Earlier today on this snowy first day of February I visited the people’s memorial for Renée Good, the legal observer and mother of three who was shot to death by ICE agent Jonathan Ross just over three weeks ago in Minneapolis.
The pictures I share this evening of my visit to this sacred ground are accompanied by excerpts from Jacobin’s Eric Blanc’s recent interview with Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Twin Cities Sunrise Movement. Blanc’s interview is titled “Minneapolis Is Going on the Offensive Against ICE.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol’s terror campaign in Minnesota has taken the lives of Renée Good and Alex Pretti and led to the abduction of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, among countless others. Minneapolis has answered with an astonishing surge of courage. Neighborhood Signal chats and daily community-watch patrols have turned sidewalks into lines of mutual aid and defense, while the January 23 statewide general strike proved a willingness on the part of residents to stop business as usual in defiance of ICE’s violent repression.
The Twin Cities Sunrise Movement has pushed the resistance onto offense, targeting the Hilton hotels that quietly house ICE agents. This campaign has led to an impressive string of local victories, including getting a local Hilton to refuse service to ICE, sparking outrage from the Department of Homeland Security and the subsequent capitulation of Hilton nationally to the administration.
Jacobin’s Eric Blanc spoke with Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise Movement’s executive director and a lifelong Minneapolis resident, about Minneapolis’s organizing pushback and how ICE’s opponents can go on the offensive nationwide by pressuring companies like Hilton, Enterprise, and Home Depot to stop collaborating with the agency.
Eric Blanc: What has it felt like to be a Minneapolis resident and organizer these past two months?
Aru Shiney-Ajay: It feels like living in a war zone. I was really reluctant to say that at first, but every few hours I get a Signal message about ICE – usually within walking distance of me. Two weeks ago, I had a friend who had a gun pointed at their head by ICE agents, and I have friends who’ve been dragged out of their cars and detained. It feels like you’re walking around and at any moment you could be grabbed and kidnapped. It’s come to a point where something as simple as recording an interaction with ICE can be met by being shot, which is a really different level of fear to carry around.
At the same time, it’s also the most organized community I’ve ever experienced anywhere. We’ve hit a density in Minneapolis where over 4 percent of every single neighborhood is in a Signal chat at the neighborhood level – and it might be higher, because those are just the Signal chats we’re centrally tracking. In St Paul, there’s a neighborhood called Frogtown. It’s heavily Hmong. Every day, we create a rapid response Signal chat for people actively patrolling in Frogtown, and every day by 11 a.m., that chat hits its limit of a thousand people – which is to say that, at any given moment in one neighborhood, there are a thousand people out patrolling.
Eric Blanc: Can you speak more about the sense of community that has emerged?
Aru Shiney-Ajay: I feel more from Minnesota than I’ve ever felt. And I’ve grown up here. But now I know as I’m walking down the street that I have hundreds of people who will swarm to help me if needed, and that I will swarm to help them.
There are these intense protest moments – like the number of times you pick someone up after they’ve been tear-gassed and use snow to wipe the tear gas from their face. But there’s also this everyday feeling of solidarity, because everyone is walking around with whistles. If you hear a whistle, suddenly people start swarming toward you. I’ve never felt so backed up. It feels like we’re all on a giant team together as a city. It’s incredible.
It’s like building a muscle of solidarity across race, across class. It’s something the Left talks about a lot, but I’ve never experienced it like this. And it’s truly ordinary people – it’s not majority organizers or activists. It’s people who’ve never organized a day in their lives but know something wrong is happening and want to do something.
Eric Blanc: Can you speak more about the fear and how people have overcome it?
Aru Shiney-Ajay: Part of it is that it starts really small, and then the small things become more risky, and you don’t want to give them up. Standing and recording with a phone was what we were first training everyone to do. Monarca Unidos, an immigrants group here, trained something like 24,000 people on legal observer roles: standing and recording with a phone.
Everyone was prepared to do that, and then that became risky. But it was an identity people had taken up – “I can stand here and record with a phone” – and people didn’t want to back away from that.
Another example is that delivering groceries to undocumented people who can’t risk going outside was floated as a low-risk thing you could do. But in the last week, ICE agents have started following around white people carrying grocery bags, because they think that will lead them to undocumented people.
So now the people delivering groceries – which, again, is a very low-risk thing – have been trained to know that in case ICE grabs them, they should never write the list of addresses down digitally. You write it on a physical piece of paper, and if ICE grabs you, you eat the piece of paper.
That type of thing is motivating courage right now. What we’re doing is very basic: it’s giving people food and walking around recording on our cell phone. And when you’re not allowed to do that – when that becomes high-risk – there’s a sense of, my basic rights are being violated.
Obviously it’s harder to go and directly confront an ICE agent. That’s high-risk. But delivering groceries shouldn’t be high-risk. It violates people’s sense of dignity and basic rights, and that’s what creates courage.
Eric Blanc: Can you speak more about your strategy of going on the offensive? Because a lot of people right now are trying to figure out how we can stop ICE. And what we’ve seen, beyond the important local defense and know-your-rights work, is mostly a lot of one-off protests or vague calls online to boycott companies. What you’re doing seems different.
Aru Shiney-Ajay: I think about it as leverage and power: looking everywhere ordinary people have leverage and seeing where we can pull those levers.
Under a functioning democracy, you play the game of public opinion. If you convince the majority, then you can get legislation or win an election. But what we’re living under right now is not a democracy. In many ways, the feedback loop from public opinion to outcomes has been broken for a long time. It’s broken because of money in politics, because of the setup of our Senate, because of gerrymandering. And now they might just try to steal the election outright.
Public opinion still matters. It’s important that we have majorities on our side. But we’re fooling ourselves if we think public opinion alone will translate into victories, or that the midterms and 2028 will be normal elections.
A lot of establishment advocacy groups seem to be hoping we’ll show America that Trump is really bad, then in the midterms, we’ll take back power – a rerun of 2018 to 2020. I don’t think that’s accurate: just look at what Trump is doing now and how similar it is to how authoritarians in other countries have grabbed power.
So you have to switch from purely persuasion campaigns to the logic of noncooperation. You have to look at the ways ordinary people are directly upholding a regime’s ability to logistically function: where the money flows but also how they eat, how they sleep, who is doing the literal work enabling everything to operate.
Corporations aren’t the only method of looking at that. There are many. Local governments are a piece. But I do think corporations are a really key one, particularly corporations that the public has a lot of access to and influence over.
A lot of the companies collaborating with ICE are shadowy and operating in the background. But there are also companies like hotels – places we all book, sleep at, and spend money at – that we can actually shift, because we have leverage over them. That’s the logic behind corporate campaigning: identifying the places where ordinary people are directly enabling Trump’s regime to function.
When you look at it that way, there are dozens and dozens of little buttons you can start to push. We’ve been brainstorming a lot of other ones, too. For example: ICE agents drive around on the roads – could we get the city government to do construction on the highway entrances in or out of the Whipple Building? Things like that. The question is: What are the concrete ways they’re moving around, and how do you put yourself in the way using every nonviolent lever you have access to?
We zeroed in on hotels because we wanted to pick something that anyone, anywhere can immediately recognize: “There’s a Hilton near me. I could book a reservation and cancel it. I could leave a bad review on Booking.com.” You want to pick campaigns that everyone has power over, because our strength comes from involving large numbers of ordinary people. If it’s just the same activists who have been doing this for years, we can’t win.
. . . Winnability is key. When you’re organizing a population against dictatorship, it’s important to understand what the main emotional barriers are that stand in people’s way. In a lot of countries, that ends up being fear. I look a lot to Otpor in Serbia as an example: they identified fear as the main barrier and said, “What’s the antidote to fear? The antidote to fear is humor. We’re going to be funny in all of our actions so that people aren’t scared.” It was great.
I don’t think the main barrier in the US is fear. It’s skepticism. Most people don’t believe in our ability to change things. So one of the most important things for organizers right now is to pick campaigns that are ambitious, tangible, and winnable – wins that aren’t so small they feel meaningless but are still actually achievable. Because one of the biggest things we need to prove to ordinary people right now is that we really do have power over how the government operates, and over what happens in our society.
To read Eric Blanc’s interview with Aru Shiney-Ajay in its entirety, click here.
Related Off-site Links:
Minneapolis City Councilor Robin Wonsley on Fighting ICE – Trey Cook (Jacobin, February 3, 2026).
“We Have to Keep Showing Up for Each Other”: In Minnesota, Caregiving Is a Form of Resistance – Barbara Rodriguez (The 19th, February 3, 2026).
Minneapolis Is Showing a New Kind of Anti-Trump Resistance – Christian Paz (Vox, February 2, 2026).
“Streets of Minneapolis”: Bruce Springsteen Releases Anthem to Honor Uprising Against ICE – Brad Reed (Common Dreams, January 28, 2026).
Faith Activists Are Praying with Their Feet in Minneapolis – Ariel Gold (Waging Nonviolence, January 28, 2026). The Nation Nominates Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize – The Nation (January 28, 2026). The “Theology of Showing Up” Is Making Minneapolis a Holy Place – Sunita Viswanath (Religion News Service via National Catholic Reporter, January 26, 2026). Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong – Adam Serwer (The Atlantic, January 26, 2026).
See also the previous Wild Reed posts on the resistance to the Trump regime’s fascist occupation of Minnesota:
• Omar Fateh: Quote of the Day – December 4, 2025
• Photo of the Day – December 5, 2025
• Susie Hayward on What’s Happening in Minneapolis
• Doing What We Can to Stop Unjust Arrests of Immigrants
• Great Event, Great Sign, Great Nails
• Christmas Eve Musings
• May We Do Likewise
• “This Is What Fascism Looks Like” – January 7, 2026
• “It Was Murder”: 12 Powerful Responses to the Death of Renée Nicole Good
• Omar Fateh: “Folks Are Waking Up”
• A Good Faith Appeal and a Grim Response
• Why Minnesota?
• Chris Hedges on ICE: “I Have Seen These Masked Goons Before”
• Steven Donziger: “Let’s Get Real . . . ICE Is a Domestic Terrorist Organization”
• Historian Kyle Dekker: “It’s Not Nazi Ideology We Are Fighting. It’s American”
• Knowing Our Rights
• Mike Figueredo on Why Trump Might Be Pushing the U.S. to the Brink of Collapse
• A “Red Alert Moment for American Democracy”
• Dispatches from Occupied Minnesota
• Marianne Williamson on How to Psychologically Endure This Moment
• What Moral Clarity Looks Like in Minnesota This MLK Day
• Nemik’s Eulogy for Renée Nicole Good
• “It Was Never About Keeping America Safe”
• “ICE Out!”: The Minnesota General Strike – 1/23/26
• “This Was a Flat Out Execution”
• “Organized Sustained Systemic Resistance and Self-Defense Are Our Only Options”
• Honoring Alex Pretti
• George Conway: The Trump Administration Is a “Criminal Organization”
• In the Face of Fascist Lies, MN Governor Tim Walz Sets the Record Straight
• Adam Serwer on How “Every Social Theory Undergirding Trumpism Has Been Broken on the Steel of Minnesotan Resolve”
• “They Were Alive. Then They Were Not”
• Bruce Springsteen and the Streets of Minneapolis in the Winter of ’26
• Craig Mokhiber on the “Imperial Boomerang”: How U.S. War Tactics Abroad Are Now Used at Home
• January Vignettes (2026)
Images: Michael J. Bayly.
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