Part One: The Minnesota 15 and the Repression of Anti-fascism

Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that when there's people or large institutions trying to do bad things, like ICE existing, there are people who do amazing things in resistance to that, often very effectively.

And today, my guest is someone who is a defendant about... trying to do anti-ice stuff. Isaac. Isaac Sand. Hi, how are you?

I'm good, Margaret. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. Isaac, you are an anarchist and a healthcare worker, and you are a Minneapolis resident.

I regret to tell you I live in St. Paul. Sorry. I said Minneapolis.

Oh, I meant Minnesota.

Twin cities.

I meant Minnesota, but I said Minneapolis. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to have cut St. Paul out of the story. I apologize.

I'm very close to Minneapolis. I'm like right over the river.

Fair enough. No, I actually, it's funny because in my earlier coverage on this topic, thanks to knowing and caring about people who are in St. Paul, I tried, although I often failed, I tried to remember to point out that this is like Twin Cities resistance, not just Minneapolis resistance. But you are part of the Minneapolis 15.

We've been calling ourselves the Minnesota 15 for the same reason.

Did I just do it again in You just did it again.

The problem is that they're the same word in my head. They both start with the same letters and are approximately the same length. The Minnesota 15. But I wanted to call you the damn 15.

I know. It would have been a better, catchier phrase, right?

Yeah. But for some weird reason, that didn't work out. So you are facing charges accused of doing organizing, I guess. And I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about that case.

So I'm looking at Two felony charges. I've been charged with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer or does a lot of heavy lifting in the name of that charge. And also with interstate stalking, which is what ICE has decided to call the practice of using your constitutional right to observe and record law enforcement. I have 14 co-defendants. Twelve of us were rounded up in house raids on June 16th. And four of us are looking at additional charges. All of us have been charged with the conspiracy count. And all of us are looking at a maximum of between six years or 26 years, depending on how heavy the charges.

Are, how many charges we have.

What are you facing?

Oh, 11 years.

Okay.

Yeah.

And this is obviously, we're in a political context where there's this directive from the White House to go after so-called Antifa or- you know, anti-fascist. And I think that, you know, the 15 of us are being targeted not because we did anything particularly outrageous. We're not even accused of doing anything especially outrageous, but because we fit a profile of being really outspoken anti-fascist and anarchist.

Well, it's interesting because they're accusing you all of doing essentially the same stuff that thousands and thousands of people in Minnesota, I got it right this time, like thousands and thousands of people did what you have been accused of doing. I don't even know whether you did it, but thousands of people have been accused of doing this.

And yeah, they've picked 15 of you, as you said, because they seemed like, all right, well, we probably can't get away with arresting this entire city, although it sure seems like they wanted to try.

That's right.

And instead, they picked you all.

Well, I remember what I was going to say, that you know, we're in a political context where people in Prairieland, eight defendants, are serving between 30 and 100 years. And now an additional person, Dario Sanchez, has been charged in the same case.

And this is a Texas case that is another anti-ICE protest case for people who are, yeah, anyway, yeah.

That's exactly right.

And the regime was able to push through in a favorable court these outrageous sentences where people, you know, they threw the book at them and people were awarded the maximum sentence. So I think we should, you know, hold them in our hearts and be aware of their case. And I'm very aware that, you know, even if they throw the book at me, it's a much lighter book and I'm only looking at, you know, 11 years tops, which still sounds like no fun, you know?

Yeah, that's a lot of years.

Okay.

So lay the scene for people with short attention spans who don't remember January and the most important political uprising that's happened in a very long time in this country.

I think this story starts long before January, maybe years before by certain tellings of it. But I think probably the latest we could start would be June 3rd of 2025, when the first major ICE raid happened under the new administration. There was a taco shop called Taqueria Los Cuatros Milpas on the corner of Lake and Bloomington downtown. And a bunch of like swatted out desert storm looking motherfuckers raided it.

Some of them were in ICE or HSI vests. Others were in ATF or FBI or DEA vests. But there was a major spontaneous protest that broke out when they tried to abduct workers from this taco shop. And Homeland Security would later make a bunch of contradictory statements about why they were there. First, they said it was a sex trafficking bust. Then they said it was a meth bust.

Anything but what it really was, which was immigration enforcement. But there were some protesters who were on scene that day, such as Isabella Lopez, who were charged with felonies. for allegedly impeding or obstructing. Somebody else got hit by a car that day as they were protesting in the intersection.

But that was the first inkling that we got that ICE was going to be interested in the Twin Cities. And I think the very next day on June 4th, the surge began in Los Angeles.

And L.A.

Experienced like much the same kind of like shock and awe brutality that we did. The next sign we got they were coming here was on November 18th, long after they had been to Chicago and New Orleans and other places. They raided a Brotex paper factory at shift change and abducted a number of workers as they were getting off work.

There was at the time there was an immigrant rights nonprofit called Monarcha. that operated the centralized hotline where people would call this 800 number and report ICE sightings. And then if they verified it, they would send out a mass text to all of their subscribers to go respond to it. And I remember Menarca and other rapid response people were very proud of the fact that it only took 13 minutes to get boots on the ground to respond to the Brotex raid. And at the time, we mistakenly thought that that was a really good response time.

But Two weeks later, Metro Surge would start and we would learn better because we saw an uptick of ICE activity every day from then until December 4th when Homeland Security first formally announced Metro Surge and said that several hundred agents, I think it was like 400 agents to begin with, were going to come to Twin Cities. And Vrotex was the last large-scale workplace raid on that scale that we would ever see in Minnesota because after that, our streets were just saturated with with these agents and they were, you know, they switched to like little snatch and grab operations that were over in two to three minutes.

And it became commonplace to see them like pull up to somebody on the bus stop, scan their face with like facial recognition software, zip tie them and take them away. And if you weren't able to like get there within two to three minutes, you had no hope of responding or even observing really. The first two weeks, I remember I mean, it was just like chaos. You were hearing about these things happening all the time. And on the few occasions when the community could stop abductions by sheer numbers, they did. Such as I remember a time on December 9th when two roofing workers were stuck on a roof in the Minneapolis suburbs out in Chanhassen in like sub-zero temperatures.

It was like minus 13 degrees that day. And- There were these two workers were like shivering up on the roof as ICE agents were waiting for them down here. One guy gave himself up and climbed down and was abducted and I think deported.

ICE then left and the.

Other guy got away but had to go to the hospital with frostbite. And then the second occasion that I remember somebody getting away was on December 15th at Carmel Mall, which is a major Somali shopping center at the corner of 29th and Pillsbury. And two agents, one of whom has been seen in New York recently, that was agent Brendan Cooney, was also present at the recent ice shooting in New York. But he pepper sprayed the crowd at his partner, like put his knee into a pregnant woman's back and then dragged her face down across the snow, across 10 feet of snow. And the crowd's response was such that they were forced to leave and the woman got away. But I understand she lost the pregnancy.

Fuck. Yeah.

Yeah, it was really bad, dude. There was an.

Electric effect of that day and the rapid response infrastructure that was in its infancy then. I think it was probably a movement of hundreds of people, it's fair to say, ballooned overnight on December 15th and became a movement of thousands of people. The South Side Rapid Response Chat, which was one of the main signal loops that people were using to observe, quadrupled in size that night. And the next day, we saw their tactics become a lot more violent immediately. I mean, it started becoming commonplace for them to break observers' windows.

Yeah.

There was one report of an ice agent throwing a tear gas canister out of a moving car on the I-94 highway. I knew one guy who got arrested, and he was the first guy to be charged with stalking, He was arrested at the Whipple building, which served as ISIS regional headquarters, still does for the whole upper Midwest.

It just became really normal for them to use pepper spray or tear gas in little confrontations with three or four people in situations where it would be absurd for the regular cops to tear gas you you know they just started doing it all the time.

And also the difference between pepper spray when it's like above freezing and the pepper spray when it's minus 13 is like kind of it seems pretty major difference in terms of like can't.

Wash it out of your face totally i mean i had a medic try to flush my eyes in sub-zero temperatures it sucked it was probably pretty dangerous but I also had a coworker who was a West African woman. She was like a Liberian grandmother of three who was abducted while she was pumping gas at the gas station down the street from my job. And that's one thing that really motivated me to get involved. I mean, I already opposed this paramilitary invasion of my city, but I really started dedicating a lot of my time to doing this kind of observing work after that. I mean, I think big picture, like, what Metro Surge was, was one episode in a national campaign of ethnic cleansing that this regime is carrying out to try to change the makeup

of our society. And I think that's an attack on everybody. I mean, especially like the poorest 5% or 15% of our population that it's targeting, but really everybody. Because when you have like one segment of society that's like hiding and living in fear and unable to hold down a steady job because of fear of getting deported that, you know, that has a depressing effect on the entire working class too.

Yeah.

So I think I talked enough about December.

If I can tell you a little bit about what happened in January when things got even worse.

Well, what if instead, before you tell me about January, some people tell you, or actually not you, you don't have to hear them, tell our listeners about products and services that they can make their own minds up about.

Oh, that sounds great. Let's go bluechewandbetterhelp.com.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

And we're back. Please continue.

So I remember for the first few days of January, there was a lull in ice activity in the cities and we were seeing less and less of it. And it had felt like we were suffocating up to that point, but it finally... felt like we could breathe again, I guess.

This is as rapid response stuff is kicking into gear.

Totally.

And then on January 6th, the other shoe dropped and they announced the surge where they sent 3,000 more agents to our streets. It was like 2,000 ICE ERO officers and 1,000 CBP, Border Patrol officers.

What's ERO?

Enforcement and Removal Operations.

There's like two wings to ICE, which is ERO is the ones that are like kicking down doors and arresting migrants and HSI is Homeland Security Investigations, which is like the intelligence wing of ICE and the people that arrested me and my friends.

Okay.

You know, there were 3,000 of them. And then it was just a whole different game after that. Whereas in December, you kind of needed a car if you wanted to find where these, you know, these kidnappings were happening. Then January happened and you didn't need a car anymore. You could just like walk around Powderhorn or Central or one of these neighborhoods in South Minneapolis. And, like, you would see them several times. You could, like, be walking to the CVS. You'd see multiple groups of ice agents staging on the corner. You might see an abduction. I mean, and it really began to feel like we were under a paramilitary occupation.

Yeah, for some weird reason.

I mean, I remember, like, saying to somebody that day on the 6th, like, they're going to kill somebody. Like, somebody is going to end up dying. It's just a matter of time.

It's crazy.

It hasn't happened yet. And, you know, unfortunately, I was... speaking prophecy, I guess, because the next day they murdered Renee Good for trying to leave in her car. I got to the scene of her murder, maybe 35 or 40 minutes after she'd been killed. Greg Bovino was already there, who was the, spoiler alert, the disgraced former commander at large of Customs and Border Patrol, who was kind of the face of the ICE invasion. He was already there.

He was the only fed in the crowd that wasn't wearing a mask. He was posing for the camera's I thought that was very weird. It was as if he had been waiting nearby for something to happen or something, which I think was an ongoing theme we would see with him. He liked to be in the middle of where shit was going down. But there was a BORTAC agent, which is who I think Bellingcat Media has identified the two guys that shot like 90% of the less lethals at us that day as Edgar Vasquez and Michael Sviham.

BORTAC is like Border Patrol SWAT team. And this guy put his 40 millimeter launcher directly to my cheek and pulled the trigger.

Fuck.

Yeah, I had a little fracture in my face. I remember going blind in one eye. I was talking to a street medic as she was flushing out my eye. And I told her, like, watch my eye socket. I think my eye's missing. And she was like, no, you idiot. You're going to be fine.

A 40 millimeter launcher is literally a grenade launcher. It is not a fundamentally different object than a grenade launcher. The riot munition launcher is... A hole the size of your fist.

Yeah. So this Bortech guy, Edgar Vasquez, shot me and a bunch of other people in the face with pepper balls, which is like a little plastic pellet holding pepper spray.

Which is a very different thing below freezing than it is above freezing.

I mean, the facial recognition scanner at my job stopped recognizing my face for like three weeks after that.

Fuck.

Because I had this big ass welt on me. But I wasn't like the only person who experienced that that day. I mean, that was like when they When they killed Rene Good, it's sort of like, I mean, the best way I can describe it is like a police riot. They started just running rampage after that, as if like that was their signal to.

Really go ham.

And like two hours after that, they raided Roosevelt High School, trying to abduct one of the workers there. And they got into a brawl with a bunch of high school students. And I mean, it was just crazy. I now think of the period from January 7th to January 14th as hell week, because it you know, at the time I didn't know that was the worst it was ever going to get. I thought that like, it just felt like we were in this eternal present where like this was life now. And they were taking dozens of people a day.

There's this guy, Nick Benson, who, who tracks the deportation flight numbers, that signature aviation flies out of MSP airport. And like the worst day during that week, they deported 248 people on these flights on January 11th. I mean, I think of that as Kristallnacht because there was– January 11th is the first overt act listed in the indictment when a lot of activists were allegedly at a big mass meeting about like, fuck, they just killed this woman.

What are we going to do about it?

Right, which would be very reasonable if true.

And that day, Greg Bovino and Bortek took the opportunity to like rampage through St.

Paul.

And my union sibling, T Brown, got her door kicked in near Thomas and Victoria in St.

Paul.

And they took her husband, although I think he was a naturalized citizen. They went to the Menards, the AutoZone, the Target and Speedway at University in Chatsworth, where I go to buy cigarettes. And they were abducting people the whole way down at the Speedway. They smashed the window of a Honduran man named Orbin Enrique Serrano and choked him unconscious and dragged him out of the open window of his own car. There was a rumor that they had killed somebody else because they carried his body away limp and people couldn't tell if he was alive or dead. Right.

There was like an evangelical pastor who was filming that day and a Bortech guy just walked up to him and sucker punched him and didn't even arrest him. There was like the only way I can describe it is there was like a theatrical or a pornographic quality to the violence here where like they were performing for the cameras and they were trying to just be as outlandishly violent as they could.

When it seems it seemed like they were trying to scare you and then you all just didn't scare. Like after they kill someone, them then trying to like I assume that they then went riot because they were trying to exert control and be like, these are our fucking streets. And it seems like it's the level of fear that they tried to put into people that I'm kind of used to see working. But it didn't work. And I wonder if it's because the stakes are just so high for everybody where they're like, no, I'm sorry, you're just fucking taking children. We can't let this go on, you know?

I mean, I think you're right.

I think people in Twin Cities don't scare easy and that this is a town with a history. This is two towns with a history and.

A memory of resistance.

I got you doing it.

Yeah, you did. My fault. Sorry, St. Paul, but.

I mean, this is the birthplace of anti-racist action in the 1980s, the American Indian movement before that. And people have a living memory of the Jamar Clark uprising in 2014, the protest when Philando Castile was killed in 2016, the George Floyd uprising that became a general uprising in every city in the world, basically.

And now Metro Surge.

So I think that to the untrained eye, it might have looked like All of the resistance to this was coming out of nowhere. But these I think this really represented like practices that like anarchists and economists had been developing for at least 12 years, becoming generalized across the whole society so that everybody and their mom was doing this stuff. I mean, that week that I was talking about Hell Week between the 7th and the 14th. and I'll get to what happened at the 14th in a second.

But they like, I mean, there was a day when they took 248 people. But there was also, I counted how many different hyperlocal rapid response groups they were. That's like the jargon that people use to call their kind of neighborhood watch groups was hyperlocals. And I counted 81 just in English. And there were more in Somali and Spanish that I didn't even know about. And like what really struck me about the movement was that like even people that have been organizing in Twin Cities for 10 or 20 or 30 years couldn't tell you all the different little initiatives that were popping up everywhere, right? Like there was this totally diffuse and decentralized and like thickly organized ecosystem of people that were doing this. And that's

what made it effective was the like kind of leaderless character of it. And it was just, you know, these weren't, these weren't organizations in the formal sense of the word. They were like practices that the whole society was taking up.

Yeah.

Which is what it takes.

Totally.

Like, cause you talked about at the beginning, for example, like where it was like a 11 to 13 minute response time and how that was like, I mean, that's not, I'm not trying to, that's not an embarrassing number, right?

Yeah.

It wasn't enough and it took time. real decentralization. Like none of this would have worked with like a central authority. It seems like.

Oh, totally. I mean, there were thousands of people.

Monarcha's own estimates are that they trained 30,000 people. I've heard other people say like, no, it was much higher. There were like at least 80,000 people doing this kind of work.

Yeah.

But there were people like driving on patrol in loops in their neighborhood where you could reach one side of your loop to the other inside three minutes. Because, you know, if you weren't going to get to an abduction in three minutes, you had no hope of being there. I mean, a lot of us had the frustrating experience of like trying to get to one of them and we'd, we'd be a few minutes too late and we call them ghost cars. That was the name for it. You'd see a car like with its engine still running its window smashed out and like somebody's family member, they're crying and that's, you know, so.

Okay. So when you all would respond or when people would respond, Were people then able to interrupt some of these in such a way that it like worked? Like, like, you know, what's going on with rapid response? You see ice and then what happens?

I mean, everybody you talk to has had a lot of stories about times they failed, but I think you said this in your article, didn't you?

That's maybe why I'm trying to go to this.

I'm plagiarizing you right now, but everybody also had, had stories about times they succeeded and you know, oftentimes without things having to get kinetic, so to speak, people just showed up with their cameras out, with their phones out. I'm not saying that people didn't take courageous action to resist these mercenaries, but a lot of the time people just showed up with their phones out filming and that was enough to drive these people away.

I mean.

Yeah, it seemed like when they were outnumbered, they most of the time, even though they completely outgunned their opposition, when they were outnumbered, they, I mean, Fascism is a coward's ideology. So this isn't surprising to me.

But I'm not going to lie.

It did feel pretty hopeless for, you know, that second week in January.

Yeah.

And then things, I mean, there were really two moments when things came to a head. But the first of those was on January 14th when ICE agent Christian Castro shot a Venezuelan man named Julio Sosa-Selius through the screen door of his own house, shot him in the leg, and then lied about it to the FBI later and said that Julio had attacked him with a shovel.

Which was bullshit.

And to date, I think he's the only ICE agent being charged criminally for his crimes.

And that's not even for shooting the Coolio. That's just for lying to the feds.

But the black and brown youth in the neighborhood spontaneously came out and rose up and fought these ICE agents. This is a neighborhood that was very active during the George Floyd uprising six years prior. And there was, you know, a strong history and memory there of that. And to everybody watching across the Twin Cities, like, this had a significance because it was in Northside. And it felt like there was this sleeping giant waking up. It was like the ghost of the George Floyd uprising is back again.

And everybody was wondering when that was going to happen. But eventually, these agents fled the scene. It seemed to me, watching the videos of what happened, that they shot all the tear gas they had at these kids.

And then fled when they ran out of munitions.

And then left the local cops to clean up their mess. But they left behind three of their vehicles that were then smashed up and looted by these teenagers. And they stole some challenge coins out of them, which are these trophies that ICE agents are awarded for committing crimes against our community.

Yeah, exactly. They lost a firearm.

And now the guy who's accused of having taken that, Alexio Miranda, is due to be sentenced soon.

There's a fundraiser for him, right? And we're going to put a link to that in the show notes.

There's absolutely a fundraiser for him to help him rebuild his life when He gets out of prison because in all likelihood, he's going away for like four or five years. But after that day, I mean, that really seemed like the turning point. I looked at the deportation numbers and the morning before that clash, 204 people had been deported.

And the morning after, 77 people were. There was like, which is like a more than 80% drop. There was this precipitous drop in the number of people they were taking. And you might expect that after a pitched battle like that, there'd be a momentary dip in federal activity while they licked their wounds.

But that's not what happened.

77 people is still a record for how many they've been able to take. It's just declined ever since then. And I can't, you know, I'm not a mind reader. I'm not a fly on the wall in the ICE office. But I think that the reason for that is that The possibility of resistance that was made manifest that night, you know, it forced them to be more careful and change their tactics.

And that's not talked about all that much with it, you know?

A great deal more attention has been paid to the general strike on January 23rd, which was impressive.

Yeah.

I often felt like I was being pulled in two different directions during Metro Surge because there was like a defensive struggle of responding to abductions in a piecemeal fashion as they happened one by one by one.

Which is what Rapid Response was for.

And then there was like an offensive struggle of building the capacity in the workplaces in the schools to.

Go on strike and shut down society.

And there were very few people that were involved in both those sides of the work. I think I'm very fortunate to have had like a little window into both of those worlds and known people that were doing both. But that work stoppage, like if we believe a poll that an interfaith organization called Isaiah did, like more than 300,000 people participated, which is like 8% of the population in Minnesota.

It was astonishing.

Like there were whole sections of like Delta Airlines that got shut down, Amazon warehouses. And there were 12 labor unions that endorsed it. But by the union's own count, only about 15,000 of the people who struck were their members. Like this is a thing that spread like wildfire. Like largely through like immigrant communities because they had had enough and people were like already not working because they had been forced into hiding.

Yeah.

So the day after that, there was another massive dip in deportation numbers to the lowest it had been. But they also murdered our comrade Alex Pretty.

Yeah.

They gang beat him and shot him in the back. I'm not going to dwell too much on that. I'm sure everybody's seen the video.

Yeah.

But I think that was kind of the beginning of the end for Metro surge because two days later is when Greg Bovino got fired or was forced to resign. And then Trump's borders are Tom Homan came in and took over to clean up his mess and open these negotiations with Governor Tim Walz. And the kind of deal they agreed on at the end was that. they would withdraw and they formally ended Metro Surge like two and a half weeks later on February 12th, I think. But like the big concession they got out of us was that they now have access to every county jail in Minnesota.

Whereas before there was only one county jail that had a 287G agreement with the feds, which was Sherbourne County. And now they can kind of go back to the old way of doing things, the way they used to operate under Bush or Obama or Biden, where they go and they rely on the regular cops to make an arrest, and then they go in and take somebody out of the jail. And it's out of sight and out of mind and doesn't provoke the kind of massive response we saw from the people here. So that's kind of where things are at now, I guess.

Well- The other thing that things are at now is it's time to pull your phone out of your pocket and press forward 30 seconds until you hear the music again.

Thank you, products and services.

Or listen to the ads. And we're back. I hadn't heard about this. It doesn't surprise me. I hadn't heard about this thing of the like, OK, that was the compromise they got is that they'll end Metro surge. But obviously, they're still doing ice abductions. And then now, like, the state's own infrastructure is complicit in it.

Yeah.

That doesn't make me happy.

I mean, and now the numbers are back up, but they're mostly not kicking in doors anymore.

They're like arresting people at their court dates at the.

Courthouse or inside the county jail, you know, in a controlled environment. Like I've heard people call it the shadow surge.

It's like interesting because it's like it seems like from afar that people In 2025, they were like testing this new, what if we just do fucking like boots and braces fascism, like just like on the ground, we run this town, fuck you stuff. And they did it mostly in LA, Chicago, and then the Twin Cities. And in all of those cities, as they brought in more, they would escalate each time, but the resistance against them would also escalate. And it does seem like they blinked, right? It seems like they were like, oh, we'll lose this. Like, it seems like if they continue to try to do that version of fascism, the United States would have collapsed.

Yeah, I agree.

Or the government would have been removed from power. Like, because that level, like at the point where you have just like grandparents staring down rifles in negative 15 degree weather, being like, you can't fucking do this. Yeah. That probably scares the shit out of them. But then it's, it does seem like then, okay, so they scaled back from that, but it didn't stop them. Like, it didn't stop ICE, you know? I'm not trying to dismiss the incredible work that the Twin Cities did. It seems like the Twin Cities, like, it stopped a coup, essentially.

No, you're totally right. Yeah.

I mean, there were a lot of liberal conspiracy theories getting bandied about in that time, especially when the occupation was at its worst. They're just trying to provoke a reaction so that Trump can invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the 82nd Airborne or something. And don't give them what they want. There's going to be martial law, which was– You know, sort of crazy making for me because I was like, what do you think this is?

They're shooting people inside their own homes.

Yeah. What could what could how could martial law possibly be worse? Yeah.

But I mean, I think it was a terrifying time for all of us who live here, obviously. But it was also a terrifying time for the state itself because, you know, they'd. I mean, I think the real lesson here, if you zoom out and look at the whole picture, is that we're in a period where they've stopped using the old mechanisms of repression because the old kind of soft power stuff doesn't work anymore and they have to resort to brute force because that's all they have. And to my mind, that's not a sign of a strong government.

That's a sign of a weak one. It's a wounded animal that's backed into a corner. And I think that Kristi Noem and Greg Babino getting fired signaled a change in strategy to something that, like, the people would accept.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah, and it's like— and the people accept it, not like, oh, I'm so glad, right? Like, Trump's approval rating is the lowest it's ever been. Like, ICE's approval rating is, I believe, the lowest it's ever been, even among Republicans, although majority Republicans still approve of it. But, like, it's, like, the lowest— It's the most repression they can do without having what happened in the Twin Cities happen elsewhere. Totally. How much can they step on our neck without us being like, wait, we're bigger than you. Hold on.

Yeah.

And I guess on that note, I think there's really two reasons that, like, me and my little group of friends and one guy I didn't even know were being targeted because, like, Because the big reason is that they don't want what happened in Twin Cities to ever happen anywhere else. And then kind of the more boring reason is just that they have this directive from the White House to go out there and find Antifa. And they were, you know, if they couldn't find like us, they were going to go find other anarchists, you know, or other people that fit this profile. Just because that's the directive they're getting from main justice. And like, if you're an HSI agent, or a federal prosecutor, like that's good for

your career these days. But I think that, yeah, they're like, we might be in the crosshairs right now, but they're really aiming beyond the target at the whole movement.

And they're trying to scare people out of the streets.

And I think to a large degree that has backfired because we sort of got out in front of it and started talking about the case and being as public as possible and calling it what it is, which is like political repression that's aimed to scare everybody. And a lot of people have rallied behind us. And I'm very grateful for the support we've been getting and humbled by it.

Yeah, I mean, it's like, I think they thought they were like, how do we play into that liberal conspiracy that there's like bad protesters, right? They were like, how do we try to pick out the people who we can say, well, these are the bad ones. I'm not mad at all at you. I'm just mad at these bad ones. And it's like, I'll be real, historically that works.

And so I understand why they went for it.

Totally.

It doesn't seem to be working this time. And I fucking love that because like movements are strongest when they are diverse tactically, strategically, ideologically, and people just like have each other's backs. When people are like, no, you can't pick the people who are like, you know, Anarchists, you can't take them out and say they're the bad ones. Like, that's all of us, you know?

I mean, I'm not going to discuss what's in the 94 pages of the original indictment or even the 62 pages of the new indictment that just dropped last week. But I can say that all of it is like shockingly ordinary and like this, you know, very, very boring, mundane, like protest organizing stuff that we're accused of doing. Yeah.

Like, like, is it okay if I talk about some of the stuff in the indictment? Is that?

No, no, please go ahead.

But the point I'm trying to make with that is I think that like, you know, they couldn't really find a lot of bad protesters to drive that wedge in between the movement. Like we are all very dedicated and opinionated people, but we're also pretty much unremarkable. We're just people that live in Twin Cities that were doing what everybody else in Twin Cities was doing. That's one reason that people have rallied behind us. Cause like, we were doing something very popular against a very unpopular.

Yeah, totally. And you're doing what everyone else is doing.

Yeah.

And the other reason is that is this big revelation that they spied on fucking everybody, but please say what you were going to say first.

Well, it's just like someone put it to me once effectively accusing you of y'all being the first protesters to ever come up with blocking the street.

Oh, that's an interesting tactic. I think that might catch on.

Yeah.

And like, Reading the indictment, I read the whole indictment when it came out because I love myself and love doing that to myself because I worry about people that I worry about and care about. And, you know, reading the whole thing, I'm like, I kept waiting for the smoking gun. I kept waiting for the, like, and then they did this thing that even a normal person would think is bad. It wasn't in there. Like, in that indictment, people are accused of, like... protesting, basic protests, block a street. Like, that's the level of, like, horrid violence that is in this indictment. And I'm not going to go through all of it with you. I think I have covered in the past a bunch more about that indictment, and I

will in the future. But, like.

Yeah, I mean, U.S.

Attorney Daniel Rosen in the press conference the morning I got arrested wasn't even able to name a single ICE agent that we had allegedly injured.

Yeah. So we can't be that scary, you know?

But.

I think this is where we're going to leave it for today. But I want to come back in two days. Well, actually, I want to come back with you in about five minutes and talk more about this case and talk more about what's going on with it and talk about, I don't know how things are now and like all of the ways that people can support you and the defendants union that you all have going on. But here at the end of episode one, if people want to know more about your case, because I don't think that they should have to wait till Wednesday for that. And also support you all, like any kind of fundraising for you or for other people who are facing charges. Do you have anything you want to shout out or talk about?

I mean, we have a fundraiser going on chuffed.org for both our legal defense costs and also just mutual aid for people that lost their jobs over the indictment. And you can find that by going to minnesota15. org and clicking the fundraising link there.

Hell yeah.

And we're going to put that in the show notes too where there's usually sources because my source this week is mostly Isaac. So instead I'll put in those things.

All right.

Well, if you listen to this the day it comes out, things are real interesting in America. Take care of each other and be ready for taking care of each other as much as necessary with everything that might be happening. And I will talk to you all on Wednesday. And in the meantime, fuck ICE, free Palestine, take care of each other.

Thanks, Margaret. Fuck ICE.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on

The iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Part One: The Minnesota 15 and the Repression of Anti-fascism

Kapitelklicken springt direkt hin

Shownotes

Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin