Be Prepared: What the Rest of Us Can Learn From the Minneapolis ICE Resistance

We’ll never know the exact reasons why the Trump administration decided to bring the full force of immigration enforcement down on the Twin Cities and the rest of Minnesota last winter.

We do know they weren’t expecting the reception they got.

Operation Metro Surge and Operation Parris were the largest immigration enforcement operations in the history of the United States of America. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers came in the thousands, decked out with military gear, assault weapons, and surveillance systems built for a battlefield.

We’re proactively arming ourselves and our communities with the knowledge and tactics necessary to resist if President Donald Trump makes good on his threats on the sanctity of the midterms.

The Trump administration was counting on our residents believing, deep down, that immigrants and people of color are not really American. But they didn’t prepare for one thing: Minnesotans know that’s a lie.

It did not pass over our houses. Why? Because we were prepared. The preparation process must continue.

The structures that enabled the mass mobilizations that pushed ICE out of Minnesota were built long before officers touched down in late 2025.

The local immigrants rights movement built capacity and infrastructure for over two decades through the Dreamer’s Movement and the campaign for drivers licenses for all. And then during the Covid-19 pandemic, after George Floyd was killed by police in our streets, the Movement for Black Lives taught everyone in this state what mutual aid looks like at scale.

How to feed each other when regular systems fail. How to keep watch on a corner through the night. How to grieve and organize in the same breath. How to refuse the choreography of fear that a militarized response is designed to produce.

That’s the model we followed when launching Project Monarca in February of 2025. Over the next year we trained 50,000 Minnesotans in constitutionally protected observation.

In retrospect, a lot of those trainings looked like a rehearsal. We equipped our neighbors with a coherent analysis, a clear picture of the strategy being run against us, and the room to wrestle with their own choices. Will I document, or will I observe? What happens when I delay the operation? When I choose to defend my neighbor, how will I do it?

Minnesotans rehearsed high-risk scenarios with their own bodies and their own fear, and they made their choices out of our values and our relentless public love.

So when the moment came, Minnesotans led. We put democratic participation into practice, and onboarded residents into our movements as we went. I want to be careful not to romanticize what happened last winter. People were terrified. People are still grieving. The cost was real, and it is not over.

But something happened in those weeks that I have been trying to find words for, and the only word I keep coming back to is recognition. People recognized each other.

White grandmothers in wealthy neighborhoods recognized themselves in immigrant mothers in Minneapolis. Lutheran pastors recognized the face of Christ in undocumented children. Labor union members recognized that the boot on their neighbor’s neck was the same boot that would come for them. Small business owners recognized that the Constitution was either for everyone or it was for no one—and they chose everyone.

We put signs in our windows. We opened our homes for children and pets left behind. We said, “Not in our state” to men with badges. They had guns, we had whistles. They had technology and surveillance systems, we had the Constitution. They had millions of dollars in infrastructure, we had one another as neighbors. We kept each other safe.

Over the past couple of months, we’ve shifted Monarca toward training community members to defend democracy against the tactics of ICE agents.

Our rights to fair and free elections are at risk. So we’re proactively arming ourselves and our communities with the knowledge and tactics necessary to resist if President Donald Trump makes good on his threats on the sanctity of the midterms.