Reflections on Minneapolis 2026

The story of Minnesota is being rewritten. Things are not yet settled, but it seems likely that someday middle school history textbooks will have a sidebar about the past three months.

In 2025, Minnesota was known as a cold place filled with moose, pine trees, and polite but mildly eccentric Scandinavians. Starting in 2026, we will be known as the place that kicked out the fascists. They came with guns and flak jackets, we chased them away with whistles and cameras.

I use the word “fascist” knowing that not everyone agrees the term applies (especially not the fascists), but in my view the combination of thuggery, authoritarianism, and racist nationalism has no better name today. And I say we kicked them out knowing that the ICE and Border Patrol agents sent to terrorize us have not actually left yet, but they definitely seem to be speed-running the “declare victory and retreat” playbook.

It’s been an intense few months but it looks like the end may be in sight (we hope!), so this is my attempt to get my thoughts and observations down while events are still fresh. This is going to be long, but it’s still only the second draft of history. Perhaps the final edit will be more concise.

What Happened?

Throughout 2025 we had been hearing news about immigration raids in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. The goal seemed to be as much about spreading fear and intimidation as actually deporting people: unidentified and masked agents would grab people seemingly at random (but usually based on foreign-seeming appearance or accents) and whisk them off to detention centers. Agents often ignored proof of legal status or even citizenship, and flashy operations like a midnight raid on a Chicago apartment building made national headlines while seemingly yielding little in the way of actual criminals or undocumented immigrants.

In the fall, the Trump administration started making noise about targeting Minnesota. This was not a surprise: Trump seems to have a personal grudge against our state since we never voted for him and our governor was the Vice Presidential candidate in 2024. But the scale of the operation was, compared to the size of our city and state, much larger than anything anywhere else. DHS claims they sent 3,000 agents to the Twin Cities, which is larger than the combined police forces of our metro area.

Community groups had been organizing since the summer, using lessons learned in other cities to train legal observers and rapid response networks, so when ICE started showing up people were ready. The first several weeks were relatively quiet with raids in Minneapolis neighborhoods barely registering for most people other than those directly affected.

My first direct exposure came in early December when ICE detained a friend, Sue Tincher, as she was observing someone get snatched off the street near her home in North Minneapolis. There was no legal basis for taking her into custody even by the extremely loose standards ICE seems to be using: it seemed that simply her presence annoyed the agents so they decided to kidnap her, too.

I use the word “kidnap” deliberately here, even though the news media usually uses words like “arrest” or “detain.”. But kidnap seems like the right word to use when someone is snatched off the street without any legal authority or justification. This event was barely mentioned in our local newspaper; at the time I emailed Sue’s husband to ask, “why isn’t this front-page news”? But things were only just getting going.

In late December, DHS announced more agents were coming, and soon SUV’s with blacked-out windows and obscured license plates were seen driving recklessly in suburban neighborhoods throughout the Twin Cities. Smaller towns throughout the state were not left alone, either, including one widely reported story of a team of ICE agents who ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Willmar, then returned a few hours later to ambush the staff. My wife started getting heavily involved in local rapid response efforts and was roughed up while blowing her whistle during a raid. For my part I started cranking out whistles on my 3D printer (I’ve given away over 1,000 very loud whistles to date).

Then on January 7th, Rene Good was murdered by an ICE agent just seconds after calmly saying, “I’m not mad at you.” A week or so later another bystander was shot, but fortunately survived. And on January 24th, Alex Pretti was murdered as he tried to help a bystander. In all three cases, the Trump administration immediately blamed the victims, claiming they were “terrorists” trying to kill federal agents, and in all three cases those claims were spectacularly proven wrong by video footage clearly showing the agents were the aggressors. In the case of Rene Good, they went so far as to open an investigation of Good’s widow, an action so outrageous it caused many of the federal prosecutors in our district to quit (at least one is now a defense attorney representing people facing federal charges related to ICE protests).

After the second murder the Trump administration seemed to realize that this was not going the way they had planned. With national opinion rapidly deteriorating, they quickly shifted to a “declare victory and retreat” playbook. Within days, the on-the-ground commander (who literally dressed like a Nazi officer and would personally throw tear gas canisters at protesters—you can’t make this stuff up) was fired, and the new guy promised to withdraw the DHS agents if he got cooperation from local authorities. And a week or two later, despite no apparent change in the on-the-ground situation, he announced that they’d accomplished their goals and the 3,000 extra agents would be leaving soon.

And that’s where things stand today. Supposedly within the next week the ICE surge will be over, though many are skeptical and for now the raids continue.

Reflection 1: This Was Never About Illegal Immigration

It’s obvious that the stated reasons for bringing ICE to Minnesota—deporting the most dangerous criminals among the immigrant population—was just an excuse. Minnesota simply doesn’t have that many illegal immigrants (or immigrants in general) as compared to places like, say, California, Texas or Florida. So what was the real reason?

I lean to the theory that Trump wanted to make a big show of punishing his perceived enemies, as a way of showing strength to his base and intimidating opponents. In the early weeks of the surge, the administration was posting “sizzle reels” of ICE aggressively grabbing people set to thumping music. And Trump’s most die-hard supporters ate it up, which was fine for Trump as long as it was confined mainly to the far-right media bubble. Which leads me to…

Reflection 2: The Information Bubble Popped

One of the most powerful features of the Trump phenomenon is how he created a closed information ecosystem for his most ardent fans. This promotes the President’s agenda and suppresses other viewpoints, while planting the idea that anyone outside the bubble is lying. It works great as a way to keep the base in line and motivated, but it seems like Trump managed to get caught in his own bubble. Having staffed his second administration with nothing but loyalists, he has nobody to keep him grounded in what the world looks like from outside.

So while Trump was putting on a show for his base, he didn’t realize how badly it would play to the majority of people not tied into MAGA media. It wasn’t until the horrific images of the killings of Good and Pretti broke through that the information bubble popped. By that time things were so far out of control that there was no spinning the story back.

Reflection 3: Whistles and Phones vs. Guns and Tear Gas

Maybe the most uncanny thing about this whole episode is the feeling that the DHS agents acted like they were more afraid of us than we were of them. They were the ones with guns, flak jackets, pepper spray, and apparent license to break any laws they wanted up to and including murder. And yet they were so constantly on edge that they would sometimes respond to minor provocation with wildly disproportionate violence, or flee a scene rather than deal with a handful of moms blowing whistles. In the end, the whistles and phones won.

The lesson here, I think, is that the narrative isn’t an important thing, it’s the only thing. Once the storyline of unarmed moms protecting their communities against thugs with guns became dominant, the federal forces found themselves in a no-win situation where they were cast as the bad guys. Going on the offensive would only feed the narrative, and I think the agents on the ground sensed it. We do not live in a country like China or Iran where the government has such firm control over information that they could force the story to change.

As an aside, there’s a strain of thinking among gun advocates that we need an armed citizenry to protect against an oppressive government. I’ve always felt this was a stretch: have you seen the kinds of weapons the actual military uses? These events prove that not only do not not need guns to fight an oppressive government, the guns may be counterproductive.

What Next?

I could have written a lot more, but I have to stop somewhere. We’re still waiting to see if the presence of DHS agents is really going to wind down in the next week as promised. Either way, we’ve proven that a few thousand armed thugs is no match for a community banding together in self-defense.