The Key to Minneapolis’s Successful ICE Resistance

You can dismiss it as a joke until someone at a café gives you a spare scarf because you can’t find yours. People offer assistance without hesitation and without question; I don’t think I ever even heard someone dismiss thanks with, “Just pay it back someday.” Of course you will—everyone knows it. Some might find it remarkable that the generosity exists right alongside the stubborn interpersonal Midwestern microdistance that can take years to thaw. But the caution of their relationships speaks to the universality of the principle: You don’t help people out because you like them. You just do.

Someone once described that cushion of reserve as “Minnesota nice right up until the front door,” but I think that buffer of formality is another reason these normies have risen up with such ferocity against the federal occupation: On top of everything else, invasive operations to detain and arrest people without cause in their cars and homes violates cherished, sparingly offered intimacy. It sounds a little insane to put it this way, but a civil occupation? It’s rude.

So while the ground-level resistance, with widespread involvement of newly activated residents, to ICE’s occupation is remarkable, I’m not surprised. The mobilization has cut across class and racial lines even more deeply than the response to George Floyd’s murder; it’s more than eight minutes of murderous cruelty caught on a cell phone, it’s more than the assassination of Renee Nicole Good. ICE is an army of Derek Chauvins and Jonathan Rosses, released to wreak havoc on the city every day. The memory is keen, the trauma is immediate and sustained, and the strength underneath the response is the work of decades.