Defend the Minnesota 15:

Fifteen people in Minnesota are facing federal charges because they refused to stand by while their neighbors were kidnapped. They are being targeted for being part of a mass movement that put hundreds of thousands in the streets, representing virtually all communities in the Twin Cities.

Operation Metro Surge sent roughly 3,000 additional federal officers into the Twin Cities, where about eighty immigration officers normally work. And more than a thousand Border Patrol personnel were sent on top of that by February. According to Human Rights Watch’s 180-page report, federal officers fired chemical irritants and flash-bang grenades at close range without warning, smashed car windows of people who hadn't been charged with anything, threw people who weren't resisting to the pavement, pulled guns on dozens more without justification, and shot at least three residents of the city, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Renee Good was 37 and a US citizen. She had stopped her car in the street to warn her neighbors that ICE was in the area. ICE officer Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield as she drove away from him.

Alex Pretti was 37, a US citizen, and an ICU nurse at the VA. He was filming when agents shoved two observers and he put himself between them and an agent. They sprayed his face at arm's length, struck his head repeatedly with a metal canister, and shot him ten times.

Nearly two out of every three immigrants arrested during the operation had no criminal record at all. Minnesota school districts lost at least 1,700 students.

Yet, Minnesotans refused to stand down. Close to 30,000 of them trained as constitutional observers. They watched their own blocks and blew whistles when unmarked cars appeared. They drove toward raids so nobody would be taken in private. They organized grocery delivery, rides to work and school and medical appointments, and rent money for families who couldn't leave home. Teachers and parents ran hundreds of weekly watch shifts outside schools. On January 23, tens of thousands walked off the job in subzero cold, an estimated fifty thousand marched downtown, and hundreds of businesses closed in what organizers and labor historians called the first general strike in this country in eighty years. Polling afterward found that roughly one in four Minnesota voters either took part or had a family member who did.

No federal agent has been charged for the killing of Good and Pretti, or for the many other abuses of power.

In June, the same US Attorney's office indicted fifteen neighbors instead, all of them union members, and accused them of agreeing, through a coalition called Direct Action Minnesota, to stop federal officers by force, intimidation or threat. The indictment's own description of that coalition is "a decentralized coalition of working-class people engaged in various forms of community defense against the current Federal Occupation." The agreement the government wants to put on trial is the coalition. Ninety-four pages in, it names no injured officer. What fills the document is renting a U-Haul, running a planning meeting, posting an article, and texting about where agents had been seen. Erik Davis, who chairs the religious studies department at Macalester College, told the judge at his first appearance that he was being "indicted for holding meetings."

Before the charges, the government started spying. Homeland Security had undercover officers wearing wires inside churches, libraries, schools and union halls. At Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville, an agent photographed license plates in the lot and built files with people's names, jobs, home addresses, and family details. HSI's own report says that investigation was opened "in accordance with" National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, the directive that lists anti-fascism and anti-capitalism as indicators of political violence. Agents ran Clearview AI facial recognition on one defendant and pulled up a photograph from a civil liberties petition drop in 2018. A slide titled "The Conspiracy," shown to the grand jury before it indicted anyone, named 18 organizations, from a Minneapolis bicycle repair shop to the AFL-CIO. All they are accused of is standing in solidarity with their neighbors and occasionally writing about it.

We are already fighting against similar repression cases. We are defending Tom Alter, a tenured labor historian summarily fired by Texas State University for a talk he gave at an online socialist conference on his own time. Alter belongs to the Texas State Employees Union, part of CWA, and CWA's financial records are among those Homeland Security went after in Minnesota. We are fighting Flock and ALPR contracts town by town because warrantless surveillance always lands first on immigrants, on Black and brown communities, on women and queer people, and on anybody who shows up to protest. Minnesota is what that surveillance produces when nobody stops it.

The Minnesota 15 have called a National Day of Action for October 3, and Connecticut is answering it.

CTCLDC is hosting a fundraising dinner at the New Haven Federation of Teachers Hall at 6pm and YOU ARE VERY MUCH INVITED!