towards a rules-based international order. The era of liberal imperialism by which the US had to massage its forms of explicit domination in the name of pax Americana is gone. This presents an extraordinary opportunity for the politicization of the masses, who must be encouraged to see this as America with gloves off, not Trump as exception. This is, of course, a banal point by now, but we are presented with a window of opportunity for radicalizing many who are experiencing fascism firsthand for the first time. If the Trump regime has shown no regard for law, then nobody should care about no-strike clauses right now. The question will be how we bridge the experience of people politicized for the first time by their experience of fascism to immigrants and workers of color, so that this becomes a moment of solidarity with those domestically and internationally who have long been the subjects of state violence. This is not an abstract question but one of organization.

What becomes possible now that liberalism’s softer face is done? How might the usual class-collaborationist fears of repression and aversion to flouting order - fears that normally produce proceduralism and tamp down militancy - be coaxed into a willingness to act in more militant ways?
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Lurie breaks down the changing global order as European leaders respond to Trump's threats at Davos. She draws parallels between ICE's domestic actions and America's international behavior, particularly regarding Greenland. The show examines how world leaders like Denmark's Prime Minister are pushing back against American dominance, suggesting we're witnessing the end of an era. Throughout, she offers a framework for understanding these shifts through the lens of 'white narcissism' and considers what strategic responses might look like for Black Americans. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com
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