Minnesota's Roots Have Always Survived Under Ice
Minnesotans know how to deal with ice. We drive on it. We walk on it. We drill a hole in the lake and fish through it. Sometimes we jump in.
ICE is no different.
I spend my professional life studying how organizations build responsive systems. Logic models, coordination mechanisms, feedback loops. I know what intentional design looks like.
But what Minneapolis built to resist ICE has no org chart, no strategic plan, no central command. Signal chats blanket the city, neighborhood by neighborhood, well past the 3.5 percent population threshold that movement researchers identify as the tipping point for sustained nonviolent resistance. More than 30,000 people have trained as legal observers. Coffee shops leave out baskets of whistles. Restaurant workers rotate rides for colleagues who cannot safely take the bus. Grocery deliveries get rerouted on the fly when drivers spot federal vehicles near the drop-off.
The movement is nonviolent and nimble. A massive protest in minus 20 degree weather, yes. But also scores of smaller, hyperlocal actions, because the community can see when it is being baited toward confrontation and chooses not to take it.
It is the most effective community responsiveness I have ever seen. And nobody designed it.
I have been talking with neighbors, organizers, people doing this work on the ground. The same thing keeps surfacing: this did not start in December. This did not start with Operation Metro Surge.
The layers were already here. Minneapolis has deep organizing roots across labor, Indigenous, immigrant, and faith communities. The climate matters, and I mean that literally. Minnesota winters require interdependence. You check on your neighbors when it is minus 20. You shovel your neighbor’s sidewalk while you are out shoveling yours. You have a shovel in your car in case you need to help dig a stranger’s car out of a snowdrift. That muscle was already built.
And then Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Floyd while a seventeen-year-old held up her phone and recorded it. His murder, and the murders of Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, Thurman Blevins, and Daunte Wright, broke something wide open in this city. The uprising that followed honed the muscle. White people finally got what people of color had been saying. Neighbors who had never been to a protest learned how to show up. Communities that had been siloed found each other. That willingness never went away. It just went dormant.
When ICE came to Minnesota, the people here built mutual aid funds, legal observer networks, and Signal chats rapidly because those roots were already there, underground. Waiting. When 50,000 people marched in minus 20 degrees with three weeks’ notice and no single organization at the helm, that was not something that got built from scratch. That was something that woke up.
No one wrote a grant for this. No one designed a logic model. And yet people are directly assisting their neighbors at a scale and speed that most funded programs never achieve.
The mutual aid funds flowing through Minneapolis right now are doing something the nonprofit and philanthropy world has debated for years. Unconditional cash transfers. No vetting. No intake forms. No overhead. One hundred percent of the money going directly to people who need it. The infrastructure is a neighbor with a Venmo and a Signal chat, and it turns out that is more efficient than anything we have ever designed on purpose.
The things that make horizontal organizing work are exactly the things you cannot put in a logic model. You cannot design relational trust. You cannot fund shared memory. You can only build conditions where those things grow, and then get out of the way.
What Minneapolis built is not a protest movement that happens to include mutual aid. The protest and the care co-arise. In Buddhist philosophy and in general systems theory, this is called mutual causality: things do not cause each other in a straight line. They activate together, each making the other possible. That is what this looks like on the ground. The person delivering groceries and the person marching in minus 20 degrees are not doing two different things. They are doing one thing.
That distinction matters. Because when the marches end, the care stays. The Signal chats stay. The grocery deliveries stay. The relationships between neighbors who did not know each other three months ago stay.
Minnesota’s roots have always survived under ice.
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