"The stakes are high, but people won't let their friends and neighbors be taken."
A conversation on resisting ICE terror in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and beyond
On Sunday, two days into the LA uprising, I spoke with long-time friend and comrade Fatima Insolación, a Minneapolis-based anarchist involved in no-border and migrant solidarity work for the past two decades. Days earlier, on Tuesday, June 3, federal law enforcement executed a warrant at a local Mexican restaurant in South Minneapolis, sparking a rapid community response that turned into a confrontation with police. We talked about the raid, the uprising in LA, the dynamics of local and federal law enforcement under Trump, and how communities are fighting back against ICE and Border Patrol terror.
I’m publishing an edited version of our conversation below. I think it provides some insightful context for the events unfolding in LA and, increasingly, around the country.
What happened in Minneapolis last week?
In hindsight, it appears that federal law enforcement executed warrants in 8 different locations, one of which targeted a restaurant (notable for displaying a large sign reading “Make tacos, not walls”) at Lake St. and Bloomington Ave., in the heart of the Latino community in South Minneapolis.
The warrants were ostensibly related to trafficking charges, and they claimed it wasn’t an immigration raid, but various agencies responded to the situation: federal agencies, as well as the Minneapolis Police Department, who claimed they hadn’t been given prior notice. Federal agents and Hennepin County cops deployed some pepper balls and pepper spray, but eventually the feds left, leaving MPD to deal with an increasingly angry group of community members who had responded to the rapid-response call. People held the corner for few hours, and later in the day, some folks did get arrested, but I don’t know if there are any pending charges.
I think this fits a pattern that we’re seeing nationally, where the Trump administration is targeting sanctuary cities and drawing in the municipal police, even though these cities have promised not to collaborate with immigration enforcement. [In response to the situation on Lake St., MPD issued a memo over the weekend, reminding officers not to assist with federal immigration removals]. And one could argue that, you know, a task force investigating drug smuggling, labor trafficking, and other criminal cases—well, what does “trafficking” even mean? It can mean be a number of things. The categories of criminality are easy for them to play with, and the feds don’t have to show or share their warrants with local police.
So the Trump administration is definitely trying to make an example of cities that have tried to separate local law enforcement from immigration, but I’m not sure those distinctions are all that meaningful. Even in places where there are no 287g agreements, local police will be asked to quell civil unrest, and even in municipalities that aren’t honoring ICE holds, they’ve been picking people up at courthouses. That’s what’s been happening here, at least. And now, even the prohibition on using the military for immigration enforcement is being sidestepped, with the new military zones they’re creating in New Mexico and Texas.
Right, and they’re setting the stage to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy soldiers to cities. I mean, they’ve already deployed the National Guard to LA, and Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, has said “we’re going to have troops everywhere.” [After this interview was conducted, Trump deployed a battalion of U.S. Marines to repress the uprising in LA].
Yeah, absolutely. Posse Comitatus Act or not, ultimately these institutions will back each other up. And arguably, all the paramilitary toys make the police vs. military distinction kind of moot, anyway. I mean, they brought an armored vehicle to the corner of Lake and Bloomington, right around the 5-year anniversary of the uprisings. It seemed designed to provoke a response, and it did. These ostensible divisions between different municipal, state, and federal enforcement agencies are essentially a liberal illusion. If you actually look at the way the enforcement mechanisms function in a practical way, ultimately, it’s one big entrapment net, and the police, whether or not they initiated the federal warrant, will be involved in taking people into custody and quelling civil unrest. Meanwhile, the protections against the military enforcing immigration law are slowly being chipped away, and very soon we’ll be seeing—as we saw a few years ago—National Guard soldiers pointing their guns at civilians in the street.
So yes, from a certain perspective, the police are already paramilitary in nature. But also, in terms of economy and size, the U.S. military is unmatched, and domestic deployment is, of course, a big deal. The fact that everyone is talking about how Trump hasn't invoked the Insurrection Act yet really illustrates how much the Overton Window has shifted.
Does it feel like things are going to escalate in Minneapolis?
I don’t think we know. I mean, I think they’ll focus on other cities right now, on LA, obviously. Clearly, they’re trying to make an argument that there’s an insurrection against U.S. sovereignty taking place, so the stakes are pretty high. It seems like they’ve been testing the waters in a few cities to see where they could get the hook in. I mean, there’s no way they didn’t know they’d elicit this kind of response. They’re really trying to maximize the spectacle of terror that they’re bringing into these communities. And it does seem strategic. We’ve known this was coming ever since they repealed the protections against immigration enforcement in sensitive areas like hospitals and schools and churches, right?
So they’re talking a big talk about increasing deportations, but at the same time, they’re not meeting pace with the infrastructural expansion. Like, what do they have, 46,000 ICE beds nationally? And they’re talking about increasing it to 60,000 or 100,000. But if you look at the FOIA documents from the companies that have been bidding for these contracts, they’re basically trying to set up militarized tent camps. And these are companies that usually respond to natural disasters or do large festivals, not imprison people who are desperate not to be deported. The up-scaling hasn’t kept pace with the rhetoric. And even from a legal standpoint, the administration is having difficulty moving at the pace they’d like to. I mean, there’s currently a group of eight men who have been stuck for more than two weeks in a shipping container in Djibouti, in East Africa, together with 13 ICE employees—they were trying to deport them to South Sudan, and the courts stopped them, so now they’re just stranded there.
Initially, it seemed like they’d be sending more people to CECOT, in El Salvador, but they’re not. They’re facing legal challenges, the logistics are complicated, and the administration is incompetent.
Right, and the symbolism of bringing Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. to face trafficking charges isn’t lost on anyone, right? For a long time, they didn’t say anything about what they had or didn’t have on him, as far as criminal charges, and then all of a sudden they come up with an entire conspiracy case for smuggling stretching back over a decade? I mean, I think it’s pretty clear that the Trump administration is testing public opinion. They’ll target undocumented folks, then see how the public feels about sending them to third-country holding spaces to be imprisoned for indeterminate periods of time, then they’ll see how people feel about potentially doing the same thing to U.S. citizens. So much of the rhetoric of Trump’s reelection campaign was focused on undocumented and mixed-status families, so I think a lot of people were surprised when he started targeting student visa holders and folks with green cards. But it’s a grab for power, and they’re constantly pushing the envelope of what’s acceptable. I don’t think folks who are concerned about the implementation of martial law are being hyperbolic. I actually think that anything is possible at this juncture, and we’re in a pretty tenuous and fragile moment, as far as whatever passes as democracy.
The Trump administration continues to double down on the rhetoric of criminality, insisting that they’re going after “the worst of the worst,” going after criminals, while constantly expanding the categories of people who qualify as criminals. I mean, we’re already there, actually…
Yes, I would say that we are. I mean, they arrested David Huerta, the president of the California SEIU [Huerta was released on Monday; he faces felony charges for conspiracy to impede an officer]. It’s very clear that they’re using these categories of criminality to forward their agenda, and it really could extend to anyone they choose to target. I mean. you know, similar to the ways that they’re trying to criminalize transgender people. There’s no way to be in compliance with the litany of state and federal laws they’re changing—the state has just decided: you don’t get to exist.
This all has precedence, of course; in many ways it reminds me of the period after 9/11, the use of Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition to torture prisons in Syria, the expansion of family detention in Texas… We've been in this territory before.
With the situation in LA, the political and media narrative is that Trump is at war with local Democratic leaders, who are fighting back against these fascist advances. Is this the dynamic in Minneapolis? What has been the response from the mayor, the city, and the local police?
At least on the surface, the dynamic is similar. Mayor Frey was openly angry about the situation and claimed they weren’t given prior notice, which does seem possible. And MPD was emphatic that they hadn’t been looped in—that they weren't enforcing immigration law. And I mean, I actually kind of believe that. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. This is the same problem we’ve had with things like Operation Streamline or Secure Communities, right? Shifting people between jail or prison and ICE detention. Sure, you can say the local police aren’t explicitly doing immigration enforcement, but if any interaction with the legal system ultimately can get you put on an ICE hold, and even if they don’t honor the hold, ICE will just pick you up when you leave the courthouse. And now that net is expanding.
Ultimately, every interaction with law enforcement of any kind can lead to your deportation, and not even necessarily to your country of origin. You might end up in some third-country purgatory.
Another thing to keep an eye on is that they’ve started threatening people with prosecution when they enter these new military zones on the border. So you can face up to a year in prison if you even trespass onto these new military zones in New Mexico and Texas. This is probably the approach they’ll take, and just imagine if they’re successful. I think they know that if they’re going keep people in tent camps, they have to do it in very, very geographically remote areas—places that aren’t close to urban centers, where people can’t get to.
I think what will happen over the next week in LA is going to be instructive. Will people continue to go out to the streets, and what’s the response going to be? They’ve hired a bunch of new people to work for ICE, and these yahoos seem really poorly trained. I mean, they have all the weapons of war, and they’re really scared of crowds. If you watch the videos, it’s like mediocre counterinsurgency—like they really don’t know what they’re doing, which is also incredibly dangerous. At the Home Depot and federal building situation in Paramount, it just seemed like they were totally caught off guard. And the facility they’re keeping people in in LA is not a legal space to hold people. The electricity in that billing gets cut off at 5:00 p.m. They’re really just ad-hocking it, and I think all of the civil liberty and legal avenues that people are used to being able to employ are just—they’re going away.
What is the organizing environment like in Minneapolis? How are community groups responding?
There are pretty strong community coalitions. Minneapolis has been a really diverse place for a really long time, and there are well-organized groups like MIRAC [the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee] and a plethora of others that have been doing organizing and legal advocacy in the Latino community for a really long time. There are also well-organized networks of rapid response groups coming together, out of the mutual aid groups that proliferated during the pandemic and during the uprising. After the uprising, that’s where a lot of people focused their political energy: creating mutual aid networks and running community hotlines that serve as an alternative to the police.
So, much like in LA, which is also diverse and well-organized, they can’t expect to do widespread raids without resistance. In some ways, I think they were kind of counting on this. I think they were counting on and hoping for these kinds of confrontations. The feds are definitely doing this as a fuck-you to the local police departments and state jurisdictions, which are then put in the awkward position of ultimately collaborating and enforcing, regardless of the ridiculous liberal counter narratives about “community policing.”
If you actually look at the way the enforcement mechanisms function in a practical way, ultimately, it’s one big entrapment net, and the police, whether or not they initiated the federal warrant, will be involved in taking people into custody and quelling civil unrest.
It seems like the same liberal voices that have been so outspoken about the need to “not comply in advance” to fascism are the first to condemn the riots—to say, “Don’t be violent, you’re playing into Trump’s plan.” And it’s true: they want to spark these spectacular confrontations, to create an excuse to ramp up repression. But what are people supposed to do? No one in power cares if people protest politely, certainly not now.
I think people should do what they’ve been doing. They actually can’t deport the number of people they claim they want to, and if every single attempt at deporting every single person is met with the level of resistance that we saw last week in Minneapolis, and certainly if it’s met with the resistance we’re seeing in LA, this won’t go the way they want it to. People who have never paid much attention to the vulnerabilities of their mixed-status and undocumented neighbors are paying more attention now than ever before, and I think the explicit white nationalism and Neo-Nazi affiliations of these various enforcement agencies are eliciting a very strong response. As they should.
I think we’re like much later in the timeline than like anyone wants to admit, because it’s scary to think about. But this has been the reality for undocumented and mixed-status communities for a long time, and now it’s ratcheting up, and the rest of America is waking up to the totalitarian, dystopic reality that others have been dealing with for a really long time.
So I think people should continue to do what they’re doing. They should plug into rapid-response networks, and they should come up with safety plans for their friends and family members who are vulnerable. Because it’s not just about riding in the streets, although absolutely people should do that. But there’s so much care labor that happens in our communities and people should prepare for what’s coming, for what’s already here. They should help their family members and friends draw up temporary guardianship papers for who gets their kids if they get deported or arrested, so that their kids don’t go into state custody, and they should come up with safety plans. I think we know how to do this. It’s just scary and overwhelming at the level at which it’s occurring. But our communities have these skill-sets, we have this knowledge, and we can do it together.
The bottom line is that we can’t allow professional kidnappers to incarcerate our loved ones and place our kids in federal holding facilities where they are abused and sexually assaulted. The stakes are very high, and they've been high. But people will not let their friends and neighbors be taken. The entire system must be brought to its knees. No more deaths in custody, no more stolen children. We will fight ICE, Border Patrol, and the cops to keep families together.
Further reading/listening:
Minneapolis to Feds: “Get the Fuck Out” - Crimethinc.
Shifting Trends in Policing Dissent with Kristian Williams and Garrett - Outlaw Podcast
ICE-Led ‘Homeland Security Task Force’ Raid Draws Large Mobilization in Minneapolis - Unicorn Riot
The Insurgent Southwest: Death, Criminality, and Militarization on the U.S.-Mexican Border - Fatima Insolación
Go Max et al!!!