"ICE is chickenshit": A view from Minneapolis's front lines
As the feds flood the city, parents fight back
Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.
One of my big goals for this year is to use this newsletter to amplify the activists, local leaders, and everyday heroes who are fighting back against tyranny and trying to solve the intractable problems we face in this country. Tonight, that takes us back to Minneapolis, the current epicenter of right-wing thuggery and grassroots resistance.
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As recently as last summer, Christian Glanville didn’t consider himself much of an activist. Then he decided that his son’s kindergarten class was too crowded, one thing led to another, and six months later, Glanville finds himself on the front lines of Minneapolis’s escalating fight against ICE, which exploded this week with the murder of a fellow parent who’d just dropped her own six-year-old son off at school.
Glanville began organizing this fall with Minneapolis Families for Public Schools, an offshoot of the nonprofit progressive group TakeAction Minnesota. The parents’ group played a central role in advocating for teachers during tense contract negotiations with the city’s school system, with class size one of the main points of contention. The pressure worked: in mid-November, the two sides announced a strong new contract without a minute spent on the picket line.
But there would be little time to celebrate or rest, because on December 1st, the Trump administration launched Operation Metro Surge, swarming the Twin Cities with immigration agents. The attention only intensified when a misleading video about Somali childcare centers made by a painfully stupid right-wing provocateur named Nick Shirley went mega-viral, giving the administration an excuse — as if it needed one — to flood more feds into the city.
On Monday, the acting ICE director called the plan to send up to 2000 agents into the city “largest immigration effort ever.” Two days later, one of those agents murdered Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, as she attempted to slowly drive away from what barely qualified as an argument until the bullets were fired. Hours later, border patrol agents attacked students and cuffed staff at a local high school, leading to the city of Minneapolis shutting down its public schools for the rest of the week.
I spoke with Glanville on Friday afternoon after a MFPS and teachers union rally calling for ICE to leave Minneapolis.
Give me a ground-level view of what’s happening in Minneapolis right now, from your perspective as someone in the thick of this conflict.
The organization of folks is incredible. There are thousands of people that are taking time away from their lives to make sure that people are safe. There’s observation and reporting of what’s happening, people making sure their neighbors’ needs are met — whether that’s getting kids to school, getting groceries for folks, just basic stuff that nobody should have to worry about doing.
That’s super-duper encouraging. And it’s also bullshit.
Was there a blueprint at all for this? It’s not something people are used to dealing with.
Thankfully, folks smarter than me were really paying attention to what was going on in Chicago and learned a lot from that. And that’s allowed for a pretty rapid buildout of support networks.
What lessons were learned?
That ICE is chickenshit… they’re not this immovable force. They’re scared of whistles. You get enough people blowing their whistles, honking their horns, and being loud and annoying, they get spooked and they run away a lot. And I don’t think that it’s really jeopardizing the tactic working by talking about it because, to their core, they’re just chickenshit people.
It was helpful to kind of have a roadmap for how care networks can communicate with each other and especially around reporting and taking care of folks after the fact. Connecting people to legal resources and letting people know when something has happened.
You’ve been very involved with Sanctuary School movement, trying to make schools safe-havens for kids and families. What does that look like?
You’ve got to separate the individual actions from the system actions. But the individuals that we’ve been working with have just been incredibly gracious and gone out of their way to help families that they know need help. So individually, the staff, the teachers are incredible.
It was fortuitous that all this organizing had just happened around the teachers’ contract, so there’s a good presence in every school, and it was able to transition pretty quickly into setting up the sanctuary school networks. There’s plenty of work and the nice thing about it is there aren’t roles. It’s good people that are doing the tasks that need to be done.
The cancellation of school was the right thing to do, and they are working on a remote option for folks going forward, which also would be the right thing to do [Note: Minneapolis announced the remote learning option this evening]. It’s not the most conducive setting, which we know because we all tried remote learning before and know the severe limitations of that. But safety is first and foremost, and this is just going to keep going on until ICE is out of the city. So that’s where the leadership needs to be focused, getting them out.
Does it feel like ICE is on every street corner? Is there tension everywhere? Or do these agents and these conflicts pop up randomly?
There’s good work being done to track where things are happening. But it does feel random, and it’s so fast. I live in a quiet neighborhood in Minneapolis — most of the neighborhoods are quiet, but mine is particularly quiet. And as I was headed home yesterday, four blocks from my house, two blocks from my kid’s school, three ICE vehicles rammed into a car that was driving away, snatched the driver out of the car, and were gone within a minute of showing up.
I happened to be driving by and there happened to be three people walking their dogs. Everyone got their phones out and recorded. I was able to ping people that knew what to do and we were able to get it to the networks that would know what more to do. But that happened two blocks from my kid’s school, four blocks from my house, and it’s terrifying.
It’s not like every street corner you see someone holding an AK-47, but it’s hard to feel confident going anywhere and trust that you’re not going to encounter incredible violence. And I have the ability to leave my house. For the immigrant families, even those who are not undocumented, they’re grabbing everyone, and there are many, many, many folks that will not leave their house, and that’s horrifying.
When you talk about alerting the networks of people who know what to do, what does that look like?
There are national networks of legal resources and family support that should be notified when this happens. And then there’s small logistic things like, ICE left the smashed car there. That’s got to be towed, and we’d rather know where it’s going instead of someone losing their means of transportation.
Was there any news coverage of this? Anything I can link to?
Nope, there is not. It’s crazy.
Do you think this galvanized leadership? Mayor Jacob Frey said ICE should “get the fuck out” of Minneapolis after the murder.
I think that it would be good for someone with more time on their hands to do a quick media study to see when are the times in his tenure that Jacob Frey has said that on TV. Because I bet it’s after George Floyd, it’s after the Annunciation shooting, and it’s now. He’s really good at talking tough when there’s a national audience. Saying “fuck” on TV speaks to a certain kind of voter, but it’s not necessarily the people that are affected or doing the work here.
I saw a photo of the stuffed animals in Renee Good’s car glovebox, and as a parent of a three-year-old, I think that’s when it really hit home: her children, including her six-year-old son, will never see their mother again. That’s not even a question, it’s just shocking that the government is defending this. That adds to the tension, too, the gleeful lack of accountability.
I would say to you parents like you in New York or any major city, and just really anywhere: you better start getting to know your neighbors and the other parents in your schools and start setting up some communication threads so that when the time comes, you’re ready to jump into action.
Because it is going to come — it’s not an “if,” it’s a “when.” We were fortunate to have some primers in doing that organizing work. For someone like me, I’m not an activist, I’m just a dude. I just didn’t want my kid to have 33 kids in his kindergarten class and one thing leads to another and all of a sudden, I’ve got a way to help.
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This interview is so terrifically helpful!
More, more…
Thank you.
It's going to take all sane Americans demanding change, speak out write letters protest if your able. Up until this year I hadn't written a letter to my elected officials since my application to the naval academy. Now it feels like I write several a day! Pressure works say her name Renee Good!