Oppression and resistance: the DHS Diaries
PWS weekly on ICE, Border Patrol, and the brave communities , organizations, and individuals resisting their fascist policies
Minnesota may well be presenting the most organized community resistance efforts to ICE and Border Patrol efforts yet seen to date. Tens of thousands of volunteers are acting as community watch groups, legal observers, food pantries, and delivery services for migrant communities who do not feel safe leaving the house, emergency response teams, street medics, legal advisors, and a hundred more roles, constantly evolving and growing.
And the activism is very visibly frustrating both DHS officials and the White House.
“It’s growing so much,” one activist, who asked that his name be withheld, told PWS. “We’ve had to organize the community group chats because they were becoming unmanageable,” he said, explaining that some neighborhood communication channels on apps like Signal had grown to over 1000 users. “Now they’re smaller groups, organized by blocks, or immediate neighborhoods,” he said.
“We know exactly where ICE is at all times, down to the block,” he explained. “Neighbors are organizing emergency response teams to observe, film, or harass ICE in real-time on the field.”
“There are school patrols, block patrols, neighborhood patrols, and multi-neighborhood patrols. At this point, I can’t track a fraction of what’s happening, because there are tens of thousands of people doing things,” Andrew Fahlstrom, an activist who helps lead Defend the 612, a Minnesota group organizing some of the volunteers, told media company Mother Jones.
There are people “giving rides, bringing food to people’s homes, going grocery shopping for targeted communities, doing fundraising for rent and other material support.”
Activist groups created searchable, publicly available databases that list the license plates of known ICE vehicles. The organization often uses unmarked cars for its operations. ICE has responded by changing those license plates daily or not using them at all.
“But that doesn’t work,” said the anonymous Minnesota activist. “Because now any cars travelling together without license plates are just assumed to be ICE, and followed by legal observers.”
Dan Troccoli, a public school teacher and union activist, recently told magazine The Nation:
“Many people around the city have been going around patrolling and keeping an eye on these agents. There are estimates as high as 10,000 people that have been involved in the city in these efforts in the last six weeks. Given the legacy of the uprisings after [the 2020 police murder of] George Floyd, people in the city have been activated for years now. I would argue we were Trump’s target for that reason, but it’s not going exactly like they planned, and people need to know that.”
Some local restaurants are providing free soup for protesters and volunteers. All are denying entry to ICE and DHS personnel without a judicial warrant expressly allowing them entry.
DHS complained of the widespread practice in public statements on social media on Wednesday, writing:
“At each gas station where the agents stopped to use the restroom, groups of agitators appeared, yelled at them, stalked them, and even tried to prevent law enforcement vehicles from leaving, creating unsafe conditions. At one stop, individuals in the crowd threw food at the agents. At their final gas station stop, someone spit on an agent.”
Border Patrol director, and mighty midget extraordinaire, Greg Bovino, called community resistance “a major obstacle” for ICE operations.
Even Vice President JD Vance flew to Minneapolis to defend migration enforcement officers, blaming “far-left” agitators for causing “chaos” in the city. Vance explained the motive for his visit as an attempt to study the “weird reaction” of residents.
The community effort is causing enormous loss in resources for DHS, whose main operational hub is constantly obstructed by protesters, some of whom have been pouring water around entry points to the facility, where it quickly becomes ICE in freezing Minneapolis weather.
Responses from Democratic lawmakers in the city, however, have been anemic. Governor Tim Walz has denounced DHS’s presence in public statements, but has done very little to actually address the situation.
Police responding to DHS calls for backup have assaulted protesters, deploying tear gas and other chemical irritants. Walz, who has often called for community responses to be tempered, calling for “peaceful actions.”
Walz also called up the Minnesota National Guard, in his words, to protect residents. But the Guard seems to be under very different orders:
A recent post on X, formerly Twitter, by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, made this clear: “At Gov. Walz’s direction, the Minnesota National Guard has been mobilized and is staging to support local law enforcement and emergency management agencies.”
As Los Angeles and Chicago showed last year, it is direct actions by communities that are making a real difference, much more than lawmakers or courts.
ICE chilling photo of the week
The round-up
ICE agents in Minnesota have detained at least four children from the same school district this month, including a 5-year-old boy. School officials accused ICE officers of using the 5-year-old “as bait” to lure his father out of the house.
The Oglala Sioux Tribe says three tribal members arrested in Minneapolis are currently in ICE detention. The tribal council voted unanimously on Thursday to bar any DHS officials from entering their land.
Choctaw Nation leaders this week passed local legislation that would bar the possibility of an ICE detention facility being constructed in Durant, Oklahoma.
In a newly released memo from last year, ICE says its officers can forcibly enter homes during immigration operations without judicial warrants. Administrative warrants are often filled out by ICE agents themselves rather than by judges.
ICE detainee population crested 73,000, a new record for the agency, according to the latest available data.
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