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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/the-neighbors-defending-minnesota-from-ice/685769/?gift=Je3D9AQS-C17lUTOnl2W8L893jn-xkg4gA0ahaD_Ltw&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

[quote]He had come to Iglesia Cristiana La Viña Burnsville, about 15 miles south of the Twin Cities, to pick up food for families who are too afraid to go out—some have barely left home since federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota two months ago. The church was filled with pallets of frozen meat and vegetables, diapers, fruit, and toilet paper. Outside, a man wearing a leather biker vest bearing the insignia of the Latin American Motorcycle Association, his blond beard flecked with ice crystals, directed a line of cars through the snow.
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Perhaps the Trump-administration officials had hoped that a few rabble-rousers would get violent, justifying the kind of crackdown he seems to fantasize about. Maybe they had assumed that they would find only a caricature of “the resistance”—people who seethed about Trump online but would be unwilling to do anything to defend themselves against him.

Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. They aren’t looking for attention or likes on social media. Unless they are killed by federal agents, as Pretti and Renee Good were, other activists do not even necessarily know their names. 
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The largest is the protesters, who show up at events such as Friday’s march in downtown Minneapolis, and at the airport, where deportation flights take off. Many protesters have faced tear gas and pepper spray, and below-zero temperatures—during the Twin Cities march on Friday, I couldn’t take notes; the ink in my pens had frozen.

Then there are the people who load up their car with food, toiletries, and school supplies from churches or schools to take to families in hiding. They also help families who cannot work meet their rent or mortgage payments. In addition to driving around with Olsen, I rode along with a Twin Cities mom of young kids named Amanda as she did deliveries (she asked me to use only her first name). Riding in her small car—her back row was taken up by three child seats and a smattering of stray toys—she told me that she’d gotten involved after more than 100 students at her kids’ elementary school simply stopped coming in. Parents got organized to provide the families with food, to shepherd their kids to school, and to arrange playdates for those stuck inside.
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If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’” Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.
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Most commuters work in pairs—a co-pilot listens in on a dispatcher who provides the locations of ICE encounters and can run plates through a database of cars that federal agents have used in the past. Green Bean explained what happens when they identify an ICE vehicle. (Both ICE and Border Patrol are in Minneapolis, but everyone just calls them ICE.) The commuters will follow the agents, honking loudly, until they leave the neighborhood or stop and get out.

The commuters—as my colleague Robert Worth reported—do not have a centralized leadership but have been trained by local activist groups that have experience from past protests against police killings, and recent immigration-enforcement sweeps in L.A. and Chicago. The observers are taught to conscientiously follow the law, including traffic rules, and to try to avoid physical confrontation with federal agents.
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