Pearl River      Minneapolis has been well-known in the past for its fierce winters and sometimes amazing ice sculptures.  There are whole festivals to show off their skills and art.  Not every city can compete on that level, but that’s old history now, because Minneapolis has shown cities throughout the United States, if not the world, a new way to deal with forcible, autocratic occupations, in this case the shock troops of ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The head of the Customs Bureau was sent by Trump, to try and clean up the mess that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have made of their mass assault on the city with 3000 agents deployed and their ruthless and bloody tactics that resulted in two needless killings of immigration observers.  After scurrilous attacks on the victims and other protestors by the head of DHS and the White House, libeling them as domestic terrorists and blaming them for their own deaths in the face of incontrovertible video evidence, national opposition to ICE extremism and lack of restraint has grown to politically frightening levels for Trump and his crew.  Importantly, people in Minnesota never faltered in the wake of these tragedies from their efforts to birddog ICE agents, alert immigrants, and provide support and sustenance to their immigrant neighbors.  Withdrawing 700 agents with a lame cover story about “local” police cooperation, underlined the horror for everyone that this was hardly a quarter of the ICE manpower in the city with more than 2000 still remaining.  Finally, there is an announcement that the entire operation is being shuttered in Minneapolis.

Democrats in Congress have also learned something from the Minneapolis model and grown a backbone in dealing with Trump and the White House.  They have refused to approve the budget for DHS until there is a guarantee that agents will have to wear body cameras and be required to get judicial warrants for their home invasions, rather than self-certified permission slips they have written for themselves.  Those seem simple, straightforward, commonsense demands that should be hard to reject.  In training organizers to run campaigns, we always remind that being “morally right” makes a huge difference in winning.  On that count, the White House has already lost this fight.

The real heroes here are not the elected officials, but the citizens of Minneapolis and their supporters, who have come to help from around the country.  They have demonstrated the kind of mutual aid that we often only see in disasters like fires and hurricanes, understanding that the plight of immigrants and the occupation of their community by police power is a total community disaster.  Despite the danger and deaths, they have been witnesses, maintaining constant vigilance, which some have correctly argued is the key safeguard in a democracy where citizens have to participate in order to stop the abuse of state power.  They have marched in freezing temperatures.  They have confronted ICE agents in their schools and businesses.

We need to learn from Minneapolis and other cities where ICE efforts have been resisted, because this withdrawal of ICE is just a redistribution elsewhere in the country.  Even as we learn lessons in Minneapolis, there is no indication that the administration and its shock troops have learned from this experience.  They continue to blatantly lie.  The top US attorney in Minnesota, appointed by Trump, had to withdraw charges filed against two people wounded by ICE agents when he discovered new evidence that indicated the government story of their shooting was false in both affidavits and courtroom testimony.  There has been a strategic retreat by Trump and the administration, but no expressions of regret or apology, and absolutely no indication of a change in strategy going forward.  Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and other fabricators in these matters are still on the job, unbowed and unbounded, at least for now.

Mass action and individual courage and participation are still the only way that we can know the truth and uphold America, as it should be, not America as it now is.