ANS -- What we can Learn from Minnesota

This is stuff we should know for when or if ICE comes to our own neck of the woods.

--Kim

The Other 98% 

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Minneapolis isn't "responding" to ICE anymore. Minneapolis is organizing to OUTLAST ICE. After weeks of escalated federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota, the Twin Cities are doing something the rest of the country keeps saying it wants but rarely builds: an everyday, neighborhood-level infrastructure that makes state violence harder to pull off in silence.

Here's what that infrastructure looks like on the ground: Signal chats that spread sightings in minutes, people walking around with whistles, neighbors showing up fast when someone's being cornered, and ordinary folks choosing "I'm watching" as a civic identity.

In a Jacobin interview, Minneapolis organizer Aru Shiney-Ajay describes a staggering density of participation, including neighborhood chats reaching "over 4 percent" of residents and rapid-response patrol chats that hit 1,000 people in a single neighborhood by late morning.

That matters because ICE thrives on logistics and isolation. You cannot "community statement" your way out of a federal dragnet. You have to interrupt the machine where it eats and sleeps and hides.

That's why Minneapolis didn't just stay defensive. It went on offense.

Activists have targeted the "pillars" that let ICE operate like an occupying force: hotels, rental cars, corporate partners, the quiet, normal places where repression refuels.

A local campaign that pushed a Hilton-branded hotel to refuse service to ICE, triggering national blowback and a corporate scramble. What makes this smart isn't the spectacle. It's the leverage. A regime can ignore outrage. It can't ignore friction inside the supply chain that keeps its agents moving.

Then came the proof-of-concept flex: the January 23 "ICE Out" general strike day in Minneapolis and beyond, called by unions and community groups as a refusal of business as usual under terror.

This was a muscle-building exercise: can we coordinate, can we hold lines, can we protect each other, can we make the city ungovernable for people who think they can hunt humans here?

This is what resistance looks like when it grows up. Not just rage. Routines. Not just protest. Infrastructure.

And that's the real exportable lesson: if you want ICE out of your city, don't wait for permission from pundits or politicians. Build networks that make disappearance difficult, complicity expensive, and solidarity automatic.