Monday briefing: the community solidarity driving the fightback against ICE in Minneapolis
Good morning. The world’s attention has been fixed on Minneapolis for weeks now. The small midwestern US city has been under siege since Donald Trump’s administration launched its latest immigration crackdown in December. Public outrage has reached fever pitch across the US after the killing of two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Though the White House has softened its rhetoric in relation to the killings, there is little indication of any meaningful shift in tactics on the ground. But, amid the justified focus on state violence, another story is unfolding. It is a story of parents patrolling schools, neighbours shopping for families sheltering at home; and alarms rippling through communities when ICE vans are spotted. It is a story of a community fighting back. To understand how this response took shape, I spoke to Sarah Jaffe, a labour journalist and author of From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, who has been reporting from Minneapolis for more than a decade, about what this moment reveals about power and solidarity. First, the headlines. Five big stories Epstein files | Peter Mandelson says he has resigned his membership of the Labour party to avoid causing it “further embarrassment” after more revelations about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Iran | Donald Trump has said Iran is talking to the US, hinting at a deal that would avoid the use of military strikes. Ukraine | A Russian drone attack on a bus carrying mine workers in Ukraine’s central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region has killed at least 12 people, officials said. Cuba | The United States has said it will ensure there will be no more fuel shipments to the beleaguered island, “Cuba will be failing pretty soon,” Donald Trump said earlier in the week. Grammy awards | Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar took home major Grammy awards during a night that saw musicians hit back at Donald Trump’s ICE occupation. In depth: ‘My neighbours are important and I will take risks to protect them’ Renee Good, a mother of three, writer and poet, dropped off her six-year-old son at school on 7 January, before encountering Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents nearby, who she stopped to ask what was going on, according to her family’s lawyer. She was killed by an ICE agent minutes later. Weeks later, on 24 January, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse, asked a woman who had been tackled to the ground and pepper-sprayed by nearby ICE agents: “Are you OK?” Those were the last words he spoke before he was killed. Sarah Jaffe tells me that what we’re seeing in Minneapolis is a powerful repudiation of Margaret Thatcher’s old assertion that “there is no such thing as society”. “We don’t experience the world in our own little world,” Jaffe tells me. “People are saying my neighbours are important – as important as my family – and I will take risks to protect them, even though I don’t know them and they’re complete strangers.” She is not surprised that the resistance to Trump has mobilised most effectively in Minneapolis. “Minneapolis has led the country in rebellion before, and it will probably do so yet again.” *** Sticking a wrench in the gears of ICE The ramping up of ICE enforcement activity in the Twin Cities, which refers to the Minneapolis and St Paul metropolitan area, began in December. In response, community defence networks were mobilised almost immediately and have only grown in strength since. The ways this defence has played out have been varied and creative, Jaffe says. Small business owners have been central to the response. A restaurant called Modern Times announced it would give food away to the local community and survive on donations, declaring, “Until the occupation is over, we are Post Modern Times.” A sex shop, Smitten Kitten, has transformed into a mutual aid hub, while a romance bookstore has been asking for recommendations for accessible books about labour and social movement history so they can stock them, she adds. The hospitality industry has been at the forefront. “An extraordinarily large number of the restaurant cooks in the US are undocumented or of some sort of precarious legal status,” Jaffe says. “So they’re putting up signs on kitchens that say ‘this is a private area for employees only, you can only come here with a warrant’.” For the outside world, the most visible organising has been around schools, where videos of parents patrolling drop-off and pick-up have gone viral online. Jaffe says parent groups began doing this after realising ICE agents were waiting at bus stops to detain parents collecting their children. Jaffe has reported ICE throwing teargas outside school buildings, with teachers trying to protect their students. Mutual aid groups first built during the pandemic have been reactivated to provide essentials to families sheltering in place. “People who are doing grocery runs are being told to not put any of the details in their phones, not to use GPS, to write the number and the address down on a piece of paper, and if they get stopped by ICE to eat it,” she says. Coordination has come through the Minnesota Democracy Defense Table, a coalition of about 80 organisations working on rapid-response teams and recruitment. But even seasoned activists have been shocked by the violence. “They smash your car window, cut your seatbelts, and just yank you out of it,” Jaffe says. “They’re grabbing anyone at this point and asking questions later.” There have even been cases of children left behind in car seats. Clergy have staged sit-ins at airports, and protesters have occupied corporate offices including Target and D R Horton, demanding companies refuse cooperation with ICE and protect workers. At every stage, Jaffe says, people are asking: “How do you stick a wrench in the gears of what ICE is doing?” Union organising has been at the heart of this struggle. On 23 January, it culminated in a “no work, no school, no shopping” general strike, hoping to hurt the economy in solidarity against the federal ICE deployment. Hundreds of businesses closed, and hundreds of thousands of residents took to the streets in temperatures of –23C. Calls are now growing for a nationwide general strike against ICE activity. *** A history of resistance This level of community mobilisation is not an eruption of spontaneous anger, Jaffe explains, but the result of more than a decade of organising coming into alignment. Jaffe first began reporting on the city’s social movements in 2012, focusing on the Occupy Homes movement, a spin-off from Occupy Wall Street. “Folks in the Twin Cities didn’t want to fight to occupy a park all winter long because you’ll be under 6 feet of snow. So, they moved really quickly to keep people in their homes who are about to lose them,” she says. She explains how the long history of police violence has forged together a community of protesters, from teachers, to labour organisers, to those who grew out of the Occupy movement. When Philando Castile, a school cafeteria worker, was killed by the police, “that really helped radicalise the teachers’ unions, particularly in St Paul, because he was one of them,” Jaffe says. Each police killing became a flashpoint, radicalising new layers of people. Where George Floyd was killed was a block away from the offices of Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha, which supports Latino workers, she explains. These organisations provided spaces where people could gather, wash their face from teargas, and connect with experienced organisers, she adds. And from this ecosystem, new leadership emerged. Marcia Howard, a teacher for 20 years who coordinated the sustained occupation of George Floyd Square as a semi-autonomous zone and protest space after his death, is now vice-president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. “Her student was the young woman who filmed George Floyd’s killing,” Jaffe says. What looks like separate crises – policing, education, housing, immigration – overlap in daily life. “As my dear departed friend Jane McAlevey would say, people don’t live single-issue lives,” Jaffe says. *** Cracks in the coalition The Trump administration has hit Minneapolis, and previously Los Angeles and Chicago, with such force in the hope of making an example of them, Jaffe says. “These are places that are the centre of the resistance camp, and he would love to break them. But news flash: he can’t. He couldn’t break LA, he couldn’t break Chicago, and now he’s trying really hard to break the Twin Cities,” she says. “I guess because it’s smaller he thought that it would be easier, but they have had more agents for longer in the Twin Cities and have had less success.” Few stories illustrate this dynamic more clearly than the targeting of Somali workers in the Twin Cities – who, with a long history of community organising and bargaining in the city in a radical and powerful way, have long been a thorn in the side of government. “They famously became the first organisation in the US to get Amazon to the bargaining table, although Amazon denies it bargained,” Jaffe says (the company says it was doing community outreach). It is for this reason, Jaffe argues, that Trump has targeted the Somali American community in Minneapolis, particularly its leftwing leaders. These include Ilhan Omar, who was attacked last week with what the FBI said was a mixture of vinegar and water, while calling for the abolition of ICE, and Omar Fateh, who led legislation in the state legislature to regulate Uber and other ride-hailing companies. But while Trump’s rhetoric remains loud, actions on the ground suggest a quiet reassessment of the situation amid the backlash in Minneapolis. Federal authorities have reshuffled leadership in Minneapolis, including pulling back Gregory Bovino, the controversial lead of the enforcement activities. After the fatal shooting of Pretti, Bovino drew further criticism for publicly claiming, without evidence, that the ICU nurse intended to “massacre law enforcement”. In his place, Trump has dispatched his “border czar”, Tom Homan. Homan sits higher in the hierarchy and reports directly to the president. Jaffe sees his arrival as an attempt to stabilise the narrative that the administration is losing. “The way people have been framing it on the ground is ‘we forced cracks in their coalition and that’s great, but it’s not over’,” she explains. Nationally, pressure is mounting. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana has said the “credibility of ICE and DHS [Department of Homeland Security] are at stake”, while a prominent Republican candidate and attorney, Chris Madel, has withdrawn from Minnesota’s gubernatorial race. Recent polling shows a plurality of Americans now support abolishing ICE. *** An attempted whitewash “I would expect that they will quietly scale down in Minneapolis while trying not to admit defeat,” Jaffe says, “and that they will go after softer targets.” One of those targets, she adds, is New Orleans, where she is heading next. “But,” she notes, “New Orleans has also been doing ICE watch patrols and buying groceries for people who are sheltering in place and donating to support restaurants that are immigrant-owned that have had to close down.” Jaffe describes the immigration raids as not only racist, but also part of a wider push to make America more white. Stephen Miller, a key White House senior adviser, denies this, and said questions about whether the administration’s tactics were racist were “dumb”. A long read on Miller, viewed as the ideologue behind Trump’s immigration policies, quotes allies who say he wants to reverse America’s post-1960s immigration boom, taking in migrants from Nordic Europe, while severely restricting those from the global south, in a bid to reshape America’s ethnic and political landscape. But, Jaffe adds, “what they’re actually doing right now is turning more white people that they assume are their base into Renee Goods and Alex Prettis.” What else we’ve been reading I was gutted about the recent death of the gifted actor Catherine O’Hara, but I found consolation in this piece by Jesse Hassenger about O’Hara’s heartfelt comedic roles. Katy Vans, newsletters team Why has the internet torn the left apart, but united the right? The academic Robert Topinka provides some interesting answers. Aamna Concerns about the rise of Reform UK are understandable, but the recent gains for Plaid Cymru in Wales give hope that there are alternatives to the status quo. Katy A proposal by a French rail operator to have childfree carriages sparked a backlash. Emma Beddington makes powerful arguments on children’s right to access public space. Aamna The floods last week in the UK were devastating to many of us, and our wildlife has also been hit hard. But we can adapt so that nature protects humans and creatures alike. Katy Sport Football | In the Premier League, Spurs came back from 2-0 down to draw at home against Man City, putting a dent in City’s title hopes. Despite being down to 10 men, Brentford managed to beat Aston Villa 1-0 at Villa Park, keeping Villa out of the top spot in the table. Elsewhere, Man Utd won 3-2 at home to Fulham, their win has them sitting pretty in fourth place. In the WSL, Man City trounced Chelsea 5-1 putting them 11 points clear at the top of the league. Tennis | Carlos Alcaraz has beaten Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open final. Aged just 22, he is the youngest man in history to complete the career grand slam. Boxing | Jarrell “Big Baby” Miller was involved in one of the more unusual moments in recent boxing history on when his hairpiece was dislodged during his heavyweight victory over Kingsley Ibeh at Madison Square Garden. The front pages The Jeffrey Epstein files feature in various forms today. The Guardian reported on Peter Mandelson, who has since resigned from the Labour party, with: “Mandelson under fire as file appear to show Epstein sent him $75,000”. The Telegraph says “Mandelson faces order for Epstein evidence”. “Epstein flew me to Andrew at Royal Lodge,” says the Mirror, in relation to a second woman who has come forward. The Times reports: “New Epstein victim: I was sent for sex with Andrew”. The Mail says: “Andrew in new Epstein legal threat”. The FT reports: “JPMorgan should ‘threaten’ UK over bankers’ tax, Mandelson told Epstein”. “Bring justice for Epstein victims, Andrew and Mandelson told,” reports the i. The Express reports: “PM wants to ‘rewind’ freedom Brexit gave us”. The Sun says Lewis Hamilton is dating Kim Kardashian. Today in Focus Fatima Bhutto on secrets, lies and surviving coercive control The Pakistani writer on enduring an abusive relationship in the public eye, and how she broke free. Cartoon of the day | Tom Gauld The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad Rejection triggers the same brain regions as physical pain, which explains why it feels so intense and memorable. Social exclusion once threatened survival, so humans remain highly sensitive to it. Yet avoiding rejection can shrink our lives, making us more fearful and less willing to take risks. Embracing rejection instead, writes Farrah Jarral, can build resilience, confidence and social ease. Jia Jiang’s “100 days of rejection” experiment showed how repeated exposure reduces fear and expands possibility. History also shows that rejection can fuel creativity, from artistic movements to individual innovation. Since rejection is universal, it allows us to grow, stay open and move through the world with greater freedom and playfulness. Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday Bored at work? And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply
