Minneapolis Everywhere
Repression and resistance in a time of cracks
By the National Executive Committee of Liberation Road.
If you are feeling overwhelmed, you are not alone. The world seems to be cracking open right now in a million ways. For the second time in six years, many of those fault lines extend out of Minneapolis, Minnesota—set in motion by the people’s resistance, by ICE’s increasingly brutal abductions of immigrants and people of color, and by their cold-blooded murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti for all the world to see.
New alliances and possibilities are opening in those cracks, just as new dangers emerge from them. As the Trump administration promises to make anywhere Minneapolis, we must make the resistance of Minneapolis everywhere.
The Trump administration is intensifying its push for an autocratic breakthrough, the bleeding edge of which is happening in Minneapolis. Around the country, the administration is escalating its ethnic cleansing campaign with increasingly repressive tactics and violence; the trampling of rights; and authorization of widespread, warrantless sweeps. It has also deployed suppressive surveillance and security technologies, including many that Israel unleashed in Gaza and against the Palestinian freedom movement. It has expanded its attacks on journalists through arrests, home raids, and censorship. And it has heightened its aggression toward election security through its raid of Fulton County election offices and seizure of ballots, ransoming voter rolls from Minneapolis, and threatening “nationalization” of elections while it also pushes voter suppression legislation in Congress. All the while, it has continued targeting activists and ordinary people engaged in acts of resistance, characterizing as “domestic terrorists” the victims of its own capricious and violent terror campaign, while intensifying persecution of key political opponents. These threads all knot together in Minneapolis.
But the people of Minneapolis have also rattled the administration and pushed its ethnic cleansing program into crisis. The massive popular mobilization of the Twin Cities through mutual aid, ICE watch, and protest action have called the question on the political and social permission for Trump’s anti-immigrant blitzkrieg and have rocked the pillars of its support. These efforts come in the wake of organizing strategic alignment built by labor, community, and faith organizations since the early 2010s; more than half a decade of tactical development emerging from the killing of George Floyd; and in the context of more than a century of socialist and progressive organizing and institution-building that is exceptional to the Twin Cities. Building on that legacy, people from all walks of life have helped defend and care for their neighbors; monitor and document the actions of Trump’s secret police; and through sounding the alarm and blowing the whistle, have even in some instances driven the occupying force from their streets, neighborhoods and the hotels where they sleep. All done with incredible courage–and with incredible sacrifice.
Cracks are emerging in the MAGA coalition. The resolve and steadfastness of the Minneapolis resistance, which has catalyzed national mobilization, has opened cracks in the MAGA front. Key Republicans are calling for inquiry and restraint, prominent conservative influencers and groups like the NRA have criticized the administration, and polling suggests a growing section of the MAGA base disapprove of ICE. But those cracks are not limited to the immigration crisis that the Trump administration has fomented in its sadistic haste to mobilize maximum resources against immigrants, especially in so-called “blue cities.” Its chaotic and dishonest handling of the Epstein files has also alienated key sections of its popular base, at once suggesting it has something to hide, and revealing the extent of it and its elite supporters’ implication in those horrific sex abuse crimes. Add to this a worsening economic picture— persistent inflation, rising inequality, employment stagnation, and a jarring, impulsive tariff program that has upended trade and supply chains—and the administration faces mounting instability on multiple fronts.
The progressive forces have the initiative inside the anti-MAGA front. Just as it has opened cracks in the MAGA coalition, the Minneapolis resistance has also forced a reform position from the centrist establishment forces that want to grip leadership inside the broad, multiracial pro-democracy front against Trump. While they surrendered leverage for a broad government shutdown, Congressional Democrats have maneuvered for a critical two-week period of negotiation to “rein in” ICE. Among the party’s base and leadership, increasing if limited numbers are embracing the demand to abolish ICE, but even pro-security Democrats have begun to shift their position. Whether led, dragged, or pushed, elected politicians, elected leaders—indeed, even local police departments—have called for some level of restraint and de-escalation from ICE.
Trump will likely continue to escalate–in Minneapolis, and elsewhere. As public support for nearly every element of the MAGA program continues to decline, the Trump administration is less likely to relent than it is to double down. The strategy is increasingly clear: blitz cities, confront activists, carry out lawless sweeps, then withdraw when litigation and resistance limit their reckless attacks—only to repeat the process elsewhere. Expect to see Minneapolis somewhere else. Yet it is unlikely the administration will fully back down there. Minnesota has been a beacon for progressives, and in so being is also a pathological obsession for Trump and his seething hatred for Ilhan Omar, Tim Walz, and the political program that the progressives have fought for and won there.
The next few weeks are critical, and the next nine months decisive. The left must continue to lead through action, and translate our leading role in civil resistance into greater political leadership. The tactics of social self-defense, ICE watch, mutual aid, and targeted direct action have successfully forced the anti-immigrant program into a crisis. As national negotiations over ICE tactics and funding continue, resistance at every level, everywhere will be essential in continuing to expose ICE’s brutality and aggression. These actions help protect and save people from abduction and disappearance, while deepening public outrage, which hardens opposition. Especially important are ICE watch tactics, which document and expose the activities of Trump’s secret ethnic cleansing police, and which also lay a foundation for popular monitoring and defense of our movements—and our upcoming election. Yet even as we defend our communities, we must prepare for a counteroffensive that propels us to electoral victory over the Trump coalition in November, and overcomes the right’s almost inevitable attempts to defy, deny, or delegitimize the election results in order to cling to power.
This moment offers both an opportunity and an urgent necessity for the left to increase its size and strength within a broader pro-democracy front. To seize it, we must guard against errors of two kinds. To avoid left errors, we must be clear that despite all justifiable anger and mistrust toward the Democratic establishment, the objective tactical alliance the left shares with centrist forces in the front against MAGA cannot be broken in the name of righteousness; it must be utilized to strike maximum damage against ICE’s ethnic cleansing program and to block the authoritarian consolidation attempt of Trump. This can include internal struggles—such as primary challenges against ICE-enabling Democrats—but always with the aim of strengthening our entire front’s ability to defeat and unseat MAGA in November. To avoid right errors, we must reject the idea that the elections can be won on affordability and an economistic program alone; fighting for democracy, and against racism and state violence, is not just a moral imperative, but a strategic opportunity for us to build pro-democracy, pro-racial justice governing majorities. The calls for May Day mobilizations pose a concrete test of this strategy—whether we can translate anger and resistance into disciplined, mass action that strengthens the entire pro-democracy front while sharpening the left’s leadership within it.
Six years ago the world cracked open before as people rose against injustice as they also fought to survive and cope with a radical reordering of everyday life. Not unlike today, when the Trump administration again works to reset global and domestic political and economic order, we again fight the state’s violent racial oppression in a conjuncture characterized by cracks. And what can crack, can break. In any protracted struggle there will be periods of more or less direct confrontation, and periods of more and less possibility for advance. As mass rejection of the Trump program escalates and their own forces struggle to unify, the unity, determination, and clarity of our movements could help break their deadly grip on power.
In Minneapolis, where the Trump administration has implemented its true program of terror, what we also see is the possibility, potential, and power of a broad multiracial pro-democracy front. Minneapolis everywhere.