After Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents shot at least one person in north Minneapolis on the night of January 14, a crowd gathered and faced them down, confronting them and tearing down the yellow tape they put up around the area. Police reinforced the federal mercenaries, joining them in shooting a tremendous amount of tear gas and flash-bang grenades at demonstrators as well as at passing cars and houses in the residential district. Nonetheless, the officers lost control of the area and retreated, ceding the streets to those who had defied them.

In the process, ICE agents abandoned several vehicles in the area. Demonstrators opened up the vehicles and found identity cards, paperwork, license plates, operational plans, tactical gear, and other items. Footage of demonstrators looking through these materials was broadcast live on the internet.

This follows the atrocious murder, one week earlier, of Renee Good, perpetrated by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in the full light of day and captured on multiple videos. You can read an account of how demonstrators responded here.

Over the past month and a half, the Trump regime has sent more and more troops to the Twin Cities because they know that what happens there has implications for the whole country—and because they are losing. If the battle of Minneapolis in winter 2026 turns out the way that the battle of Portland turned out in summer 2020, it will bode ill for Trump’s ability to retain control by brute force.

It is important to note the role that local Minneapolis police played in assaulting demonstrators tonight, despite their nominally answering to a Democratic city government that has paid lip service to opposing ICE. Police across the country have played an essential role in enabling ICE to terrorize communities. Without the continuous assistance and support of local police departments, federal agencies would already have been outmaneuvered by protest movements. When Democrat politicians claim that they need to “maintain order,” they are attempting to position themselves as junior partners in the consolidation of fascism. It may be in their interests to “maintain order” as mercenaries kidnap and murder people, but it is not in ours.

We offer here an account from the protests following the shooting in North Minneapolis, sent to us anonymously.

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I had two hours left at my work shift when my phone started blowing up. Several comrades didn’t know where I was and thought I might be out in the street.

“Where are you?”

“You OK????”

“Shots fired at 24th and Lyndale”

“They just shot another person”

Every rapid response group chat was talking about the same thing. All kinds of rumors were flying around. Did they shoot one person or two? Were the victims alive or dead? Somebody said ICE had shot a 12-year-old Venezuelan boy in the leg. Somebody else said the victim was hiding in his house for fear of arrest and desperately needed medical attention. I didn’t know what to believe.

It’s always like that when a new emergency is going down. In the course of the past 45 days of federal occupation, scrambling through a fog of war to find out what just happened has become a familiar sensation. Somebody sent me a livestream of a crowd running away as ICE agents shot tear gas grenades and flashbangs at them.

Time slowed to a crawl. I hurried to finish up the drudgery I was working on as fast as I could. When I felt like I could get away with it, I told my coworkers I had a family emergency and I had to leave early. I jumped in my car and ran every stop sign on the way to 24th and North Lyndale.

I ran into a crew of street medics two blocks north of the crowd. They told me about what they’d seen before I got there. ICE had snatched two kids suspected of throwing a firework at them—20 masked thugs charging up to grab the kids, only to release them half an hour later under intense pressure from the rest of the crowd. The medics warned me that they were going to get out before the cops started mass-arresting people. In their opinion, I was walking into a kettle. The air already stank of tear gas.

At 24th Street, I found a crowd of about a hundred people facing off against a skirmish line of Minneapolis Police Department pigs in riot gear. The feds had already left and handed over the situation to the local cops. Somebody was slowly beating a drum. To my right, kids stood up on an elevated front lawn, screaming “Fuck ICE!” and “Fuck 12!” down at MPD. Somebody was brandishing a tear gas canister that had been fired at them, showing it off to their friends. A TV news crew was there. They tried to talk to me. I pushed my way through the crowd to get away from the cameras. Beyond the skirmish line, a block south on Lyndale near 23rd, I heard the sound of shattering glass.

I doubled back and went around the block. I came out on the other side of the skirmish line. There was a crowd of young people on this side, too. They were smashing up two SUVs that I recognized immediately as ICE vehicles by their blacked-out windows and out-of-state plates. Guys were trading kicks at the glass. Somebody was proudly displaying a big Mexican flag. One young person jumped up on the hood and stomped her foot through the windshield. Somebody with a can of red spray-paint tagged “HANG KRISTI NOEM” on the side of the other car.

A few people pulled a locked gun safe out of the trunk of one of the cars. Somebody dumped a fingerprinting kit on the ground. Someone else was rifling through a folder of documents at a frantic pace, snapping pictures of each one with a cell phone. There was an ICE face mask in the driver-side door of the nearest SUV. Appropriately enough, there was an ice scraper on the floor of the vehicle.

Suddenly, I heard a loud bang behind me. The familiar acrid taste of tear gas filled my nostrils. I started running south with the rest of the crowd. When we got to the next intersection, however, I turned around and saw that the cops were pulling back, shooting projectiles at the crowd as they moved east on 24th. The crowd got its bearings and we turned around and ran back up to 24th. There were such huge clouds of tear gas to the east of us that I couldn’t see the cops anymore.

“This is one! This is ICE!” I heard somebody yelling excitedly. She was pointing at another silver SUV parked on 24th. I checked the plates against the database of ICE vehicles that activists keep, saw that she was correct, and instantly felt silly for doing clerical work in the middle of a riot. Someone started whacking one of the side windows with the ice scraper that had been in the previous vehicle, striking it as hard as possible. After a few swings, there was a satisfying crunch as the window gave in. People around me began kicking in these windows, too. Somebody got the driver’s side door open and threw a firecracker inside.

Some overzealous cameraman—I couldn’t tell if it was the same guy from before—muscled his way through the crowd to get a shot of the ICE vehicle receiving this treatment. “No video!” someone roared at him. “If you let him take pictures of this shit, somebody is going to jail!” A few people forcefully encouraged the cameraman to turn around and leave the area.

When the tear gas cleared, I saw that the cops were gone. It seemed too good to be true. I ran up a couple blocks to scout the perimeter. They were nowhere to be seen.

I went back to where the two smashed-up ICE vehicles were. A festive block party mood had set in. People were setting off fireworks. Somebody was trying to pry open the gun case. Someone was dancing on top of a vehicle again while someone else blasted “I Don’t Fuck With You” by Big Sean. Young folks passed around a bottle of Hennessy. A lane of traffic had opened up. Some passing motorists raised their fists out the window and shouted “FUCK ICE!”

“I’m so proud of my city,” I found myself murmuring out loud. After seven weeks of atrocities at the hands of these fascists, people were finally fighting back. I thought about the liberals who were at home wringing their hands about how we were supposedly giving the feds an excuse for a crackdown (what the fuck did they think was already happening?) and posting on Facebook about the “language of the unheard.” The newfound comrades I was partying with around the looted vehicles seemed perfectly eloquent to me.

The George Floyd uprising of 2020 was never very far away. Its specter has haunted Minneapolis throughout everything that has happened for the last month and a half. Tonight, January 14, it finally assumed corporeal form again. People will remember tonight as the opening salvo of the people’s counterattack against a fascist invasion.

When history is written the way it ought to be written, it will not be our ferocity, but rather, the moderation and long patience of the Twin Cities that will make people shake their heads in wonder.

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