This week, the Trump administration announced that the ICE surge in Minneapolis is ending, and that their nearly 3,000 federal agents who have spent the past two months terrorizing the Minneapolis region are being sent back to their home bases or other cities.
The fact that ICE is pulling out of Minneapolis in this way is a victory. The only reason they are doing this is because of the resistance they‘ve been met with in Minneapolis and across the country. While Democratic Party politicians try to make headlines for criticizing Trump and ICE, it was ordinary people and not the Democrats who were the decisive force that confronted ICE head-on.
In response to the ICE terror — especially after federal agents murdered both Rene Good and Alex Pretti on video— organizing in Minneapolis and across the country swelled. People were able to find a place to put all their anger. It was the two Fridays of mass mobilizations under the banner “No Work, No School, No Shopping” that brought out tens of thousands of people in Minneapolis. It has been the organizing in neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools in Minneapolis to patrol for ICE and mobilize in large numbers wherever ICE showed up. In several neighborhoods in the Minneapolis region, neighbors set up barricades to keep ICE out and to patrol everyone who went in and out of their neighborhoods. Minneapolis police have been sent out to break up these barricades, but often neighbors have just rebuilt them after the police leave. For days, there have been regular protests in front of the Whipple Federal Building outside Minneapolis.
Because organizers in Minneapolis refused to back down and continued building their numbers — sparking similar actions across the state and country — the Trump administration has now decided to scale back its surge in the Minneapolis area. This can be celebrated and is a glimpse of the power we have when we rely on our own forces and defend ourselves.
But even though this surge in Minneapolis is ending for now, we can’t believe that there has been any real change in the Trump administration’s priorities. They want to appear as if they are scaling back, but in fact, they are preparing for intensified attacks on immigrants and the rest of the population. In fact, the director of ICE, Todd Lyons, told Congress this week during testimony that ICE “is only getting started.”
As ICE reduces their surge in Minnesota, they are spending over $38 billion to acquire warehouses across the country to expand their detention center capacity. They have already acquired about 25 warehouses. Most of the buildings can hold about 1,500 people, and some can hold as many as 10,000. Currently there are about 73,000 people in detention centers in the U.S., up from about 40,000 when Trump began his second term.
The conditions inside these facilities are meant to torture people. Already over 30 people have died in these horrible conditions. There has been a measles outbreak in a facility in Texas. And ICE has been sending all pregnant minors they abduct to a horrific facility in Texas, where they have no access to medical care or abortion services. Some are rape victims as young as 13. Their attacks on immigrants and many citizens have not stopped, and they continue to hire more and more agents. Meanwhile, the money to fund this ICE terrorism has been paid for by massive cuts to our healthcare, education, and other social services. So now is not the time to slow down, but to increase our efforts to organize our forces even more.
The people of Minneapolis have shown us what needs to be done. We cannot stand up to all of their attacks alone. We can’t rely on the Democrats to do anything. We cannot wait around for elections that won‘t protect us. The administration is attacking the majority of us all at once. We see struggles of teachers and students for more funding for their schools. And we see health care workers fighting for better working conditions for themselves and their patients who are facing record health care costs. We see attacks on the unhoused population in every major city. We see access to reproductive health care disappearing across the country. We see our voting rights under attack.
We need to follow what Minneapolis has showed us. We cannot fight all of these battles alone, one by one. Our power depends on us coming together, fighting all these battles at the same time, like a closed fist. We may be on our own, but we are not outnumbered. Together we can fight not just their attacks, not just the Trump administration, not just the billionaires, but their whole system of exploitation.
