Public officials and even leading nonprofits have said repeatedly that Trump’s actions are illegitimate because so many people targeted by ICE “are not the criminals” that Trump was supposed to be going after. This is unacceptable framing and positioning. What does this tell us? That it’s OK to kidnap, torture, disappear, and kill people named by the state as “criminals”? The implications of that position are extremely dangerous. Yet organizations on “our side” are using this rhetoric. This needs to stop. Let’s learn from Andrea Ritchie’s recent piece in the Nation:
“Criminalization… operates to neutralize resistance—whether used by the regime to paint targets as deserving of violence, or by “our side” when we make distinctions between “regular arrests” and ICE enforcement actions.
When we decry detention and deportation of migrants “with no criminal convictions,” leaving unchallenged incarceration, torture, and extraordinary rendition of “criminals” who are presumed to be deserving of their fate, or when we or insist that resistance be “nonviolent” and non-disruptive, even as federal officials declare that any monitoring or opposition to ICE activity (or their political agenda for that matter) constitutes “violence,” we are playing the other side’s game.
In order to fight our way out, we are going to have to fight for everybody, which requires us to divest ourselves from the notion that some people are not worth fighting for.”
Photo credit: Michael Skolnik (Minneapolis, January 2026)
Not everyone is confused about humanity right now. Indeed, the good people of Minnesota are showing through their actions that they are passionately committed to humanity, and are thereby fashioning the blueprint for not only defeating the siege on their city, but for defeating the politics of death and dehumanization that have infected our society and rhetoric. They are also seeing federal Bureau of Prisons officers enforcing ICE actions (see photo above), so the through lines are perhaps more clear.
Adam Serwer has captured the Minnesota way in his brilliant and moving account in the Atlantic:
The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.
No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors.
A recent report from a donor colleague on the ground shows that the situation remains as it was when Serwer reported his article, both the danger and the commitment to protect others:
Nothing has changed here despite the PR about a “drawdown” that the national media has fallen for. Over 2,300 agents are still here. Immigrants are being picked off in the suburbs. Here in the city abductions of legal observers have picked up. Usually ICE traps their cars, breaks the car windows and then drags them out to detention at Whipple -- this is happening multiple times a day. Despite all of this, new people are joining ICE watch and mutual aid networks every day.