Recent reporting out of Minnesota offers a hopeful lesson for communities in resistance to ICE. A memo leaked to journalist Ken Klippenstein reveals that despite having a sufficient standing force, ICE is relying heavily on volunteers for operations in Minnesota, indicating a reluctance among their ranks to deploy. This follows the widely reported scene of ICE agents packing up and evacuating Jonathan Ross from his home, just hours after killing Renee Good. These developments suggest an encouraging possibility: ICE is afraid. Resistance is working.
As blue states and cities like ours brace for intensified ICE presence, it’s essential to understand where effective resistance comes from, and where it does not. Executive leadership is likely not the source. A week after Gov. Tim Walz’s strong remarks about involving the National Guard, he has yet to deploy them. In that same period, 1,000 additional ICE agents have been ordered to Minnesota. Two days after Mayor Jacob Frey’s podium f-word went viral, he reassured the public that Minneapolis police would not interfere with ICE because “they have bigger guns” and that he doesn’t “want to create warfare in the street.”
What has moved the needle is ordinary residents, putting their bodies between federal agents and the neighbors they seek to harm. Together, they film, confront, harass, and make operations so uncomfortable that we see cracks in the armor. Their tactics echo those of a resistance that also successfully repelled state-sanctioned violence and racial suppression: Massachusetts abolitionists of the 1850s and 60s. From Springfield’s League of Gileadites to the Boston Vigilance Committee, abolitionist networks tracked slave patrols, mobilized rapid responses, used force in self-defense, and made operations so costly and chaotic that their presence in Massachusetts collapsed.
ICE’s power shrinks in another context. Their estimated 21,000 agents represent 0.006% of our population, while Nazi Germany employed about 6,500 Gestapo agents in 1937 — 0.01% of their population — and four million Brownshirts as early as 1934, nearly 6%. To keep ICE’s numbers comparatively weak, remember the lessons of successful resistance networks: systems of oppression retreat when resistance makes them too costly, both financially and reputationally, to maintain.
Nate Watson
Northampton