Minnesota v. MAGA

Terrific piece from Adam Serwer about how a community under attack from the federal government has proven the assumptions of its would-be overlords wrong:

I don’t know what the feds expected when they surged into Minnesota. In late November, The New York Times reported on a public-benefit fraud scheme in the state that was executed mainly by people of Somali descent. Federal prosecutors under the Biden administration had already indicted dozens of people, but after the Times story broke, President Trump began ranting about Somalis, whom he referred to as “garbage”; declared that he didn’t want Somali immigrants in the country; and announced that he was sending thousands of armed federal immigration agents to Minneapolis. This weekend, he posted on social media that the agents were there because of “massive monetary fraud.” The real reason may be that a majority of Minnesotans did not vote for him. Trump has said that “I won Minnesota three times, and I didn’t get credit for it. That’s a crooked state.” He has never won Minnesota.

Perhaps the Trump-administration officials had hoped that a few rabble-rousers would get violent, justifying the kind of crackdown he seems to fantasize about. Maybe they had assumed that they would find only a caricature of “the resistance”—people who seethed about Trump online but would be unwilling to do anything to defend themselves against him.

Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. They aren’t looking for attention or likes on social media. Unless they are killed by federal agents, as Pretti and Renee Good were, other activists do not even necessarily know their names. Many use a handle or code name out of fear of government retaliation. Their concerns are justified: A number of people working as volunteers or observers told me that they had been trailed home by ICE agents, and some of their communications have already been infiltrated, screenshotted, and posted online, forcing them to use new text chains and code names. One urgent question among observers, as the videos of Pretti’s killing spread, was what his handle might have been.

[…]

Then there are the people who load up their car with food, toiletries, and school supplies from churches or schools to take to families in hiding. They also help families who cannot work meet their rent or mortgage payments. In addition to driving around with Olsen, I rode along with a Twin Cities mom of young kids named Amanda as she did deliveries (she asked me to use only her first name). Riding in her small car—her back row was taken up by three child seats and a smattering of stray toys—she told me that she’d gotten involved after more than 100 students at her kids’ elementary school simply stopped coming in. Parents got organized to provide the families with food, to shepherd their kids to school, and to arrange playdates for those stuck inside.

Amanda’s father and husband are immigrants, she said, and she speaks Spanish. “I can be a conduit between those who want to help and those who need help,” she told me. She calls each family before knocking on the door, so they don’t have to worry that they are being tricked by ICE. At one home, a woman asked us to go around back because a suspicious vehicle was idling out front. At another home, a little girl in pigtails beamed as Amanda handed her a Target bag full of school supplies.

The decency and solidarity on display in Minnesota is such a striking contrast to the Stephen Miller impressionists who find such concepts literally incomprehensible.