In Minneapolis, spectacular cruelty meets authentic community 

“They wouldn’t understand that isn’t cold here all the time

Deep, deep, deep down inside

That something here is quite warm.

Minneapolis Poet Laureate Junauda Petrus, “Ritual on How to Love Minneapolis Again” (2025)

I am a historian of democracy and policing — and the fourth generation of my family to live and work in Minneapolis. My city is once again at the center of a national conversation about state violence, just five and a half years after Minneapolis police officers murdered a Black man named George Floyd. And once again, I’m watching my city respond with fury, grief, and hope.

Thousands of ICE agents and their comrades in the Border Patrol threaten us on our own streets, violently snatch people from their cars and homes without warrants or cause, and raid hospitals, day care centers, and schools (including one just two blocks from my home). Their agencies doctor images and post memes and refuse investigations and insist that what you can see with your own eyes is untrue.

Their real mission is not producing fear but content creation, as viral videos of government-mandated xenophobia garner millions of clicks. In an age of algorithmic capitalism, they power the latest iteration of American fascism. Visual cruelty empowers President Trump and his grifting cronies.

But Minnesotans complicated things. On January 22, Vice President Vance came here and pronounced his confusion regarding the “very unique, very Minneapolis specific reaction to our enforcement.”

He — like the rest of us — has been watching videos of everyday people resisting armed federal agents with little more than Signal chats, whistles, and words. They show people taking food to neighbors, standing outside schools to warn students and teachers if ICE agents appear, engaging in peaceful protests and solemn vigils, raising money to cover food and rent for frightened families, and pulling off the nation’s biggest general strike in decades. They show people who, despite being shot and detained and deported, continue to show up for each other.

In other words, the government-sanctioned spectacle of cruelty that fuels an un-American authoritarianism has been met by a community-driven expression of thoroughly American democracy.

Outside observers have tried to explain it by touting Minnesota’s liberal history, civic orientation, and culture of looking out for each other in a difficult climate. To be sure, the Farmer-Labor Party distinctively shaped Minnesota’s political culture. We tend to take civic life more seriously than most. And yes, harsh winters encourage neighborliness.

But the roots of many Minnesotans’ response to this brutal police riot can be found in a more recent history of quiet, steady, and persistent relational organizing that intentionally works across differences of every sort and brings people together around shared values.

In 2012, a group called Minnesota United for Families emerged to block the passage of an amendment to the state constitution that would outlaw LGBTQ marriage. The coalition did not focus its work on mobilizing a liberal base or attacking the state’s sizable conservative constituency. Instead, it focused tightly on how people imagine and feel about family. Acknowledging individuals’ differences while tapping into the shared values of a majority, Minnesota United for Families defeated the initiative. The next year, they used the same approach to pass a law guaranteeing marriage equality in Minnesota.

Relational organizing across difference with a focus on shared values took root in other spaces, too. The faith-based organization ISAIAH brings religious people of every sort together to create social and political change. Their interdenominational work across mosques, synagogues, and churches boosts capacity for civic action and has helped pave the way for legislation around clean energy, expanded voting rights, access to driver’s licenses regardless of immigration status, and paid family and medical leave.

Service worker unions — sporting disproportionate numbers of immigrants of color — also grew in size and strength in Minnesota during the 2010s. They taught members that solidarity depended on identifying and emphasizing shared values and experiences over language and ethnic and job differences. In 2024, one perceptive journalist dubbed it the “Minnesota model,” and suggested that it might be the future of organizing the working class.

This approach to organizing seeded the population with people who began imagining citizen empowerment in the same way. They fostered the localized and temporary mutual aid that marked everyday life in Minneapolis during the 2020 uprising that followed Floyd’s death. Confronted with an influx of white supremacists and the absence of public safety services, neighbors shared phone numbers, organized group chats, and coordinated volunteer watch teams to protect homes and businesses.

That much of Minneapolis and St. Paul and their racially diverse first-ring suburbs now sport moms blowing whistles when ICE appears testifies to the significance of the relationship-building during that moment. Direct action led by Black Lives Matter protesters and police abolitionists did not always secure political victories but did expand Minnesotans’ imaginations.

Now allied with longstanding immigrant advocacy groups, these many strains remain committed to emphasizing shared self-interest. In the wake of Renee Good’s murder, they even managed to mobilize many of Minnesota’s white liberals, who until recently remained stubbornly averse to grappling with the Twin Cities’ intense racialized inequality. Seeing the white, queer, Christian, mother as one of their own, they recognized themselves in the struggle — and already-organized Minnesotans welcomed them to the fight.

Together, they are producing a potent “we the people” politics that defies the blatant authoritarianism espoused by President Trump and Vice President Vance. Their deliberate, decentralized organizing — which can appear leaderless but is in fact leaderful — transcends partisan tribalism. Focused on morality, the Bill of Rights, and basic human decency, many different kinds of Minnesotans have come together to work together. They know the stakes are high.

What is happening in Minnesota is not just about immigration. It is about a surging American fascism. It is about democracy. It is about the rule of law. It is about the Constitution. It is about the future of our republic, which hangs in the balance.

During a news conference just one day after Good’s murder, Gov. Tim Walz — a former high school social studies teacher — invoked the Civil War and the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment. At the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, the 1st Minnesota charged into a brigade of Confederates five times their size to fill a sudden gap in the Union lines. It was a tremendous sacrifice; 82% of the regiment was killed or wounded in 15 minutes. It was just enough time for reinforcements to arrive and save the Union Army from sure defeat.

Walz suggested that today’s Minnesotans might need to follow the example of their Civil War forebears. “The nation,” he said, “is looking to us to hold the line on democracy, to hold the line on decency, to hold the line on accountability.”

This month, many Minnesotans have literally put their lives on the line to buy the Republic a little time.

What will you do with our sacrifice?

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