At 9 AM this morning, as the general strike settled across the Twin Cities, a group of some hundred community defenders took up positions around the Whipple building, the lair and headquarters of the Federal occupation of our metro. This band of defenders equipped themselves with shields and reinforced banners, marched to the Snelling light rail stop, and physically blocked the road for two and a half hours. Holding their position in temperatures reaching twenty degrees below zero with a punishing windchill, they stopped ICE and other federal vehicles from being able to drive out of Whipple in their direction for the rest of the morning.
The crowd of defenders was shortly thereafter assisted, as two trucks hauling trailers drove up to the other entries to the Whipple building. The passengers of one of these trucks successfully unhitched their trailer and tipped it across the road, blocking another point of egress from the building. Reports indicate that the second truck was interfered with by state forces present and left the area, dropping its trailer as it withdrew.
Although the blockade of the Whipple building was incomplete, the building was effectively cut off for around half an hour, and traffic in and out of it substantially disrupted for over two hours. The community defenders withdrew shortly before noon in the face of chemical irritants by the Hennepin County Sheriffs, aware that other points of egress to Whipple were at that point open.
This action was carried out concurrently with a mass, nonviolent march at the MSP airport to shut it down. Early reports indicate that 89 clergy were arrested at the airport.
These actions by community defenders threw sand in the gears of the occupying federal forces today, as they scrambled to respond to the general strike in the metro, which is being widely observed across all neighborhoods with businesses shut down and workers staying away from work, gathering for the mass march this afternoon in downtown Minneapolis. Through both the active blockading by community defenders and mass march participants, and the withdrawal of labor by the working class of the Twin Cities, our community has brought business as usual to a halt, focusing all attention on the struggle against the ICE occupation.
In the center of the protest were two reinforced banners- one demanding ICE OUT, and the other with a Palestinian flag. The Cities are host to a mass, assertive Palestine solidarity movement, with such reinforced banners being made and used at protests throughout the course of the recent genocide in Gaza at the hands of the IDF. Its appearance in the blockade at Whipple reflects an international solidarity between those fighting the occupation in Palestine, and those fighting the occupation here in the belly of the beast. It is a reminder that fascism is imperialism come back home- and that the same tactics of abduction and disappearance, torturous mistreatment in captivity, warrantless raids by masked soldiers, and murderous violence against the resistance which Palestinians have contended with for decades is once again directed here at home. For the apparatus of violence used by empires, like the American one groaning towards its decline and thrashing about in all directions to re-cement its authority, there is no real distinction between foreign and domestic. Invasions, bombings of boats, and kidnappings overseas are framed as policing actions, while domestic policing is framed as a “war on” drugs, on terror, and increasingly on immigrants and dissidents. The same personnel, equipment, and trainings is recycled back and forth between the military, and the militarized police. Just as this empire’s brutality is international, so is our resistance to it, in solidarity with all who face occupation.
The roots of fascism are in the practices of colonialism. Fascism in America does not need to be imported from the far right traditions of Europe. The European fascists, particularly the Nazis in Germany, looked to American colonization of indigenous people and anti-Black racist laws as an inspiration for their own anti-Jewish, anti-Romani, and other racist laws, and their dreams of “Lebensraum”. What we see rising today under Trump is not fascism planted here by somes sinister outside influence, but a return of American white supremacy to its naked, honest form.
In the Twin Cities, however, we draw on our own traditions of resistance. This is Bdote, the place where two waters come together, and where the so-called Fort Snelling now used as an ICE detention camp was one the prisoner-of-war camp for Dakota warriors captured by in their resistance war of 1862. This is the city of the 1934 Teamsters Strike, in which workers across industries banded together to support truckers in breaking the back of the anti-union Citizens Alliance and turning our city from one the toughest union-busting metros in the country, to a solid union town. This is the town of the 1967 Plymouth Avenue Rebellion, in which Black workers over North rose up against structural racism and police terror, and the town of the 2020 George Floyd Uprising, and sustained resistance after the police murders of Jamar Clark, Philando Castille, Winston Smith, Fong Lee, and so many others- most recently, Renee Good shot in cold blood by ICE and Geraldo Lunas Campos, found hanging in his cell after his kidnapping. We are a city of immigrants and Native folk, of descendants of refugees and settlers and enslaved people, and carry with us the memories of Somali struggles against colonialism, of German 48-ers, of Irish rebels and Polish revolutionaries, of Scandinavian syndicalists and cooperativists, of Anishinaabe and Oceti Sakowin resistance fighters, of Hmong people who resisted state tyrannies in the highlands, and so many other threads that weave the fabric of our town- a fabric warm and embracing to friends, but tough and unyielding to those who would try to tear it apart.
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