Twin Cities Outrage and Resistance

LIKE MOST MINNESOTANS and residents of Minneapolis, the assault by ICE is personal to me. I’ve lived here since 1971. We are aghast and angry and fed up.

The first house I lived in and raised our kids was just down the street from where ICE gunned down Renee Good. Only two weeks ago my wife and I celebrated her birthday at a restaurant across the street from where ICE executed Alex Pretti last week.

The level of visceral anger in this community toward what has become a hostile occupying force is palpable. Many of us know Hispanic families who are afraid to go to work, even to take out the garbage, for fear that an ICE patrol circling in their neighborhood, will arrest them.

Many of us know Somali-American citizens, who call Minnesota home, who carry their passports and identification papers on them for fear they will be scooped up and abducted by ICE.

Some of us know Native Americans who also live in fear, because they are people of color. Some have been arrested. Most of us know people who are taking food to people hiding in their homes who dare not go to the grocery store.

I worked as a reporter at the Minnesota Star Tribune for 52 years, most of the time in a four-story building at 425 Portland Ave. The building was torn down ten years ago. There is now a park where 50,000 protesters gathered last Friday and marched in a peaceful, legal demonstration in temperatures of seven degrees below zero.

Protesters gathered at Target Center, home of the Minnesota Lynx and Timberwolves, for a rally. The demand was simple: “ICE out of Minnesota.” More than 1,000 businesses shut down for the day in solidarity. Thousands of Minnesotans called in sick and stayed home from work. It was a remarkable workers’ action.

I believe the protest march was as big as any anti-Vietnam war demonstration in Minnesota’s history, and we had some big protests here back then. What Donald Trump has done is turn regular people — workers, students, shop owners — into protesters.

In the old days we would have called it mass “radicalization.” It’s a problematic word, because radicalism these days is often equated to terrorism, and the folks who are in the streets in Minneapolis are not terrorists by any stretch of the imagination, despite what reactionary autocrats like Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have said.

The people now carrying protest signs are appalled at the cruelty of the ICE thugs, masquerading as law enforcement, who have been encouraged and applauded by the White House. Many folks see it as their duty to protest. We realize it is Minnesota today, but it could be your state tomorrow.

Labor’s Seismic Shift

What is particularly stunning about the current protests in Minnesota, starting with the No Kings Day demonstrations, is the central role of the labor movement which has joined with Indivisible, religious entities and other groups including women’s rights organizations.

The role of labor is a seismic shift. Labor groups are not just endorsing the protests, they are playing a big role in organizing them. The involvement of the Minnesota AFL-CIO has been outstanding, as has been the role of the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation.

SEIU Local 26 was key to organizing the big ICE Out march. A CWA local has turned its offices over to an immigrant action network. It was impressive to see them in operation last week. Numerous other union locals have also stepped up.

As a reporter, I covered demonstrations for more than 50 years, and we got used to “the usual suspects,” dedicated activists who came out to protest war, racism and support women’s and LGBT rights. They were the necessary core to any successful movement, and they are still around, which is great.

But today, as I look at the crowds that the ICE horrors have generated, the faces I see are new and fresh. Many are young people, too young to know much about the mass opposition to the Vietnam and Iraq wars, let alone the titanic labor struggles that shook this nation like the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike.

There are many more immigrants and people of color who have joined the protests. It takes real courage for them to come out as they have been targeted by the bigoted ICE brigades, which harkens back to the reign of terror against Black people in the South in the years before the rise of the civil rights movement.

Where do we go from here? I’m not sure but I have one thought. ICE needs to be stopped and the cruel deportations must end, too. I believe the most important thing we can do in Minnesota and across the country is to stay in the streets, with large, peaceful, legal mass actions, the kind of demonstrations that will bring out an ever-larger number of people.

It should be underscored that it is ICE that is breaking the law, it is ICE committing the violent acts, it is ICE trying to incite the trouble on the streets of Minneapolis by assaulting immigrants, nonviolent demonstrators and ICE watchers.

Trump’s ICE storm troopers have been engaged in widespread provocations so he can invoke the Insurrection Act. Our movement needs to stay disciplined and not be provoked. The careful marshalling that has been done in Minnesota at these largest demonstrations by the activist groups themselves has been well done and needs to continue.

In my opinion, it is important that the labor unions and our allies like Indivisible and other activist groups, stay the course and continue to mobilize the kind of big peaceful, legal protests that you can take your family to. That’s what we did during the Vietnam War, with ever bigger, peaceful demonstrations, until eventually most of the country, and the GIs themselves turned against the war. It forced the United States to withdraw from Vietnam.

Though it is understandable, we can’t get frustrated and let up. We need to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. It’s key to ridding our country of the ICE operations that are terrorizing our communities and end the horrific, inhuman deportation campaign by the Trump administration.

Randy Furst retired in 2025 after 52 years as a newspaper reporter. He now works part-time as a news consultant.