The Fight Against Trumpism Can’t Wait for Election Day
If you truly believe that ICE really is done terrorizing Minneapolis with its Operation Metro Surge (many residents don’t), it wasn’t the Freys or Walzes who forced them to respond. There was no vote, no referendum. ICE’s problems arose simply because normal people, having watched their friends and neighbors kidnapped and shot in the street by masked men, decided to act of their own accord—from parents organizing school safety group chats to businesses that closed for the general shutdown, to the thousands of people who woke up every day to observe, film, and prevent abductions. Without these citizens, their smartphones, and the videos documenting their relentless pursuit of federal agents, we might not have the footage directly contradicting the government’s nauseating claims that Good and Pretti were “domestic terrorists.” Absent the evidence that ordinary people collected, sometimes at great risk, what pressure would there really be on Trump to even make a withdrawal announcement?
The vast majority of these ICE watchers, or “commuters,” are not activists at all. They’re just people Trump tried, and failed, to break.
“Everybody is involved, whole communities. It’s like my neighbors, you know, they’re not activists. They’re doing communal work, and they’re trying their best. It’s not perfect, but whether they’re doing know-your-rights training, whether they’re being observers, everybody in my area is engaged with that, and I wouldn’t say they’re activists at all,” Aminah Sheikh, a member of the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America steering committee, told me. “I think people are pulled in this moment because we are living through a stage of fascism.… It’s on ordinary people. And I think Alex Pretti and Renee Good are a symbol of ordinary people. They were just regular people trying to defend their neighbors and their community.”