White supremacy may be an American tradition — but grassroots resistance is growing
~ Dana Williams ~
Although I no longer live there, I continue to identify as a Minnesotan. It’s a rather white state, but also greatly influenced by immigrants, who have always been part of my own life. Among other groups, Minnesota has many resettled Hmong and Somali refugees, displaced by US military invasions of their homelands. Like Portland and San Francisco, Minnesota’s largest city Minneapolis is known to have a progressive population, often more left-leaning than its liberal politicians.
When Mayor Jacob Frey admonished ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis”, Democrats and liberals cheered because of ICE’s association with Trump. But radical anti-racists know talk is cheap: ICE thrived under the Obama and Biden presidencies, too, and Frey (who resisted popular demands in 2020 to de-fund the city’s police department) hasn’t ordered Minneapolis police to arrest or eject ICE from the city limits. Instead, Minneapolis cops have attacked and arrested anti-ICE demonstrators, and protected ICE gangs.
In fact, this current xenophobia is only really new in style. Anti-immigrant ideology is as old as the settler-colonialist state. The rot that socially-constructed borders create is deep in the national psyche. This version isn’t any worse than past iterations—consider decades of Chinese “exclusion”, Mexican “repatriation”, and Japanese internment. But white supremacy is hypocritical. Thanks to the 1790 Naturalization Act, my ancestors from Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland were all legally defined as “white”, and thus welcomed with open arms.
Minnesota—named after the Dakota word for cloudy water—is itself a creation of theft masquerading as immigration. The federal facility where ICE is staging its operations from is adjacent to a settler fort that served as a concentration camp for prisoners following the 1862 US-Dakota War, that helped White Europeans flood in and expel indigenous people from the territory. It’s illogical to proclaim that some could be “illegally” residing on stolen land, but white supremacists aren’t concerned with redressing historical crimes. They believe to be Minnesotan is to be white.
Nothing makes this clearer than the arrest of Ogalala Sioux Tribe members by ICE—profiled simply for not looking white. The US Supreme Court recently ruled it’s now legal for ICE to use “ethnicity” as grounds for detaining suspects. Dubbed a “Kavanaugh stop” due to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion, the US has abandoned a half-century of presumed “colour-blindness”, thereby legalizing the already common practice of racial and linguistic profiling by law enforcement. Have an accent? Look Black or brown? Wearing non-Western clothing? ICE agents don’t need legal warrants for specific suspects, they can stop anybody they wish and create a reason later.
The legacy of repression targeting Minnesota’s Lakotan people continued into the 20th century, but so did resistance. Police brutality against indigenous people in Minneapolis—mostly survivors of the genocidal residential schools—was so extreme that it provoked the formation of the American Indian Movement in 1968. Anti-racist movements have thrived ever since, from the Baldies and Anti-Racist Action to the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s no coincidence that rapid response participant Renee Nicole Good was murdered on 7 January 2026 within a mile from where George Floyd was murdered 25 May 2020, which sparked a global uprising against police and white supremacy (likely the largest in world history).
The difference between now and the past is that a sizable minority of the US-born white population have become outspokenly pro-immigrant. By becoming accomplices with our immigrant neighbours, we can disrupt the pathetic American tradition of acquiescence to cruelty and injustice. So many white people are in the streets of Minneapolis right now because every one of them can tell the same story as me about how immigrants have enriched their lives, made them better people. Their rage at seeing the contemporary equivalent of antebellum slave patrols (a very American repressive organisation that targeted Black people) roaming around, and harassing and disappearing people in their community makes them want to fight.
Residents are joining rapid response networks, carrying whistles and blowing them whenever they see ICE driving around, and then standing their ground until ICE leaves. According to one long-term militant, the anti-ICE siege of the federal building has drained ICE resources, thus limiting the number of kidnappings ICE can make. As the disruption spreads, it could draw in more people and generalize the revolt against authority. For example, the local labor council has called for a general strike tomorrow (23 January), 2026, the first in Minneapolis since 1934.
Fascism only wins when we stop fighting it.
The original article stated erroneously that Minneapolis is Minnesota’s state capital, which is in fact St. Paul. Image from CrimethInc.com.
