Transcript

Arielle Angel 00:00

Hello, and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I’ll be your host for today. Last month, ICE agents began arriving in Minneapolis as part of what the administration has called Operation Metro Surge. Now there are 3,000 agents on the ground in the city, more than local police forces. It’s a very small city, and this, as I understand, the presence is really being felt just out people’s windows, just on street corners, in every conceivable way. We are seeing horrible images, abductions of children as young as two and five, and agents using children as bait to draw out and arrest their families. And of course, we’ve now seen two murders of regular people out doing ICE watch. On January 7th, that was Renee Good, a mother and a poet, who was shot in the face while trying to leave a verbal altercation with ICE agents. And on Saturday, Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, was killed also while observing ICE. Last Friday, before the murder of Pretti, there was a general strike with businesses closing and tens of thousands on the street in subzero temperatures. And in response to all of this, as we saw culminating in the general strike on Friday, there has been, by all accounts, one of the most impressive mutual aid and rapid response operations that we’ve seen maybe in recent memory, with block-by-block networks coming out on the streets to protect their neighbors and people mobilizing to deliver meals and do laundry and more for undocumented people who can’t leave their houses.

AA 01:52

So I’m really, really grateful this week to have three organizers who are on the ground in Minneapolis to talk about what this moment looks like, and feels like, and what we can learn from their experience. I’ll just say before I introduce them that this is a really tough moment to have this conversation. Pretti was murdered only two days ago, and for this to be the second murder in such a short amount of time, in addition to tens of thousands of abductions of neighbors, it’s just a really heavy moment, and I don’t take for granted the amount of work that the people on this call are doing right now, and to take this time out to think aloud about it is really wonderful and greatly appreciated. So I’m going to introduce our guests. Lily Cooper is an organizer with UNIDOS Rapid Response Team, which has trained almost 30,000 people across the state on how to be legal observers—which, if I’m not mistaken, Alex Pretti was also acting as a legal observer when he was murdered by federal agents. Lily has also been organizing with the Sanctuary Cities Team, campaigning for stronger sanctuary policies in the Twin Cities. Hi Lily, welcome to the show.

Lily Cooper 03:06

Hi, Arielle. Thanks for having me.

AA 03:08

Kandace Montgomery is a local Minnesota organizer, trainer, and movement strategist. She’s currently supporting training needs and moving non-cooperation campaigns of community leaders to target businesses in Minneapolis not to cooperate with ICE. Kandace, welcome to On the Nose.

Kandace Montgomery 03:25

Hi, thanks for having me.

AA 03:26

And Jesse Meisenhelter is an organizer with Minneapolis Families for Public Schools, whose current campaign aims to build sanctuary school teams across Minneapolis and Minnesota. Hi, Jesse.

Jesse Meisenhelter 03:37

Hi. It’s really good to be with all of you.

AA 03:39

I guess I want to start just by asking you guys: What is it like right now, to be doing this work, and what has it been like for the last couple of weeks? Both personally, but also in terms of what the feeling is among the people that you are organizing with. I’ve been hearing reports from friends that you really feel the ICE presence in the city in a way that wasn’t imaginable before they showed up. But I’m curious to hear what that actually looks like and also what the response has been like. Where do you see people right now?

LC 04:13

I think we’re in a crisis. I know personally, for me, I have been feeling like my nervous system is constantly activated without respite, really. It’s a really scary moment. I mean, last week we organized a general strike, the Day of Truth and Freedom, and thousands and thousands of people didn’t go to work. Hundreds of businesses closed, and tens of thousands of people were on the streets on Friday. There was this sense of solidarity and hope, and then, less than 24 hours later, Alex Pretti was murdered in broad daylight, in cold blood. And I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the day after this mass public demonstration, federal agents decided to show up in force and escalate yet again. I went to the scene right after the murder on Saturday, and I saw hundreds of agents. First, just federal agents, a relatively small number of observers, and some people who were there to protest. Agents were indiscriminately gassing the crowd, setting off flashbangs, unprovoked. And then, the state troopers showed up and really acted as a bodyguard for federal agents to continue to unlawfully gas observers, who were showing up peacefully. And so, I think there’s certainly a sense of whiplash. ICE is completely occupying our cities right now, and at the same time, there’s a movement that is only getting stronger. The night that Renee Good was murdered, we had a rapid response training scheduled. 600 people were registered, and 1,000 people showed up. So I think people are scared right now—we’re in crisis—and there’s this sense of steadfastness and commitment that is incredibly inspiring and incredibly hopeful.

JM 06:36

Yeah, I’ve really been going back and forth between feeling incredibly shaky and incredibly solid. And I’m feeling shaky today, if I can just share with you what my day’s been like so far. My car had died over the weekend because it’s really cold here—it killed the battery—and I was trying to figure out getting my car towed when I got a call from folks who were at a training we did this weekend about how you peacefully de-escalate outside of school. And there were multiple ICE cars outside their school around that time. I got a message in my house chat that one of my housemates going to work thought they saw ICE in the parking lot that our house is on. And I walked outside, and there was a vehicle with tinted windows and four men sitting inside, 50 feet out my back door. I live across the street from an elementary school where I closely organized with 20 or 30 parents, and so, yeah, I contacted the Signal thread we’re all in: I’m 90% sure there is an ICE vehicle waiting outside the school. Drop off’s about to begin in five minutes.

JM 07:42

A few of us started to gather between the school and the vehicle, and we were talking through like: Maybe we should start lining up on the sides of the street to shepherd students across the street so that no one’s walking directly alongside the vehicle. When my housemate got home from grocery shopping and pulled into our driveway, the act of her pulling the car into our driveway made them turn on their car, and she got out of our driveway, and suddenly, men in tactical gear are popping out of the top windows of the vehicle and screaming at her to get out of the way. And they’re driving right at her and down the alley behind our house. I trained people all day yesterday on: Even when it’s nothing, start recording. But this all happened so fast. I wasn’t even recording yet. And then I went to the auto shop to talk to them about my car, and as I was walking home, I ran into a friend who I know lives near where Alex was murdered, and she told me she was there. Like she was just there. And we just cried outside for 10 minutes. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s just like, that’s Monday, and it’s just been that way for three weeks.

AA 08:55

Yeah. I mean, you really get the sense from what you just discussed, it’s like even if you weren’t looking for it, it’s there in your face.

JM 09:03

Oh, yeah. When they are here, which is not every day, but it is most days—and if they’re not here, they’re in a different neighborhood or a different suburb—when they’re here, it’s everywhere.

KM 09:13

Yeah, I would just resonate with that. There’s no escaping it. I’ve been on multiple national calls where Minnesotans are just trying to emphasize to folks: You just cannot understand what it feels like to be here right now unless you are here. And then talking to folks who are coming into town and being like: You are right. I think for me, I definitely feel a big mix. I feel a shit ton of pride for our city, and I feel a lot of fear. My partner is an immigrant and is luckily a citizen but takes the bus when I can’t pick her up, and it’s hard to even get her in a Lyft back and forth from work because Lyfts and Ubers are being targeted. And so, every day, it’s like a little bit of like: Okay, I’m not trying to be that person, but can you just remind me where you are, or check in, or whatever? It’s a big mix, and I think that is the feeling. It comes in waves, and it comes in different waves.

KM 10:15

I also am marking the determination of Minnesotans. 100,000 people to come out in -20°. I think that there’s a collective sphere of: Y’all chose the wrong ones. And then, I think there’s also just this collective experience of feeling really in high alert. I happen to have a black SUV in this moment, and I also live in one of the hottest neighborhoods that ICE is targeting. The amount of times that I’ve had someone slowly pull up to me, or slowly walk and check what I’m doing, and all of these things—and I think they see me and they’re like: Okay, probably not ICE. But it’s just this collective experience of really being on alert, and watching out for each other, and also just being really scared all the time and just waiting for the next threat, the next thing to happen. And then random bursts of crying. There’s an experience of no escaping it while also being really determined to keep each other safe.

AA 11:18

Yeah, I mean, I have been noticing it with the people that I’ve been speaking to. I spoke to an old friend whose partner is not a citizen but a legal resident with an expired green card, and he was like: Do I necessarily want to explain that at gunpoint? Not really. And so, I’ve been hearing this from all over, that the sense of fear is palpable, and I really hear that in what you guys are saying. Kandace, I want to go back to you because I know that you were a co-founder of Black Visions in 2020, one of the organizations that was very involved in the George Floyd moment. I am curious about how you think about the continuities with that moment. Basically, what are the organizing frameworks and strategies or coalitions that have lasted until now, or things that aren’t happening because people learned their lesson last time, that kind of thing? What do you see as the connection between these moments? And maybe even, if you could think in a broader sense: What does this response in Minneapolis have to do with where Minneapolis has been?

KM 12:28

Yeah. Minnesota is a place that people come to live for a reason. Folks from the South, folks from Chicago come up here because there are systems to take care of them, to create a better life. There’s just so much that makes Minnesota so good and is clearly a threat to the authoritarian regime, in addition to just having a really robust and diverse immigrant population. In terms of the shifts and the moments, we have to go back to 2014, 2015, when Jamar Clark was murdered. That spurred an upsurge of activity here, led by young Black people, including myself, to really center a conversation around racial justice that wasn’t there as strongly beforehand. I think it allows for this moment to be so clear of the explicit racism that is happening.

And then, you fast-forward to 2020, and George Floyd is murdered. At the end of the day, what it inserted in this community is that we can keep each other safe. Community is the one that’s literally keeping us safe, that is providing infrastructure to do grocery runs, to support local businesses in that process, to provide mutual aid, all of these things. I think that Minnesota organizing has one of the better systems of folks really building coalition, and really building inside of an ecosystem of organizing, and working across from each other. I think that we have also let go—and there’s still more work to do in this—but let go of saying: This type of organizing is right, and this type of organizing isn’t. And that’s allowed us to be like: So how do we tap into your strength? What’s the role that you are going to hold down?

KM 14:15

I also think that since 2020—and Jesse’s work is especially a testament to this, and the work at Take Action and others—folks put some bets down to be like: We’re going to just base build. We’re just going to build, and bring people in, and develop their leadership, and do all of that. And that is, I think, part of what is in the recipe that creates this moment. I mean it is just a moment of abundant leadership. People are taking on, not like, “I’m going to do the sign-in table”; it’s like, “I’m going to literally defend my community and lead a team of people who are going to defend my community against armed federal agents that are entirely unaccountable.” The level of risk and leadership that requires is huge, and I think that’s also Minnesotans commitment to everyday organizing. I also feel like there was a tendency, in previous moments, that every org had to do everything. I think that folks have let go of that and are like: This is the one thing we’re going to rock. And I think over the last four or five years, we’ve really done that and built some infrastructure around that so that we can respond in this moment.

AA 15:24

Thank you so much. I love what you’re saying about the specificity of different groups and also about the diversity of tactics. Jesse also reminded me about the St. Paul Principles from the 2008 Republican National Convention—basically, an affirmation of diversity of tactics and a recognition that there should be communication about what kinds of different tactics are taking place at different places, so you don’t have high-risk actions going on in moments with people who are taking on different level of risk and that kind of thing, but you’re also not condemning other people’s tactics. I think that’s such an important basis for some of what you’re talking about. But I do want to also lift up what you were talking about around coalition building and the different kinds of networks that have been activated in this moment. I was wondering, Jesse and Lily, if you wanted to talk a little bit about that, because both of you are training to do some form of protective presence and rapid response. And so, I’m wondering about how you’re mobilizing existing networks to do that. I imagine, for example, because of how I’ve heard from the ways that things have gone down in Chicago, that the teachers’ union might be a very effective way into some of the networks in the schools, for example. But I’m sure that there are other examples of this.

JM 16:42

Yeah. So I really agree with everything Kandace said about supporting organizations, groups, cadre relationships, to be like: What is my role in this fight? How do I pick it and do it really, really well? That’s required a lot of saying no and a lot of reminding myself each day where my focus can be, where I can be in the streets, where I can show up in this moment. I was raised by a public educator who had studied with the Zapatistas and deeply, deeply believes that schools should be at the very, very center of our communities. I think public schools are one of the places where our community is far less segregated, and there are far more deep relationships and knowledge between impacted families and allied or supporting families. And was becoming really clear before the 3,000 officers arrived. This surge has been going on for almost two months now.

JM 17:35

Minneapolis Families for Public Schools was founded by six parents who met during the 2022 educator strike and were like: Educators are well-organized in this district. Parents and caregivers are not. And they reached out to me in 2024 and said: As parents, we have not had the time to grow this project as much as it needs to grow. Can you lend some resources, lend some paid capacity? And so, last year we did a survey, surveyed 1,000 families in our district, and identified the two things that are the most common reasons why people leave our public schools. Those were too big class sizes and not enough resources for special education, and it turned out that those were two of the three main demands of the next educator’s contract fight. And so, we made a strategic bet to align with our educators. We could have gone for a policy fight; we could have gone for more state funding. There are so many ways we could have come for those two demands, but we knew we wanted to work alongside our educators and that a strong contract fight could be one of the best ways we could get those things.

JM 18:36

And so, we had school-based teams with some relationship to educators at over 20 MPS schools in November, when conditions on the ground with ICE started to worsen, and when 100 agents were sent in for the original Metro Surge, we experienced abductions of family members within those schools within the very first week. And suddenly, I was trying to support finding someone’s car from an impound lot, from the elementary school down the street from my house. And so, the sanctuary school teams are combinations of parents, and caregivers, and educators who are going so above and beyond the call of their role. They’re paying attention every single time parents and family members are coming to and from school. These sanctuary school teams have moved, I think, $800,000 of mutual aid in this last month. That’s just through the 25 schools that I talked to last Thursday. That does not encompass the other 25 schools I didn’t talk to last Thursday, or any of the other schools in our district, or the private schools, or the charter schools who are also using this model.

AA 19:43

Yeah, what I also hear you saying is that the work that you are doing—which is mostly now focused on mobilizing parents to do patrols and manage the flow of vulnerable kids out of school and into school—actually comes out of a network that was conceived of for a completely different reason: just to improve the way that schools serve their students. I have the sense from talking to a lot of people that a lot of different networks are being mobilized in exactly the same way. And what I hear in what you’re saying is that this will also change these organizations—that they will start to think about their mandate more broadly from this moment. I mean, it’s kind of what we wanted out of the pandemic moment, and you hope that kind of expansion and broadness of vision seeps back into the broader politics.

LC 2-:34

Yeah, I’ll bring it to the organizing work that I have been a part of. So in 2024, my colleagues at UNIDOS started developing materials that would be turned into the legal observer or upstander trainings that we’ve now been facilitating over the course of the past year. It was very evident to my fellow organizers that there was going to be an immense amount of repression and a serious crackdown on immigrant communities. And so, to get ahead of that curve, for the past year, we’ve been training community groups. We’ve been training churches, synagogues, neighborhood associations, groups of moms across the state of Minnesota and in western Wisconsin. And we now have a network comprised nearly of 30,000 people. The MONARCA hotline that we created is a line that people have been able to call to connect with an operator, who then sends out alerts to all of our legal observers who live in the area close to where a raid is occurring. That system was working really well up until Operation Metro Surge really intensified, starting in December. During Operation Metro Surge, we started seeing an escalation that our hotline alone cannot ameliorate. And so, what we’ve seen in the past couple of months is the creation of hyperlocal grassroots neighborhood watch groups able to deploy people more quickly and better able to keep tabs on where ICE activity is happening. For example, the block that I’m on, we have not just our neighborhood Signal chat, but just on my street, we have another even more localized chat where we can keep tabs on agents in our immediate vicinity. So I think the combination of mass trainings with the hyperlocal responses is really what has been keeping our communities as safe as we’ve been able to keep them.

AA 23:00

I’m really struck by the way that I’ve heard you describe this and the way that it’s reaching the country through social media and stuff. Because you’re really talking about, as you said, suburban moms and a kind of block-by-block organization, where people might be in multiple Signal chats that, as you described, are concentric from their block, to their neighborhood, to a more citywide affiliation—maybe through their synagogue, or their church, or their workplace, or their union. I feel like I can’t remember ever hearing about something with this kind of mass participation. I mean, the 2020 moment was one watershed moment, but even then, it didn’t feel like there was a real synergy between the left and liberal pieces of this, because we were constantly hearing about how “defund the police” wasn’t the right slogan, or “the people aren’t ready for abolition,” all of this kind of stuff. And here, it doesn’t seem like there’s a comparable stumbling block. It’s really like: ICE out. Abolish ICE. You hear people saying: Abolish ICE is the moderate position at this point. I mean, obviously, you have a lot of morons of the New York Times, but then you also have Jamelle Bouie basically saying: Let’s call it what it is, ethnic cleansing, and abolish ICE. And that feels different to me. And so, I’m just curious, in all of the work that all of you guys are doing: How are you seeing what’s happening between the left and liberal side of this coalition? Is this a new moment for us to actually be able to work together? Where are the tensions that you’re seeing as they’re coming up? And what might we take from this into all of our organizing that’s happening in a broader moment, all of our anti-authoritarian organizing in general?

JM 25:00

I can share about how this feels in school teams right now. So folks who choose to be a part of Minneapolis Families for Public Schools have a spectrum of political beliefs. Some of them are leftist moms, some of them are more middle to moderate. I know at school huddles last June, we had some folks attending who were like, they voted Trump last time types of folks. And it’s just unanimous. I feel like if you’ve experienced even a minute of this, you know you want it out of your life and out of your state as soon as possible, and that it is wrong, and it feels wrong, and it’s hurting people around you. And so yeah, “ICE out” is the most moderate response at this point. I do see some of the grappling within the team as we think through what the National Guard presence has meant and will mean going forward. Because folks here—and especially moms within my team who experienced the National Guard in 2020—moms in Minneapolis don’t want those guns near their school, don’t want those folks in their city again. But there’s a lot of pressure on us as a team to call for them to come unarmed, unmasked, to do protective presence and walk with us outside our schools.

AA 26:10

Are people actually really talking about the National Guard as if it’s going to be a force that’s going to stabilize? Because its deployment to the streets of DC or to any of the places that they’ve been since Trump 2 has not been a stabilizing force; it’s been a destabilizing force.

LC 26:26

Yeah. No, I just wanted to clarify, Arielle, that the conversation here in Minneapolis is whether Governor Walz is going to deploy the National Guard to defend residents from rogue federal agents who have no accountability, are being told that they have impunity to use lethal force against peaceful protesters and observers. And so, the question, the debate is: Would a deployment of the National Guard, if Walz were willing to do that, would that keep residents safe? That’s the debate that is happening in some circles.

JM 27:12

Yeah. I think the only place folks feel clear is that we are keeping each other safe, and we trust each other to keep each other safe. Right now, that’s the strategy that’s working.

KM 27:22

I certainly think that this is a huge polarizing moment, and I think that we really need to re-embrace the idea of polarization that the right has toxified or villainized. It is not about a red or blue type of thing; it is about: What’s the vision for community that you have and that you want versus what we have right now? And which side are you standing on? I think that’s one of the polarizing lines that people are moved by in this moment. And so, whether or not they say, “ICE out of Minnesota” or “abolish ICE,” that is some version of a decision for a different world. And of course, as a well-known abolitionist, abolish ICE, for me, is actually the floor. That is the bare minimum. I don’t want ICE out of Minnesota for them to just go to the next place; I want them gone. I don’t want anybody else to have to experience this. My family, a big chunk of them actually live in Maine, which is being targeted because what? Huge Black immigrant population there. And so, I don’t want those 3,000 agents to go to Maine.

KM 28:33

But it is an opportunity to meet people where they’re at and to move them closer. I don’t think we have the time for a righteousness of politic right now, and like, what exactly is the word that folks are gonna say. It’s like: What’s the vision for community that we have? And are you on that side, or are you on their side? That’s the question. And then, I think the opportunity for organizers in this moment is to really politicize this. While we have your attention, let’s actually say: Not only can we keep ourselves safe, we are keeping ourselves safe. We should not only be relying on the state, or government, or whatever to try and keep us safe because they’ve proven, time and time again, that they are not actually capable of doing that. And so, while we change who is in power, and while we actually build a level of governance, in which our folks with our politics are helping to call the shots alongside community, how organizers are politicizing that and connecting that to bigger visions, I think, is important.

KM 29:37

I also think that it’s an opportunity for: How are we letting go of a carceral state mentality? Some of what folks on our opposition are relying on is like: Well, we just need to preserve law and order. She should have just listened to that ICE officer, or he should have just, and then he wouldn’t be dead. And that is so clearly not the case anymore, and we’re seeing it in real time on video. And so, there’s an opportunity for, I think, for folks to let go of that. I feel mixed about the question around the National Guard, as someone who studies authoritarianism. It is true that oftentimes, in order to beat a regime, you have to have some type of armed force organized on your side. That is true. And I am most interested in the strategies in which we are taking ownership for our own safety and building the level of mass movements that are unmatched historically to actually push this regime out. And while we’re doing that, shaping a new version of the world—What does actual democracy look like, for example—I think are some of the things that we really need to be wrestling with while we’re in rapid response mode.

AA 30:49

This plays directly into the question that we’ve been circling, which is the relationship to elected officials in this moment. Obviously, there have been harsh words from Jacob Frey, the mayor, and Tim Walz, the governor, and it’s not really clear how they are going to become a part of this, both in terms of independent investigations, deployment of their own forces, as we’ve discussed. What do you feel like would be the maximalist demand from organizers at this moment for them, and what are people talking about in terms of pressuring them?

LC 31:25

So a year ago, we went to our local elected officials, city council members, and mayors in Minneapolis and St. Paul and had conversations with them about the need to strengthen our separation ordinance. So the separation ordinance is the city policy that prevents city employees and police officers from enforcing federal civil immigration law. So we’ve had a separation ordinance both in Minneapolis and St. Paul for a couple decades, and really, the bottom line of the ordinances were that no data could be collected by the city on residence immigration status. So if the federal government were to ask, there would be no data to turn over. So we went to our local electeds, and we said: Not collecting data doesn’t go far enough. And the response that we got in May, both from local elected officials and from city attorneys, was: We don’t want to draw attention to the Twin Cities. If we strengthen our separation ordinances right now, we’re going to be inviting retaliation by the federal government. We don’t want to put ourselves in jeopardy. It’s better to lay low. The following week, we saw a large-scale raid at the corner of Lake and Bloomington here in Minneapolis, at Las Cuatro Milpas, and our strengthened ordinance here in Minneapolis passed last month after Operation Metro Surge had already begun, but only because of the level of escalation and crisis that we were immediately facing. I think, had we not been in such a dire moment, those policies that our local electeds have control over may or may not have actually gotten passed.

JM 33:33

Yeah, we really, really need an eviction moratorium in our state, and we need it before February 1st, because we are trying to support folks to shelter in place as much as possible, to get food to their houses, to get rides for their kids, to get that rent covered by their neighbors. And it is a beautiful thing for schools to be playing that role in their communities. I hope that’s a role schools never go back from. There’s a lot of things that I want to end about this moment, but I hope that commitment to making sure people have safe rides to school, food to eat, and a roof over their heads is something that schools are always a part of making sure is real for our students. And we need support. We need Governor Walz to call for that eviction moratorium on February 1st before folks are displaced. It is going to be so much harder to do this organizing if folks become more housing-unstable and highly mobile. That’s a way different apparatus for figuring out giving families rides to schools. And keeping up this level of rent relief is just looking really, really scary.

KM 34:35

My assessment, without being deep inside the circles of negotiating with elected officials right now, is that I think that they are underestimating the ways in which folks would be behind them, especially if they were putting forth real solutions and transformative change. Folks are there. We had 100,000 people in the streets who didn’t go to work. One of the biggest general strikes of modern history. Folks are here, they’re organized, they’re listening, and it’s disappointing that the Dems haven’t come out. Their power is limited because of the federal government, but there are ways that they could be imposing costs or offering benefits for businesses and other entities that are defecting. Like they could pull licenses. They could offer incentives for small businesses that are becoming Fourth Amendment businesses. They could do a lot of things to actually just continue to organize support. They could be leveraging defections from the regime and getting people more polarized and institutions more polarized to our side. And then lastly, as Jesse said, they could actually be using the resources of our state in our city to keep people safe. Like the eviction moratorium is, in my opinion, the floor for what could be happening. Most people are getting caught up because they have to leave their home some way, and if we actually stop that and created a sense of security for that, hundreds and thousands of dollars of mutual aid that are being circulated right now could go toward other things if folks didn’t have to worry about rent.

AA 36:19

No, that’s an amazing point—that the amount of energy that it takes to organize this mutual aid and the amount of resources that it takes when the state could actually put some of its own resources to doing some of that work. I mean, it’s almost a no brainer, and they were able to do something similar to that during COVID, and there’s no reason that that kind of apparatus shouldn’t be mobilized again to take some of the burden off of regular citizens, who are also doing a lot of other things, to try to shift the balance in terms of the energy that people have for rapid response, for campaign organizing, for all kinds of different things away from the safety-net work.

JM 37:03

Every single mom on my block, every single neighbor on my block, is rising to the challenge of this moment. I can’t even begin to describe to you how everyday life feels on pause to have each other’s back and push together toward the maximum safety. And our electeds could be doing a lot more. The idea of sanctuary schools is based off of protection that we had until January of 2025. It used to be illegal for immigration activity to occur in schools, in churches, or in hospitals, and we’ve watched all of those places—places of worship, and schools, and places where people are receiving essential medical care—all be deeply targeted by the metro surge and the occupation of agents recently. There’s a reason the sanctuary school teams need to crop up around the country, and we need to start organizing this way. We are making schools sanctuary once again. I think our elected officials need to be pursuing every strategy possible to enact a 1,000-foot perimeter around schools and daycares so that essential protective presence is not as needed.

JM 38:10

I also am hearing people say so many comparisons to the pandemic and the types of steps Democrats were willing to take then—they could just do a daily briefing, sharing where we’ve seen activity in our city, what schools should be patrolling. We’re having to do that type of sharing of verified, accurate information ourselves. We’re up against enormous, terrifying false information strategies. There were AI images distributed throughout December showing fake instances of students being detained within schools. We didn’t have confirmed reports of agents entering schools in December, but there were all of these fake images showing that happening and causing absolute terror. And that information is barely being distributed to our English-speaking families; it’s even harder to get it to monolingual and Somali-speaking families. And that’s a huge, huge role that our electeds could be playing right now.

AA 39:01

It sounds like there’s also the fear of infiltration, and if the state was doing that work, they just have so much more—you would hope—more resources for that kind of security.

JM 39:11

That would be huge. That would be huge. We both have fears of infiltration and real experience of plainclothes ICE officers joining our school patrols last week. Like that is their strategy. That’s something that elected officials could take far more responsibility for in this moment. And the last piece that we’re paying attention to is by enacting a state of emergency, Walz can give districts flexibility, to be able to call for virtual school or to call for no school when incredibly intense incidents happen on school sites. I was there on January 7th when 40 agents, including Bovino himself, deployed chemical weapons on students and on-site at a high school near my house. And it was a group of parents who came together in the foyer and were like, “There’s no way we can go to school tomorrow,” and had to run that demand all the way up the flagpole through a whole night of organizing and get it announced at midnight. That school was able to be canceled the next day, which was an essential safety measure for families and students to get to reset after such a terrifying incident. And we need that power, site-specific, district-level power, to be released by calling for a state of emergency and granting that flexibility to our districts.

AA 40:23

I will say that watching these two murders has really brought to mind the September 2024 moment, where the IDF killed a Turkish American protective presence activist, Aisha Noor Ezgi. I don’t know if you guys remember that. At the time, we put together a conversation about: What does it mean for the protective presence activists in the West Bank to train people into this work that they knew was going to be so incredibly dangerous, and knowing that more people were probably going to get hurt because it’s the nature of the work? And also recognizing that what they were doing was training people into that work. I just wonder how you’re thinking about risk in this moment, and what it means to do these kinds of trainings, and how you hold that responsibility.

LC 41:14

It’s felt so unavoidable to talk about risk in the past two months while facilitating these trainings for people. What we talk about with folks is: Yes, of course, now we’ve seen that you could potentially be risking your life, showing up as a constitutional observer, showing up in a completely lawful capacity, documenting agents—that you are risking your safety and you could potentially be putting your life on the line. At the same time, I think that’s something that people already know. That’s something that is viscerally felt, and it’s not stopping people at all. If anything, our community has been spurred even more into action, and people who have never even gone to a protest are coming to our legal observer trainings, knowing fully the risk that they might be taking on. We have a list of hundreds and hundreds of pending requests for trainings around the state from, really, everyday people who just feel like they can’t do anything else but act in this moment, regardless of the risk that they might be taking on.

AA 42:34

I really appreciate that, and I really appreciate the doubling down on the question of “we keep us safe.” But this slogan, of course, in the Jewish context, we think about it in terms of synagogue security and whether to have police at synagogues, and people are always like, “We keep us safe.” But the truth is, it’s hard to imagine what stops people who are armed and dangerous against people who are not. I’m not arguing for police in synagogues; what I’m just saying is that what is missing in “we keep us safe” is that there’s also situations where safety is not possible when you’re facing down a heavily armed paramilitary, for example. And so, I almost want to know more what that means and what that feels like. Do you get questions like this when you’re doing those kinds of trainings? Are people looking for more of a sense of safety? And how do you answer them?

LC 43:25

I mean, I think that people are at a point where people who didn’t feel like their safety had been on the line prior to this escalation with Operation Metro Surge—where two U.S. citizens have been killed—now, those people are feeling like their safety is on the line, and I think that is part of what is spurring them into action. We’ve seen U.S. Citizens be dragged out of their cars and detained illegally at the Whipple Federal Building, and we’re having this conversation as I’m getting notifications that ICE is outside of my apartment.

AA 44:04

Oh, God.

LC 44:06

Really, talking to people, they are not talking about their safety. They’re talking about the fact that they feel like the foundation of their constitutional rights are crumbling, and they are deeply concerned about especially their First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights, and they feel like they are going to continue to put themselves on the line if that is what it’s going to take to preserve their own rights.

KM 44:36

I think that also, the experience here is: It’s really clear that our safety is not guaranteed. Whenever we walk out the door—unless you’re here, you don’t get it, that that is the experience. And so, I think that what I’ve seen when I’ve been in some of these trainings is folks are clear that there’s no actually other choice, and so: How do I get some training and get in alignment with my community to be a little bit safer than if I wasn’t doing that? Part of what we’re also just trying to offer to folks is, we can run through every single scenario that possibly could happen and think about how we would respond, but it’s actually about: How do we tap in and regulate our nervous systems to be able to respond as strategically and safely as possible, in coordination with other people, who are dealing with the same exact triggered, trauma response in real time? But yeah, it’s just like, you check your back. You look both sides whenever you leave your house, because our experience right now is that our safety is not guaranteed, and I don’t think we’re able to avoid that.

JM 45:46

Yeah, this is one of the places that I sometimes feel shaky these last few weeks. I had my dad pass away when I was pretty young, and so, it feels really intense for me to mostly be training a team of people who are parents and to be thinking about the risk of: Someone could lose a parent today. And before we knew Renee’s identity, I started to get phone calls when it was confirmed that she was a mother, because people were really worried she was going to be someone in our team. We have really strong teams at most of the public schools in the neighborhood that her and I live in. I spent most of that day being really afraid she was going to be someone I knew really closely. And later that day, we responded to two situations of ICE at schools in our project, and I personally knew 20-plus moms who are part of that response. And it just really ups the stakes for me. I feel like when it’s people I know, and I’ve met their kids, I know what it’ll mean, and I think that’s why it’s felt so moving to me to not really get that question from people here. We say in our trainings: Everything we’re asking you to do is legal, everything we’re asking you to do is nonviolent, and yet everything we’re asking you to do could risk your life, could cause you to get abducted, could cause you to experience brutality. And are you having conversations with your family about not only what your risk assessment is for yourself, but what is your guys’ collective risk assessment? What do you need to have in place? And it feels like people understand that we’re showing up in this way, first and foremost, for our immigrant neighbors and because those rights and safeties for all of us are sliding away really fast. And that this is training for: How do I get to the grocery store and back safely? It’s training for: How do my kids get home from school safely? And it’s holding on to the fact that: My government’s doing something I hate; I should be able to use my voice about that. All of those things are true, and all of them come with unbelievable risk right now.

LC 47:47

Yeah, I mean, people who are organizing right now are being labeled domestic terrorists. ICE agents are telling people who are recording on-site that they are going to be listed on a registry, that they’re terrorists. There was somebody who was detained over the weekend. Federal agents told them: We don’t work on the weekend, so you won’t be seeing a lawyer for the next couple of days. Which was a lie. There’s the psychological risk also, the risk of doxing. My hyperlocal chat was infiltrated yesterday by MAGA agitators, who were posting unbelievably horrific things in the chat. Disgusting images. And then, there’s also the risk of being unlawfully detained by ICE agents or arrested, as we saw in the case of Nekima Levy Armstrong. Even our local elected officials and our governor are under investigation by the federal government. So there are so many more layers of risk than just your physical safety.

AA 49:03

We’ve been talking—as we’ve been talking the last couple days—about actually, whether there’s a Jewish angle on this story at all. I’m hesitant to ask about it because on some level, there isn’t, and yet, Lily, you very helpfully brought to my attention the statements of the local JCRC, the Jewish Community Relations Council. And there is also just a lot of discourse that’s starting to come out about the comparisons of ICE to the Gestapo—which we’ve seen before, by the way. I mean, we saw this like with AOC’s concentration camps comment in 2018, comparing the places where family separations were happening and detention centers to concentration camps, and the way that that became a major flashpoint in the discussion. You had the U.S. Holocaust Museum weighing in today, actually. They said: Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges. So, Lily, I would love for you to talk about, basically, what the local JCRC said about these comparisons, and whether you think that reflects local Jewish sentiment.

LC 50:20

Sure. I mean, Arielle, I feel like you’re rage-baiting me right now by giving me that news. So back in May, our governor, Tim Walz, was giving an address at the University of Minnesota commencement ceremony, I believe, and compared ICE to the Gestapo. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas called on Walz to retract that statement. That was at a point in time when we were seeing students be targeted on campuses for allegedly taking part in Palestine solidarity protests and movement work. And so, fast forward to Friday, just a few days ago, the JCRC put out a statement. It was signed by the executive director of the JCRC, of a statewide Catholic coalition, and a statewide evangelical coalition, and said that they were calling on federal, state and local leaders to, quote, “come together and chart an offramp from this crisis. We ask you to present a united Minnesota vision that prioritizes de-escalation by promoting collaboration among federal and state law enforcement to remove dangerous people from our streets.” That’s the first of five points that they’re asking for. They’re asking for immigration enforcement to stop targeting law-abiding undocumented immigrants, to respect the civil and human rights of undocumented immigrants, to protect the most vulnerable among us, and to restore safety, security, and calm to our streets.

LC 52:14

So the idea that Operation Metro Surge is, in any way, removing dangerous people from our streets is ridiculous and completely unfounded. I’ll also say that the distinction that this letter is drawing between law-abiding undocumented immigrants and undocumented immigrants who are criminals is something that we really need to take a closer look at. We’re in a moment where all undocumented immigrants are being criminalized by this administration. For people who are 14 and older, if they fail to register with Trump’s registry of undocumented people, then that’s a crime. And so, there’s not exactly a line between criminal and lawful right now when we’re thinking about immigration. But I don’t think that this is necessarily representative of the mainstream Jewish community. I think the response from the Jewish community is the same as the response from the mainstream Minnesota community, which is absolute disgust, horror, and anger at what’s happening and a real clarity that this is not keeping us safe in any sense, that this is not an operation that’s removing criminals or dangerous people, and that this is something that is tearing families apart and is costing the lives of U.S. citizens as well.

JM 53:57

My experience is seeing Jewish people from all over my life—rabbis from more synagogues than I’m usually in touch with—joining school patrols right now. People who have kids at schools, people who are just neighbors to schools—that’s the overwhelming way I’m seeing Jewish folks showing up, like: This is not okay. This shouldn’t happen in my neighborhood, at my neighborhood school. Whether or not they have kids, they’re walking around making sure folks arrive safely, and I think that’s pretty beautiful because I just think it’s nice for Jewish people to not always need a special role. Sometimes it’s just as simple as: Drive your neighbor to work today, please. And that’s what this moment calls for: All hands on deck. I want all people to get to let down that feeling of: I need a special invitation to take this incredibly seriously with all of my time. I think the part that has given me some chills is the friends who have done protective presence in the West Bank sharing back how similarly they’ve experienced these school and neighborhood patrols to feel and some of the direct offerings they’ve been able to give about how we can learn to do this safer, and keep each other safe, and the connection there of: We’re going to need to learn from folks who have been experiencing this far longer.

AA 55:09

Yeah, I mean, I think what’s striking about the JCRC admonition of Walz for the Gestapo comparison and the U.S. Holocaust Museum is actually how out of step that is with the American Jewish mainstream. The American Jewish mainstream, when they’re polled—and I’m talking about liberals who are not necessarily against the Israeli government, maybe liberal Zionists, whatever—immigration is one of the top issues for Jewish Americans, and they relate to it so directly because of these experiences, because their personal narrative and mythology has to do with the Gestapo, and being stateless, and immigration, et cetera, et cetera. And so, it’s kind of interesting to see—I mean, I know the U.S. Holocaust Museum has had changes on the board around Trump. It’s a federal organization, in many ways, and so I can see why that’s happening. But it does seem like if we’re talking about these levers in the left-liberal coalition, this is another place where it just seems like it’s very clear to me that liberals are going to end up on the other side of this, and that largely liberal Jewish organizations need to be very careful, or they risk alienating even the people who have been with them the last two years on this issue.

LC 56:25

I completely agree with that. Just based on doing a number of trainings in synagogues here in the metro area—talking to people about why they’re at the training and what’s motivating them to come to the training, a lot of people have said: This is my direct family history. This was the literal experience of my grandparents. This is why I ended up in the U.S., because of a very similar type of violence that was perpetrated against my ancestors. And they draw the comparisons between ICE and the Gestapo.

AA 57:02

I did want to circle back to the national context, just about: We know that it’s not isolated. As you said, it’s going to Maine. They talk of going to Philly. I want to know what you would say to the rest of the country right now, in terms of: What are the lessons? What should we do?

KM 57:19

What I would say—and I’ve been saying to folks—is that the preparation starts yesterday. In my neighborhood, what started and has allowed for the thousands of dollars of mutual aid, intricate patrol system, and campaigning, it was potlucks. A couple of folks took it upon themselves to knock door-to-door, to be like: Hey, a lot’s going on in our world. We just want to come together as a community. I think that folks should hit up Minnesotans about: How did you set up your defense mechanism? We, here, talked to people in Chicago about what they did and started to figure out what makes sense for our city. And so, my biggest thing would be to not wait. Even if there isn’t an immediate threat, start building these community networks, these pods of your friends, who are ready to take action together or process shit together, and for organizations to really start building up: What is the strategy? The collective strategy that we are going to come together? And think about the series of scenarios that are likely to happen in a place, like: What is the immigrant population? Who can they vilify? What is a social safety net, welfare system there that they are trying to undermine? What would we do if this happens? If this happens? If this happens,? What is our strategy? What are the corporations that are most likely going to be aiding and abetting ICE, for example, and how do we start building some campaigns around them? How are we training up our leaders, our members, on direct action skills and community safety skills, but also facilitation skills? I mean, everyday folks, suburban moms, are hosting meetings at their homes, and passing along those skills, and getting people really skilled up. So it is about really deepening the capacity of our communities and the interconnectedness right now, and I would just say: Do not wait. Even if your city is not under direct threat, you should be getting ready because it benefits your city regardless. I’ve lived in my house for eight years, and there’s people I’ve never met before and I’m having the opportunity to meet because of some of this community-building work. So that’s what I would say. And then continuing to move demands nationally through our states, and also locally.

JM 59:43

Yeah. For me, as someone who’s been scared of how the climate crisis will hit us for a long time, I’ve always been under the mindset of: Get to know your neighbors. They’ll probably be the ones most close to you as you experience a hard crisis. I’ve been a part of hosting neighborhood potlucks around my house about every three months since I moved back to the Twin Cities in 2021. And it’s always crazy to me, 50, 100 people show up. The amount that folks want to meet their neighbors anywhere in the country right now is so high, and that has served us so well in this moment, because everybody on my block was already in a text thread; we could already start to talk. I think the same applies for folks at schools: Start knowing the folks in your kid’s class. Figure out ways to be connected outside of crisis so that relational tissue is there when a crisis is occurring, whether it’s with your kid’s class or the people on your own block. Start having conversations right now about— Like at my workplace six months ago, we had the conversation of: Who are your direct family members that you would need to take care of or need to be offering rides to because of their immigration status, if what happened in Chicago happened here? Start having those conversations with your neighbors. What role would you be able to play? What is the risk for you? What sorts of support would you need if something like Chicago, something like Minneapolis, happened in our neighborhood? And just start building that relationship and knowing who each other are face-to-face so that you’re not trying to put that together in a very quick, very intense moment. We’ve had school patrols grow to 200 neighbors in under five days, so it’s really not too late to start. I think just adding in that layer of coming together and knowing who each other are and what you might need before it’s there.

AA 1:01:32

Yeah. I live in a building that—there’s probably 200 people who live in this building, and if I’m looking at my block, we’re probably looking at 5,000 people, maybe more. And I think about what that actually means. But then again, you have to start somewhere.

JM 1:01:47

Then do your building. Do half of your building. Do four floors of your building.

AA 1:01:51

No, of course. Not to get too personal, but we have tried that before, and the landlords also have been thwarting the ability to actually even put anything up in the building to meet neighbors because they’re afraid of a tenants’ association. So there’s a lot of issues going on.

JM 1:02:10

I think that’s what every person who’s not in Minneapolis says to me when I’m like: You should start to do this now. And people who are like your school principal or your landlord might feel like they would be your opposition right now, or someone who wouldn’t be your major teammate, and those folks are going to be your teammates when this hits, and you’re going to need to work with them. And in fact, it’s going to be a left error to not make them your teammate. And so, I just really encourage starting a conversation from the place of: If this happened, what would we really do? What would you be afraid of happening? What are the concerns you have, to make them your teammate now. I know it won’t be smooth in the hypothetical, but if this happens in your city, who your friends are is going to dramatically shift.

AA 1:02:50

Lily, any last words?

LC 1:02:52

Yeah, I mean, I think what we’re seeing right now is that Minneapolis is at the epicenter of the consolidation of authoritarian power, where we’re seriously at the whim of a demented narcissist who is channeling the power of a militia that has no guardrails and no accountability directly at residents, regardless of immigration status. Every single blue state in the country should expect this to happen where you live if we don’t do something about it.

JM 1:03:26

Every single state, not just blue states. Every single state. They came from New Orleans.

LC 1:03:32

100%. I 100% agree that getting to know your neighbors is essential. I think where there are already hyperlocal mutual aid networks, reactivating those networks or establishing networks where there aren’t any. Getting to know your neighbors is essential in doing that. But also, preparing ahead of time, training as many people as possible on their basic rights, on how to be a legal observer, on what to document, on the risks associated, and focusing on the First and Fourth Amendment.

AA 1:04:09

Fourth Amendment being?

LC 1:04:10

Protection from unlawful search and seizure without a valid warrant. And then, also organizing to make sure that businesses and corporations local to where people are become Fourth Amendment institutions cut any existing contracts with ICE. Make sure that they have a policy that denies ICE entrance into their businesses without a lawful judicial warrant and denies the use of their property for ICE staging. People across the country should be hosting nonviolent direct-action trainings right now for their communities. I want to plug a toolkit that everybody can access, which is, if you visit ICEOutNowMN.com, you can access materials to use to train your own community and to use to advocate that institutions assert their Fourth Amendment rights.

JM 1:05:14

Also, get on the offense. Start calling in and blocking ICE’s ability to use hotels, and restaurants, and cars here in Minneapolis. Be a part of a proactive strategy that makes it impossible for them to sleep or eat anywhere they go so that they stop going to more places and more people’s homes. It’s going to be really hard for Minnesota to hold down that corporate strategy by ourselves because we’re navigating an occupation, and that’s a huge way to show up for us right now—part of that Free Minnesota strategy of blocking their ability to sleep at Hilton hotels and to rent Enterprise cars.

LC 1:05:49

And call your senator, and get your community members to call your senator to make sure that they vote “no” to fund the Department of Homeland Security, because that vote is coming up.

AA 1:06:04

Yes, very important. Thank you guys so much for joining us in the middle of this fucked up, scary, whirlwind moment. It’s really been an honor to talk to you and to learn from you all. This has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you to our editor, Jesse Brenneman. Thank you to our guests. If you liked this episode, share it and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. Thanks a lot, everyone. See you next time.