An anonymous partisan dispatched from the Southwest gives an account of a week spent battling ICE in the streets of the Twin Cities while navigating trauma, exhaustion, and the sublimity of a popular uprising. These notebooks were emailed to L&F anonymously.
January 17
Things have been relatively quiet so far, we spent most of yesterday preparing logistics for the influx of out-of-towners. The people who have already been going hard here are stretched thin and very tired, many of them have been arrested and/or beaten by police and are trying to recover while also orienting new arrivals. It's created a fertile ground for miscommunication and conflict but so far we've mostly been able to work through it and being here feels really good. I would caution anyone still planning to come to lock down your logistical needs and communicate them in great detail as far in advance as possible, and consider renting a car/sleeping space of your own if you can afford it.Today most of the groups we were connected to focused on countering a pro-ICE rally called by far right influencer Jake Lang, who planned to lead a march from city hall downtown into the nearby Somali neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside. The whole city was on edge and expecting violence, the National Guard closed highway exits near Cedar-Riverside, community defense formations stationed members on corners, and local residents prepared armed defenses inside the public housing towers known as "The Stacks". There was a large liberal counterprotest planned nearby as well, while direct action minded folks made a plan to blockade the march before they could leave downtown to prevent a confrontation in the neighborhood itself.
Our crew met up early this morning at a spot just outside of Cedar-Riverside, which was serving as a staging area and dispatch center for counter-protesters, as well as a potential fallback point in case of larger-scale violence. After food and coffee we went out in a vehicle patrol, using the same tactics developed through confrontation with ICE to respond to civilian fascist threats. Circling downtown we found maybe a dozen right-wingers, including Lang, holding an "Americans Against Immigration" banner in a subway parking lot, vastly outnumbered by counter-protesters. We started to get reports of ICE operations on the Southside, and decided that was a better use of our resources than getting sucked into a confrontation with a protest that had clearly already failed. We later learned they were able to muster about 50 people, most of whom turned tail and ran when confronted, leaving Lang alone in the middle of dozens of counter-protesters who pelted him with water balloons in the 10° cold, grabbed him by his plate carrier and forcibly marched him back to his hotel, stole said plate carrier off his back, and allegedly stabbed him. One counter-protester was injured when fascists hit her with a car while fleeing, her condition is unknown but supposedly did not seem severe.
The potential strategic context for countering this fascist demo was to offer some gestures towards holding space and experimenting with disrupting logistics flows in newer ways for the struggle as it’s unfolded here. The rapid response efforts are completely insane in scale. Its undeniably the biggest effort I have ever seen. Thousands of people, dozens of local neighborhood groups. Neighborhood Signal chats maxing out Signal’s capacity regularly so much that they have protocols for cycling people out of loops and rotating text loops when they max out at 1,000.
Anyway, the broader strategic issue is that while this is incredibly effective it is essentially wack-a-mole. ICE abductions have started to go down (I can't even start on the partisan data collection system that helps us know this) due to these efforts. As a result though, there's been an increase in activity in the suburban areas where people are less organized and more spread out. They’ve also started to pivot from 1-2 cars and 5-6 agents to 5-6 cars and door knocks and small raids. These are harder to amass a group that can out number them while also makes them nimble enough to grab people quickly.
Unfortunately we were too late to interfere with the supposed ICE operation in Southside, and despite monitoring rapid response chats and patrolling in the vehicle for a couple hours couldn't get a handle on anything else. After the destruction of federal vehicles Wednesday night, ICE has shifted their tactics to target distant suburbs with less robust rapid response networks, which so far has proved difficult for urban comrades to adjust to. This shift has revealed some of the limitations of the previously successful neighborhood thread model. Many of the people I'm tapped in with live in Southside which has been a huge center of raids and confrontations for the past week, but now that southside is quiet they don't have links to other areas. I hear a lot of sentiment that the raids are over so fast it's not worth driving somewhere further out. It seems that ICE operations may also just be winding down in general, but it's hard to say if there are fewer operations or they're just less reported.
Even without directly confronting ICE we've learned a lot and it's felt great being here. The scale of infrastructure is amazing--churches, cafes, community centers, etc. are turning into very active hubs for supply distros, trainings, and large-scale gatherings that can't be held in houses. The dispatch threads are a little overwhelming but efficient at getting out information and have massive community buy in--they have to make a new Signal thread for each neighborhood every day because they always max out on members (1000).
The level of IRL community support is amazing too, basically everyone in the city is on our team, fuck ICE graffiti is everywhere, tons of businesses have “No Ice Allowed” signs, friends are getting free drinks because they look like protesters. When driving around you see plenty of other people clearly on patrol and our friends in a rental car with jersey plates have been honked at plenty of times, lol. It doesn't feel hostile or paranoid though, soon as you show you're a friend people are hyped and show a lot of solidarity. One friend said "it's like everyone has a weapon out, but when they see you're a homie, they put it down and you're really a homie.”
January 18
We hopped out with 10 people aggro as fuck all screaming at them “fuck you, get the fuck out, we hate you piece of shit, etc.” and the vibe shifted quick. They were a little snotty and gave us some half-hearted insults back, but you could tell they were scared. One of them broke ranks and went around shoulder checking and squaring up with protesters, making his comrades visibly nervous, and another drew his pepper spray but was told not to use it. Within 10 minutes they piled back into their cars and retreated.
By that time a whole convoy of observers had formed and chased the fuck out of them all over St. Paul, catching them in gas stations when they tried to hide, blowing reds with them while they ran code. They tried hard to juke us which just confirmed to us that they were an actual abduction team, not a decoy "rabbit team," and while they eventually lost us on a sketchy left turn across the highway, we felt good with how much time and distance we put between them and their intended targets.
After the chase we re-grouped and spent a little time on wild goose chases. ICE has been bailing so fast when confronted lately that it's hard to get good information even with a solid dispatcher, by the time people can compile a useful report from the ground they're already running. This is challenging for morale and energy of patrollers, but with the scale that St. Paul rapid response was running at, it didn't make a lot of strategic difference. There were enough cars to check out less substantiated reports without taking everyone out of the fight, and even one car responding to an abduction will usually save the target.
After a while we started to get the hang of separating the wheat from the chaff and made a gamble on going across town to an area where a lot of suspected ICE cars had been seen. It paid off. When we were about 5 minutes out dispatch confirmed an operation at an apartment complex just a block from where we were heading. Once again we rolled up to about a half-dozen agents, this time surrounding a car and running the driver’s ID. We parked at the far end of the block and advanced towards them while other observers pulled up independently at the near end, creating a pincer formation which once again unsettled the agents and distracted them from their target. A backup team of agents pulled up from around the corner and one warned that if we advanced further we would be considered "impeding". The crowd was not at all intimidated, remained aggressive, and once the agents realized they were in for a fight they gave the driver back his ID and ran away. We tailed them for a little while and caught them jumping out on a random pedestrian to check his papers, but they ran when they saw our car--we didn’t even have to get out (😎). We chased them again but took a wrong turn and lost them, but thankfully the wrong turn put us in the parking lot of a banging Nepali restaurant and we decided to get some dinner and call it a day.
The strategic picture here is still unclear. There are a lot of high level machinations lingering in the air right now with effects yet to be seen—a court order prohibiting ICE from using force on "peaceful protesters", an Army arctic warfare division staging for deployment here if the insurrection act is used, DOJ investigations of Minnesota officials which may deepen the fractures between state and federal forces (and the anger of local liberals). ICE is clearly on the backfoot tactically but everyone is holding their breath to see if their current operations are saving face before retreating or just a new posture to throw us off while digging further in. Either way it's satisfying to be able to prevent so many abductions--an unconfirmed figure going around says only 6 arrests in St. Paul yesterday despite dozens of agents out—and popular support and rage is deepening. The most immediate project seems to be formalizing infrastructure beyond rapid response: housing, onboarding new comrades, etc. with an eye towards sustaining this level of activity if ICE does stay here until March (when Temprary Protected Status for Somalis ends) or longer, and hopefully providing a path to generalize the struggle beyond resisting one agency into something with more transformative potential.
January 19
Stayed home and had a chill day, nothing to report.
January 20
The trauma and exhaustion of these abductions was still obvious, press and observers were screaming at each other in the parking lot, the doors were locked and guarded, and shoppers hurried to their cars escorted by observers.
We bailed to a nearby gas station where another rapid response call came from, and found one of the teams of ICE agents we had chased away from someone's house the day before trying to use the bathroom. The manager was outside filming and heckling them, he thanked us for coming and told us that the day before they had beaten up a US citizen customer just for being Asian. We called more commuters to monitor and followed them into a neighborhood when they left.
As we drove through the neighborhood our convoy grew until we had at least half a dozen cars chasing the two ICE vehicles, horns and whistles blaring. They tried hard to fuck with us, brake checking and reversing towards us, taking crazy turns down alleys, looping and around and sandwiching commuters, but our badass driver never flagged. We also got a ton of support from locals, who came out of houses and corner stores to shout abuse at ICE. Satisfying as a car chase always is, we figured out pretty quick we were once again getting jerked around, and after 30 minutes or so we started hearing about abductions nearby and disengaged to go look for the actual arrest team.
Not seeing anything in the neighborhood we staged at the supermarket again, where an ICE vehicle was surveiling the parking lot from across the street. They pulled down a couple times to probe our defenses, but decided not to press their luck after seeing how many observers squared up as soon as they got close. Without any more reports of active abductions we held security for a while at a carniceria around the corner before calling it and heading out for dinner. Even at dinner the scale of terror was evident—no employees had showed up to the Ethiopian restaurant we stopped at, the owner and his wife were running everything alone.
This day didn't show a lot of tactical shift compared to the previous, besides the prevalence of decoy cars. Chasing these was annoying but encouraging in its own way. ICE is drastically outnumbered here and we can afford to send some resources chasing decoys, while every agent they have running interference isn't able to abduct people.
January 21
After navigating the daily wakeup logistics clusterfuck we dropped some friends off for foot patrol and found a cafe to catch up on the threads. News was still pouring in—Bovino was in the neighborhood with a BORTAC convoy and a perpetual trail of commuters, but we figured he was a distraction. Abductions and confrontations were happening at a steady pace, but with less spectacle than before. All our friends were out along with hundreds of observers on foot and in cars. We got a hearty breakfast in (free thanks to the people's fund) and set out into the fray.
We only had three of us in the car today, and felt way more nimble than we usually did with 5. Making decisions and communicating was far easier. We zipped around the neighborhood chasing reports, occasionally running into Bovino"s convoy, but only found one actual abduction. Agents were out of their cars with grenade launchers but didn't use them, and despite our side having far more people, and more aggressive people, than we'd become used to in the suburbs, the agents were able to get away with their detainee unobstructed.
It's hard to know what you're getting into on any of these calls. We responded to a vague reports of "agents out of cars" and got stuck in stopped traffic about a block away, barely able to see people running around at the reported intersection. We parked and sprinted towards what looked like a growing confrontation to find a dozen BORTAC agents surrounded by observers. As usual they were frightened and disorganized, not in any sort of formation, just milling about bumping into each other, threatening tear gas without any masks on, locking each other out of their cars. They had one arrestee on the ground, someone else tried to dearrest them at an inopportune moment and also got grabbed. Another observer told us that the rearmost vehicle of the convoy held immigration detainees and they were going to block it. When the convoy started moving, we got in formation to block it but the people who were supposed to back us got lost in the chaos and agents shoved us out of the way.
Even with us gone the convoy didn't get far, cars in the next intersection blocked their only exit. We couldn't tell if these were observers or just traffic (a thin line at this point anyway) but it didn't make any difference to the agents, who dismounted and smashed out the window of the first car they saw. They dragged an old lady out and slammed her on the sidewalk, then grabbed another observer and maced him while he was on the ground in cuffs. The crowd advanced and the agents started setting off gas grenades (while not wearing masks lol). We fell back a bit and stopped to help medic a teenager who had been maced then picked up discarded hi-vis vests and got in the streets to direct traffic so a Muslim family who didn't want to drive past the agents but were stuck on a one-way street could turn around and escape. Meanwhile a crew had returned to our car to retrieve respirators, but by the time they returned the agents had gotten away. We would later learn the skirmish had started when the agents rammed a civilian car leaving a doctor's office off the road and abducted two teenagers.
We were all spent from the showdown but didn't have time to rest, reports were already coming in that Bovino's convoy had attacked observers after being denied service at a gas station nearby. We were too late to catch them at the gas station but went around and headed off what had become a rolling confrontation--convoy creeping down the street while Bovino and his goons walked alongside throwing gas into the neighborhoods. As usual, once it became clear they were outnumbered they mounted back up and returned to Whipple, leaving the neighborhood quiet for the first time since sunrise.
After grabbing some supplies from a cafe that's become a distro hub, we called it a day, went to gorge ourselves on Pho and cheap beer. It's hard to eat lunch when your adrenaline is going and we end every day with a huge meal, sometimes two. The pleasure of good food and time to be together is vital when everyone is running as fucking ragged as we are. We've got the good fortune of a solid crew and everyone feels supported but the emotional toll of being surrounded by and enduring so much brutality weighs on everyone. After we got home from the bar and we were all standing around the kitchen making snacks and laughing together, I stumbled on a news report about the day's operations. I unmuted the video and heard a teacher describing four children from her school being abducted, including a 5-year-old who was used as bait to detain his family. The table slowly fell silent and when the video ended I looked up and everyone was crying. No one spoke for I don't know how long. The scale of naked cruelty here is shocking, even after years of witnessing Border Patrol atrocities in Arizona. We take solace in absolute certainty of how evil our enemies are. We don't have to restrain ourselves or try to compromise with them. The only question is how to win.
January 22
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ICE agents abandoned their vehicle after crashing it into a telephone pole.
Woke up once again to ICE all over Southside. Despite the exhaustion and grief we got back on patrol as soon as we could. I can only imagine how it feels for locals who've been doing this for weeks. It feels good to be able to relieve them, and even with the strain of hosting, everyone is grateful for our presence. One friend went as far as to credit Minneapolis's defining role in the struggles of the past decade to their robust network of outside supporters bringing in new tactics and fighters. Even outside of anarchist friend circles, telling locals that we were organizers against Border Patrol on the border gets a very warm reception despite the "locals defending OUR city" framing, and the consensus seems to be that outside support will be critical in sustaining what we are more and more certain will be an extended struggle.
Still, the exhaustion is real. After some friends left and we had to shuffle cars/crews there were definitely some grating moments as people who had adopted different practices learned to work together. These are minor troubles but amplified when chasing false alarms or trying to make sense of poor dispatch info. Everything gets better when we have a direct enemy to confront, we don't have to release our tension on each other.
It took a while before we got a solid report today, but finally we found a hot one. Agents were out of the car and blocking off an alley on a residential street. We rolled up at the same time as a border patrol SUV and immediately found ourselves in a standoff. The driver of the SUV had drawn his handgun and was aiming at protesters while calling them "fucking faggots" and pointing at individual observers saying "I'm getting *you*." Down the alley two more SUVs were advancing, flanked by officers from Bureau of Prisons Special Operations Response Team, a federal tactical team created to suppress prison rebellions. These officers were more aggressive than many BORTAC agents had been, they moved in formation and effectively targeted the most confrontational observers with direct intimidation, tear gas, and mace. Still they found themselves distracted and scattered by the many autonomous units of the crowd, and were unable to evacuate until two more cars of backup arrived. Even while leaving, one of their cars broke formation and stayed behind so an agent could get out and chase someone whose heckling apparently hit a nerve. The heckler escaped, leaving a small team of agents briefly alone and vulnerable before they piled back into the car and retreated. As usual we would only find out how the confrontation began hours later—ICE had smashed the window of a family car and dragged out a father with his 2-year-old daughter.
One of our crew had been maced during the skirmish and couldn't see, so once the agents began to retreat we pulled them into a community theatre on the corner which invited us in to regroup and wash out their eyes. As grateful as we were for them being chill with us rushing in, ripping off our clothes, and spraying water everywhere, the most heartening thing wasn't the immediate relief, but the depth of popular, embedded rebellion it implied. It didn't feel like we had the good luck to get maced on the right block, it felt like we could get maced on any block in southside (if not the Twin Cities!) and someone would take care of us. Once our comrade was able to open their eyes, we headed back out to walk around and scope out the block.
Not seeing anything, some of us decided to go home and rest while the rest continued a brief car patrol. ICE activity was low though, and we called it early to make plans for tomorrow. Nobody knows quite what to expect from the general strike and associated demos or the next few days in general. ICE returning to Minneapolis proper is a significant escalation, although it remains to be seen how long they can sustain it.
Long-term observers report that ICE is becoming less disciplined, often making them more aggressive but worse at controlling crowds. Observer energy and numbers don't seem to be flagging at all. If we have a tactical bottleneck, however, it's a lack of opportunities or will for materially significant offensive action. Crowds are confrontational enough to force agents to retreat but rarely have the cohesion or numbers to feel confident destroying ICE vehicles or even de-arresting comrades. A few tightly organized crews of about 10 people rolling together equipped with glass breakers, caltrops, etc. and very willing to take risks could dramatically increase the amount of damage done to ICE resources. This is complicated by the importance of getting numbers out to a confrontation before ICE retreats and the relatively slow nature of decision-making and navigation among large crews, and in fact many of the confrontations described above saw cars full of geared up militants roll up just 2 or 3 minutes after the confrontation ended. To some degree, this is just the nature of the game, but the best way to overcome it is to proliferate as many of these crews across the city to minimize response time. The good news is the peace policing of the first week following Renee's murder has effectively disappeared, and even at events where ICE vehicles have been damaged or when agents have been attacked, comrades report the crowd being entirely supportive.
Where the struggle goes next strategically remains an open question. Of course all of our friends hope to open possibilities for social revolution, but so far the struggle has been unable to generalize past the immediate goal of expelling ICE from this particular city. A concerted messaging effort that connects current ICE operations, which are often seen as an aberration or excess, to the normal functioning of liberal government could have a massive impact. Unfortunately many of the comrades most equipped to produce effective messaging and communication infrastructure are going hardest in the streets and have little time and energy for longer-term projects, while the nonprofiteers are able to leverage their existing infrastructure to push their lines from the comfort of their offices.
Still, the possibility of this rupture widening is on everyone's mind, even the liberals often express feelings of "making something constructive out of this," and local government is increasingly facing ill will for not doing enough to impede or remove ICE. The specter of armed struggle also hangs heavy over the current situation, both observers and pro-ICE agitators are increasingly seen with firearms, and there's a lot of popular messaging about "using the Second Amendment against tyranny," etc. It certainly seems possible for this to escalate to actual gunfights with ICE. The infrastructure that exists right now would not be sufficient to sustain any sort of offensive armed struggle, and ill-advised actions could have disastrous consequences, but the possibility of armed area denial or even guerilla attacks within the context of a mass uprising may rapidly develop as the struggle grows.