The Blueprint That Broke a Federal Occupation
Minneapolis and the Mosaic of Effective Activism
Christopher Armitage Feb 6 
The federal government sent more than three thousand immigration agents into a city with six hundred cops.¹ Starting December 1, 2025, they rolled into south Minneapolis in unmarked vehicles, wore masks, refused to identify themselves, and treated the neighborhood like occupied territory. They killed at least two American citizens, Renee Nicole Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24.² We know about Good and Pretti because someone had a camera rolling. In a city where filming federal agents from a public sidewalk can get you beaten, kidnapped, or killed, “at least two” is the only honest number we have. By February, agents had grabbed four thousand people off streets, out of cars, and from their homes.¹
Federal agents committed two of Minneapolis’s three known homicides that year.³

Minneapolis didn’t collapse. It organized. And the organizing didn’t look like one thing, which is exactly why it worked.
Tens of thousands of Minnesotans from every community in the city marched in January cold, in windchills that hit thirty below. On January 23, labor unions, faith leaders, and community organizations called what organizers described as the first general strike in the United States in eighty years, shutting down more than seven hundred businesses across the state.⁴ The marches and the strike were different tactics, and both mattered. The marches themselves were a cross-section of the entire city: Hispanic families, Somali communities, students, union workers, retirees, all walking together in temperatures that punish you for standing still.

Indigenous communities led from the front with smudging, dancing, and songs, organized through the American Indian Movement, the Indigenous Protector Movement, and the Little Earth Protectors. Not just elders. Whole generations showed up. Representatives from at least ten tribes traveled to Minneapolis, the birthplace of AIM, on what Rachel Dionne-Thunder of the Indigenous Protector Movement called “unceded Dakota land.”⁵ They came because ICE was stopping, questioning, and detaining Native people based on skin color alone.⁶ Federal agents occupying Indigenous land were profiling Indigenous people for looking Indigenous. That fact alone should have been a national scandal. In Minneapolis, it was one more reason to march.
Print shops across the city churned out posters by the thousands at steep discounts or for free. Volunteers distributed them at events, tucked them under windshield wipers, taped them to doors. The posters listed upcoming actions, named the politicians to contact, and spelled out the specific demands that would have the most effect. Multiple groups produced and distributed them independently, without coordinating with each other, because the need was obvious enough that nobody had to be told. Volunteers 3D-printed whistles and handed them out block by block so an entire neighborhood could sound the alarm the moment agents turned a corner.
At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, the ICE field office that served as the operation’s command center, activists ran daily surveillance and captured footage that ended up on every network in the country. They turned a federal building into a stage where the administration’s own cruelty played on camera for a national audience. Clergy from half a dozen denominations went to the airport and got arrested for it, about a hundred pastors and ministers and rabbis hauled off in zip ties for blocking the terminal where deportation flights departed.⁴ Churches opened as sanctuaries.
Thousands of people joined Signal chats organized by neighborhood, each one run by volunteer dispatchers tracking ICE movements in real time. Ad hoc intelligence networks, built overnight by civilians with nothing but cell phones. When convoys rolled through neighborhoods, people followed them, documented plate numbers, and reported locations so families had time to get inside. Some of those watchers got run off roads by federal vehicles. Agents stalked others, collected their personal information, and tried to intimidate them into stopping. They didn’t stop.
Through all of it, volunteers built a door-to-door mutual aid network from scratch. They delivered groceries, dropped off supplies, checked on families who couldn’t leave their homes because armed, masked men were circling their block. The Immigrant Defense Network trained nearly thirty thousand constitutional observers across 77 of the state’s 87 counties, up from twenty-five hundred in November, averaging two thousand new volunteers every week by late January.¹² Lawyers fanned out through low-income immigrant neighborhoods to explain rights that people didn’t know they had: that they could refuse to open their doors without a judicial warrant, that they could remain silent, that being stopped did not mean being convicted. Know-your-rights cards showed up on bus shelters and in laundromats, printed in English and Spanish and Somali. None of this infrastructure existed before the occupation. The community built it while the occupation was happening.
And that was just the organized stuff. You’d drive to a neighborhood to follow an ICE watch team and pass a group of older women holding signs on a corner, no organization behind them, just showing up because they decided to. You couldn’t go anywhere in south Minneapolis without running into something, some act of opposition you hadn’t heard about that had apparently been happening for weeks. It was like the whole city was doing this, independently, in every direction, all at once.
None of this had a single leader. None of it required permission. A grandmother delivering rice to a Somali family and a college student running Signal dispatch and a print shop owner working at cost all operated inside the same structure, and the structure held because every piece reinforced every other piece.
Our team started calling it the mosaic.
A mosaic works because no single tile carries the whole picture. Lose one and the image survives. Add one and it gets sharper. Minneapolis operated the same way. Marches drew federal attention, and the Signal network tracked where agents redeployed. ICE targeted the watchers, so mutual aid kept families fed and the watchers kept watching. National media showed up, and the footage from Whipple and from dashcams and cell phones gave them something to broadcast besides government press conferences. Every tile created conditions the other tiles needed.
On February 4, Tom Homan stood inside the Whipple Building and announced a drawdown, effective immediately.⁷ He said it wasn’t a surrender, that mass deportations would continue. The administration claimed seven hundred agents were leaving. Whether the real number was seven hundred or something else, who knows. What I know is this: the first time I embedded with ICE watchers, right after Renee Good was killed, the scanner traffic sounded like a war zone. People getting chased off roads, agents swarming neighborhoods, abductions reported constantly. The second time, weeks later, I spent two days following ICE watch volunteers whose entire job was to find where the agents were, and we didn’t hear a single abduction. Something changed. A Marquette Law School poll found 60 percent of Americans disapproved of how ICE was conducting itself, with only 23 percent of independents approving.⁸ An NPR/PBS/Marist poll found 65 percent said ICE had gone too far.⁹ Trump told NBC’s Tom Llamas that “maybe we could use a little bit of a softer touch,” then immediately added, “But you still have to be tough.”¹⁰
The community made the operation politically toxic. Not through one brilliant move but through dozens of ordinary ones running simultaneously, reinforcing each other, until the combined weight became more than the administration wanted to carry into a midterm year.
Americans love the idea of the dramatic gesture. One march changes everything. One speech turns the tide. One lawsuit ends the abuse. What actually dismantles fascism is commitment. Showing up Tuesday and Wednesday and the following Tuesday, not because anyone’s watching or because it feels historic, but because it matters and we said we would. The people who built the mosaic in Minneapolis weren’t waiting for a defining moment. They were doing the work that creates one.
State Senator Erin Maye Quade and State Representative Emma Greenman represent the communities living under the occupation, two legislators in two chambers watching their constituents’ constitutional rights erode daily and doing what they can to protect them. I spent a week in Minneapolis and sat down with both of them to go through the soft secession and oppositional federalism frameworks we’ve developed at The Existentialist Republic, model legislation designed to go from A to B, to solve the problem it claims to solve rather than winding through intermediaries built to dilute the result. Both were ready for tools with teeth.
That meeting was one tile. Thousands of people calling Attorney General Keith Ellison, Governor Walz, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty every single day was another. They demanded what Letitia James has started building in New York: trained state observers embedded in enforcement zones to document whether federal agents stay within the law, creating an official record that prosecutors can use.¹¹ They demanded the arrest of Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot Renee Good and left the scene with federal colleagues, refusing to sit for interviews, debrief with local investigators, or cooperate with Minneapolis police, skipping every step of the process that determines whether an on-duty shooting was justified. The dispatchers were another tile. The woman printing whistles was another. The families marching in ten-degree cold behind Indigenous leaders were another. No single tile forced the drawdown. All of them together did.
None of this is over. Not one federal agent has been prosecuted for an on-duty murder, beating, or kidnapping anywhere in the country since Trump’s second term began. People are still in detention camps. Operations continue. The administration learned from Minneapolis that it needed better optics, so now we get fascism with improved customer service: fewer convoys in daylight, fewer cameras catching agents dragging someone into an unmarked car, the same raids run quieter so nobody films the part that polls at 23 percent. The underlying machinery hasn’t stopped. But the mosaic proved that sustained, targeted pressure changes behavior. The next step is finding the next specific target. Not the big abstract fight against everything at once, but the next concrete place where pressure can be applied, ground gained, and conditions changed for real people. As soon as we win one, we find the next one. The fight moves, and we move with it.
We don’t need one perfect strategy. We need dozens of imperfect ones running at the same time. Printers, lawyers, drivers, legislators, someone who knows how to cook for forty, all doing their thing without waiting for someone to hand them a role. The mosaic doesn’t require a leader. It requires participants.
Minneapolis showed what the mosaic looks like when it’s running. Any of those tiles works. We pick one. We deliver groceries. We run Signal chats. We print posters. We call our attorney general every morning until someone picks up and listens. We join people already doing the work, or we start something nobody’s thought of yet. But if Minneapolis proved anything, it’s that the general strike was the tile that scared them the most. We push for one in every city. Every week. With specific demands and a specific target. We don’t stop when they ignore us. We stop when they move.
The EARR Training Booklet, is available as a physical booklet at TheExistentialistRepublic.com and for free at BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER. The guide teaches the Educate, Activate, Recruit, Repeat framework for building the kind of decentralized opposition Minneapolis just proved works.Works Cited[¹ ⁷] Allen, J., Nicholas, P., Gomez, H. J., Smith, A., & De Luce, D. (2026, February 4). Trump admin to withdraw 700 immigration agents from Minnesota after Minneapolis shootings, Homan says. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-administration-withdraw-700-immigration-agents-minnesota-rcna257397[² ³] CBS News. (2026, January 26). Bovino, some Border Patrol agents to leave Minneapolis soon, sources tell CBS News.
CBS News Minnesota. https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/live-updates/reported-shooting-south-minneapolis-federal-agents-protesters/[⁴]
CBS News Minnesota. (2026, January 23). Thousands march through downtown Minneapolis protesting against ICE as state workers hold general strike. https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/live-updates/general-strike-rally-planned-in-minnesota-friday-to-protest-ice/[⁵]
Thomson Reuters. (2026, January 23). Thousands of demonstrators demand ICE leave Minneapolis. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/minneapolis-clergy-arrest-protest-9.7058754[⁶]
Newsweek. (2026, January 17). Native Americans raise alarm over ICE operations. https://www.newsweek.com/native-americans-raise-alarm-over-ice-operations-11376134[⁸]
Marquette Law School. (2026, February 4). New Marquette Law School national survey finds 60% disapprove of the work of ICE, with Democrats and independents opposed to ICE and Republicans in favor. Marquette University. https://today.marquette.edu/2026/02/new-marquette-law-school-national-survey-finds-60-disapprove-of-the-work-of-ice-with-democrats-and-independents-opposed-to-ice-and-republicans-in-favor/[⁹]
Marist Institute for Public Opinion. (2026, February 5). The actions of ICE: February 2026. NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll. https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/the-actions-of-ice-february-2026/[¹⁰]
Gomez, H. J. (2026, February 4). After the Minneapolis shootings, Trump says his administration could use “a softer touch” on immigration. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/minneapolis-shootings-trump-says-administration-use-softer-touch-immig-rcna257459[¹¹]
New York State Office of the Attorney General. (2026, February 3). Attorney General James launches Legal Observation Project to monitor federal immigration enforcement in New York. https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2026/attorney-general-james-launches-legal-observation-project-monitor-federal[¹²]
Torres DeSantiago, E. (2026, February 2). Nearly 30,000 Minnesotans trained as constitutional observers [Interview]. MPR News. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/02/02/immigrant-defense-network-training-constitutional-observers