Author’s note: I would love to speak with Pagans in the Twin Cities about their experiences during Operation Metro Surge. If you are interested in giving a quote to The Wild Hunt, please email me.
I spent the summer of 2014 in Minneapolis. I was taking a summer language course in Icelandic at the University of Minnesota, staying with my one-time editor at Patheos Pagan, Star Foster. Most of my time was absorbed in studying my paradigms and vocabulary lists, but between Star and my classmates, I got a few opportunities to explore the city. I remember visiting the American Swedish Institute, for instance, and buying tickets on a whim to a professional wrestling show, and touring a few of the local Witch shops. (The Twin Cities, home to the annual Paganicon conference, have one of America’s most vibrant Pagan communities.)
But most vividly I remember my morning commute to the university, a bus route that took me across the Mississippi right as the rising sun peeked over the city. I would look up from my homework and see the morning light on the water and think to myself, you know, I could see myself ending up here, someday.
In the midst of the crowd at the Minnesota General Strike on January 23, 2026, a sign that reads “ICE OUT!” [Flickr, Lorie Shaull, CC 2.0]
I have been remembering those happy days as I have been watching these unhappy ones. The Twin Cities are effectively under occupied rule, as a surge of federal agents, primarily from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has embarked on an open-ended siege of the region. Supposedly this was provoked by business fraud committed in part by members of the Twin Cities’ Somalian-American communities – fraud that had already been investigated and prosecuted under the Biden administration. The fraud was, of course, committed by only a handful of people, but the Trump administration framed this occupation, named “Operation Metro Surge,” as collective punishment for the whole community, the overwhelming majority of whom had nothing to do with any crimes. (In this, the operation is a of a piece with a long history of American collective punishment of Black, brown, and Indigenous communities.)
But it should be clear by now that “investigating fraud” was just a pretense, and now, no longer a necessary one.
Legal immigrants – people with valid asylum claims, people with green cards and work permits, people who have every right to live and work in peace in the United States – fear to leave their homes because masked men with guns are waiting to snatch them up. Five-year-olds are used as bait to lure out their family members and then flown to concentration camps in Texas. Ordinary people who have committed no crimes but looking out for their neighbors – ordinary people, poets and nurses, mothers and sons – have been shot dead by trigger-happy agents. And despite video after awful video showing the truth of the matter – car wheels turned away from officers’ bodies, legal firearms never leaving the holster – America’s leaders take to the airwaves to desecrate the names and memories of American citizens murdered by American police.
It can’t go on like this. And maybe it will not.
Drummers at the Minnesota General Strike on January 23, 2026 [Flickr, Lorie Shaull, CC 2.0]
In the midst of all this horror, there is something to be said for how the people of Minnesota have come together to support one another in ways that Americans have not seen for decades. Mutual aid networks, forged in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, have sprung up all throughout the Twin Cities. These aren’t the projects of (just) scrappy anarchists or dedicated political activists; many are small, local groups of neighbors looking out for neighbors, often tied to ordinary community institutions like schools or churches. It’s a kind of social solidarity that had been largely been written off in American life in the 21st century, after the sociologist Robert Putnam observed the decline of our community fabric in his 2000 study Bowling Alone. It seemed like things had only further eroded in the years since, as we apparently withdrew into our phones and away from our neighborhoods. But in the face of crisis, Minnesota seems to show something different.
The same can be said, on a bigger scale, for labor solidarity. Friday saw the first American general strike – a “Day of Truth and Freedom,” without school, work, or shopping – since 1947. Although every other month sees a wave of posts on social media calling for a nationwide general strike, without actual organizing capacity and institutional support, the idea has always seemed quixotic at best. But a coalition of labor unions and hundreds of businesses and organizations threw their support behind Friday’s economic blackout against ICE’s occupation, and 50,000 Minnesotans took to the streets in subzero temperatures to demand an end to the siege. What seems impossible becomes possible.
A sign at the Minnesota General Strike on January 23, 2026 [Flickr, Lorie Shaull, CC 2.0]
I am tempted to bring out the old saw about the best of times and the worst of times, but that would be wrong; these are among the worst of times no matter how brave, diligent, and kind the people of Minnesota show themselves to be. That hope will not bring Renee Good, Alex Pretti, or the dozens of people who have died in ICE custody over the past year back to life. It will not erase Liam Conejo Ramos’s memories of being kidnapped by masked men, or restore the months innocent people have lost because they are too afraid to leave their homes.
But if the efforts of the ordinary people can’t change the past, they can still point to a better future. It doesn’t have to be like this. It won’t be like this forever. We have to believe that, and build toward something better to follow.
If you are able, the author recommends offering donations through one of the organizations linked here through Stand With Minnesota.
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