The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Nick Estes:

It doesn’t matter if you have a tribal ID that ain’t stopping ice. Give me your hands. Give me your hands. A passport. That ain’t stopping ICE. An ID card. That ain’t stop an ICE. No,

Speaker 2:

No! Shame! Oh my God. What the [expletive]!

Nick Estes:

This agenda is not just about immigration enforcement. It’s a campaign of terror.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to The Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us as we speak. The state of Minnesota is under siege by our own federal government and residents. Immigrant and US born alike are living in fear with the deployment of over 3000 federal agents to Minnesota in recent weeks. This is the Trump administration’s largest and most violent so-called immigration enforcement operation yet, and with President Trump threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota in response to protests over ICE’s terror campaign, the situation on the ground is extremely volatile. The videos in firsthand testimonies coming out of Minnesota these past two weeks have been stunning, frankly, armed masked thugs of the state raiding workplaces, breaking down residential doors and invading homes, dragging people out in the frigid cold in their underwear, racially profiling accosting and detaining brown, Black, Asian, and Indigenous people demanding people on the street show their papers and present their proof of citizenship, ramming cars, smashing car windows, attacking bystanders and observers, scanning people’s faces and pulling up their information using shadowy surveillance technology.

It is all truly dystopian and truly terrifying. But what is equally terrifying is the fact that there is no guarantee that people outside of Minnesota are actually seeing and hearing what’s happening there. Information is being suppressed, shadow banned and under-reported AI and our billionaire own social media platforms have royally screwed people’s ability to find good information, let alone trust what they’re seeing with their own eyes on their own feeds. And that is why on all of our platforms across The Real News Network, we are doing our best to get around the information blockade to smuggle and amplify on the ground reports and firsthand testimonies from Minnesota. And today we are getting firsthand reports from Minnesota, from Aminah Sheikh, a union organizer in the Twin Cities, and an active member and executive board member of Twin Cities, democratic Socialists of America, and Nick Estes, an enrolled member of the Lower Brules Sioux Tribe and an associate professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Nick Estes:

I’m Inta kpi. My name’s Nick Estes. I’m an associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota here in Bide, OTA Oua, which is also known as Minneapolis. What you’re reading and what you’re seeing in the news is actually much worse on the ground. There are constant reports of ICE presence. I’m talking to you from the University of Minnesota campus and the Twin Cities. They have been on campus. They’re actually staying on campus at a place called the Graduate Hotel. Everyone in my life, from my daycare provider to my colleagues here on campus is affected by this to my friends on the south side who are being abducted by ICE for their activism and documenting what’s happening right now. So what you’re seeing on the news is just a sliver of what it’s actually like to be here on the ground. Almost every waking moment of my life is some kind of discussion about this, and I just got out of class.

And so students we’re talking about it, how it’s impacting their lives. Some of them are international students, some of them are afraid to even get on public transportation because those are sites that ICE is targeting. Specifically the University of Minnesota knows that ICE is operating on campus. They know that ICE is staying at the graduate hotel, which is within the jurisdiction of the campus. They also know that community members have been demanding, whether it’s faculty, students or staff, that these university obeys the Fourth Amendment that prevents the illegal search and seizure of our buildings in our classroom spaces. We are in the heart, Cedar Riverside, the heart of the Somali community is right next to campus. And to pretend that this does not impact us is a moral stain on this university. I try not to think about myself and thinking about what I’m personally experiencing, but really thinking about what I’m experiencing as a collective whole. And that’s really how I’ve been able to cope with this phenomenon.

Aminah Sheikh:

It’s been really hard. I’m a mom of a toddler and for me and for many of our neighbors, our friends, our community here, regardless of the community you belong to, we feel like we’re at war. And it feels like not only is it a war on the streets, but it’s an information war, which is different in the sense that I feel overwhelmed. And I’ve heard from many people that they have those similar feelings of exhaustion. I’m really exhausted because every day there’s new information and there’s new things happening with Trump and what’s going on in the world in regards to Venezuela and the capture of the President of Venezuela and then Iran. And I just feel like the information is so much and it’s coming all the time. And then being here, it feels like we are at war on the streets and we’re kind of living in this fear, but we’re also strong and we’re organized and we’re disciplined and we’re trying to keep it together. But it definitely is a very anxious time. And I think for me particularly, it’s been the amount of information, the amount of AI out there. There’s a lot of weird videos that I couldn’t even tell you if they’re true or not. And there’s a lot of misinformation being put everywhere. So it’s hard to tell what’s sometimes the truth and not the truth.

Nick Estes:

It’s worth pointing out that ice today is housed at the same Fort Fort Snelling. That was a concentration camp for my ancestors. The concentration camp was rebuilt in the mid 20th century, but the military reservation, the campus actually stayed the same. And so it’s still serving the same sort of colonial function this time. It’s not just targeting Indigenous people this time. It’s targeting everyday workers. We were actually there filming a podcast the day that Renee Goode was shot in the face and killed by an ice agent. And it really came full circle to me to say that what everyday people are experiencing on the streets of Minneapolis is not a unique kind of historical phenomenon, but it’s a continuation of the settler colonial project as it began in the early 19th century when the United States first came here, that ice facility can only exist because of a treaty, a fraudulent treaty that the United States government made with the Dakota Nation in 1805.

So when I think about this, I think about this in a historical context and that this is just a continuum of the imperialist violence that many people are experiencing. Just last month we were seeing the Pentagon posts, smut films of them executing people in the Caribbean. We didn’t see the evidence of why these people were being killed. And now we see an ice agent holding a cell phone recording himself, executing a woman in the street here in Minneapolis. So they are collapsing what many people see as a boundary between domestic and foreign policy. That war has come home. It actually never left from the perspective of indigenous people.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Amina, you are a veteran union organizer, and I wanted to ask if you could say a little bit about how this federal invasion of Minnesota, particularly the Twin Cities, how it’s impacting working people. The accounts I’ve heard from some folks is it sounds like COVID. Some people, a lot of people are hiding in their homes because they’re too afraid to leave while others who don’t want to leave are forced to brave the horrors outside to make a paycheck.

Aminah Sheikh:

Weeks ago, I think we all saw when that influencer, that many of us don’t even know who he is, right wing influencer Nick Shirley came and went to a childcare center. I was shocked and I was appalled. I was in shock that this man could just show up at a childcare center and try to ask to see the children there. And I was in shock also that there was no coordinated response from the union movement, the labor movement. And then it really made me understand how dehumanized black African communities are here and their children are dehumanized and this coordinated organization from the right and how nazim and Nazi symbols and Nazi ideology has become so prevalent and normalized that for a lot of people it wasn’t a big deal. And so to be honest with you, I was very concerned. I was concerned because I didn’t hear any union come out and speak about how this is terrorism, but also this is a worker rights issue.

And it really raised the alarms for me about how many workers, millions of workers in this country are actually not organized and don’t have any representation. So I was really concerned because as the weeks passed by, it seemed like a lot of deliberation and not a lot of approach from the trade union movement. Many of us have actively argued within the Democratic Socialists of America that it is incumbent for trade unionists and unions to defend their members, but also defend the working class. But just like the pandemic people are still going to work and we haven’t reached some utopia place where work doesn’t exist. We have to continue to go to work. So with everything that the federal government, the Trump regime is doing, we need a coordinated response from the labor movement and we need them to be invested in this because really it’s a workplace issue and we can’t rely on management to save us.

We saw that with the pandemic, and people think that people don’t want to go to school and they don’t want to be outside. I think that’s inaccurate. The union movement, the teacher’s unions and the educator unions, people want to go to school, but if children are being kidnapped, if staff are being kidnapped, if workers continue to be kidnapped and abducted, and if we keep dealing with domestic terrorism, I’m not sure how we can just go to work. So I don’t think that not going to work is also a resolution, but I think that what’s a resolution is that the trade union movement and the labor movement be very part of the coordinated responses that are happening in community, whether it be through rapid response mutual aid, but they also have to go beyond that. And that’s what’s happening on January 23rd. It lifted my spirits to see that about a week ago, there was an announcement about January 23rd and all hands on deck, everybody, faith communities, community leaders, different civil society organizations, and the union movement, the Minnesota Labor Federation, part of the AFL-CIO have all endorsed a call to action.

January 23rd means no shopping, no working, and no school, no business as usual. And this decision was made through lots of ongoing discussion and dialogue between different communities and it’s just one tactic, part of the multitude and array of tactics that are happening all across the state. But specifically in the Twin Cities, the DSA, which I can speak to more, our members are involved in so many different ways in efforts of solidarity and defense of the communities, whether it’s through patrol, whether it’s through rapid response, being out there with our unhoused relatives making resolutions. The labor branch has been, and many our union members have been active with passing resolutions at their labor meetings to say that we need to call for support, put funding resources. Our national Democratic Socialists of America have also sent funding and support. We have love coming from across the country and really we’re all pushing towards this Friday, which is just one step.

I want to do a moment of union organizer inoculation that we’re calling it a general strike, but obviously it’s not there yet. But we need to lift the imagination of the working class. We need to lift the imagination of union and non organized workers, which is millions of millions of people that continue to have to go to work. And I think of the late Jane MLA that this is kind of like a structure test. Where is the working class? Where are they? And to me, just from our phone banking or canvassing, I’ve almost wanted to cry multiple times. I think maybe we actually have always been there and we could be there. And so I’ve tried to tune out the naysayers because I learned that my own daughter’s daycare, the workers there, the educators there, went and spoke to management, said in solidarity, we will not be coming to work on Friday. And to me, that told me that workers are ready. And this is just one of the many tactics that we’re seeing here in the Twin Cities, and we are organized, we are disciplined, and we are determined, and we know that January 23rd is just part of a longer plan so that maybe one day we can see a general strike.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Nick, I wanted to ask you a little more about that Indigenous perspective because the irony is almost so cosmically big that my head’s about to explode, that a presidential administration with its own private immigrations and customs enforcement army is on the street right now targeting accosting and abducting native Americans, Indigenous people on this land under the guise of cleansing this country and restoring its greatness. I wanted to ask if you could unpack the absurdity and the horror of this moment.

Nick Estes:

It’s important to remember, Max, that the nine tribes in South Dakota where I was born and raised, all banished Kristi Nom from their reservations when she was the governor of South Dakota. We were trying to warn not just the United States, but the world of what she represented. The laboratory of repression that she created in South Dakota has now been scaled up to a national scale. I didn’t imagine that moving to a place like Minnesota that we’d have to be dealing with these kinds of things, but that’s the reality of it. This moment in time is not unique. Even with her sort of track record of her racist violence against native people, she said that South Dakota had the US Mexico border within its boundaries because of the reservations that existed there because she blamed and criminalized indigenous people there, Lakota and Takota people, my people of being violent criminals who are aligned with drug cartels.

So it’s not surprising that she’s doing this here in the city. This is the birthplace of the American Indian movement, which was founded in 1968 to address this very fact of racial profiling and police violence. This is the home of George Floyd. This is Trump. And people like Christie Nom trying to get their licks in on Indigenous people, on black people because of what in 2020 and the conscious shift of this nation around its racist and colonial past. They’re trying to undo and rewrite history. But what we’re seeing on the ground with the native community, it doesn’t matter if you have a tribal id, there’s an effort for people to get tribal IDs. I think that’s incredibly important and they support it 100%. But that ain’t stop ice a passport that ain’t stop ice an ID card that ain’t stop ice. This agenda is not just about immigration enforcement.

It’s a campaign of terror to terrorize Minneapolis for what it represents to terrorize the Somali community, our neighbors, our coworkers, the people who we are in community with every single day. They are trying to terrorize them because of what this place represents in the broader sort of political imaginary of what should be possible in the United States and what they were trying to build back in 1968 when they founded the American Indian Movement. They’re still fighting that battle today in alliance with the black community, the Chicano Latino community, the Somali community, the immigrant community, the Asian American community. I’ve never seen the city so united in this moment in time and it’s having the reverse effect. I think it’s having the opposite consequence that they thought would happen. It brought people together. My 70-year-old neighbor in the alleyway is talking to me about how to get ice off the street.

She’s part of the local ice patrol. The guy who was shoveling the streets down the road from me when I was walking to work was talking about he is a Black man who grew up in Oklahoma, was saying, y’all warned us about this. What they’re doing at Fort Snelling, they’re now doing to everybody else. And so what has happened now is just, it’s not history repeating itself. This is a moment in time where this community has gotten together. And I really hope that it goes beyond just getting ice out of Minneapolis and Minnesota and that we really take serious the limitations of our current electoral politics, the Democrats who helped bolster and strengthen ice as much as their Republican counterparts, and that we actually put forward a true humane program and policy that’s based on human solidarity as we see exercised on the ground every single day.

I don’t want to overshoot myself, and I don’t want to over romanticize this moment in time, but when I imagine what a future would look like, what community safety would look like, what a sense of belonging might look like in a place like Minneapolis, because frankly when I moved here, I did not get that Minnesota is a very racist state. It’s just because it builds itself as progressive doesn’t mean that it’s not filled with this genocidal history that was against my ancestors and that we’re not living with those legacies today. But I never imagined that everybody on my block would be united around one cause and that they would be stopping me on the street to talk to me. Not to say, how you feeling? I’m sorry, what’s going on? Or whatever. But to say, Hey man, we’re standing up. We’re getting involved with this.

Join our neighborhood block signal chat. This is how we’re keeping our community safe, and this is how we are keeping each other informed of what’s happening. And I really hope that it goes beyond just this reaction towards ice, which is incredibly important because again, it demonstrates that at the core of what it means to be a human in this world is to exercise solidarity with each other. When we look at the south side of Minneapolis and Franklin Avenue, the first thing to go up was powwow grounds. A local business, kind of a community hub for the native community becomes ground zero for making sure people who haven’t left their homes in weeks have food, have water to make sure that people who are out on patrol have a place to stop off and to feel connected, to make sure that those native people who have left the city, who moved into the suburbs, who are surrounded by this intense white supremacy and feeling of alienation have a place to come back to.

These are stories that I’ve heard from people on the ground, and these moments of terrible danger seem incredibly nightmarish when you’re living through them. But it also is very comforting to know that this is the natural response and desires of people under crisis is not to turn against each other. It’s not these narratives that we hear in the news about. It’s a winner takes all mentality. It’s a Mad Max scenario where people just descend into anarchy. It’s actually the opposite of that. I’ve never felt so safe with my neighbors, forget ice for a moment, but just I’ve never felt so safe with my neighbors than I have ever felt in this moment in time. And to me that says something that a new world is possible and it’s actually being built right now. We just have to get ice out. We have to make sure that our immigrant relatives and community members are safe. We have to make sure that our workplaces are safe. And how do we do that? We exercise our economic muscle, we withdraw our labor, we take a day off and shut this place down to say, ICE doesn’t belong here. And that is the most powerful form of solidarity that we can exercise in this moment, just short of physically removing ice from our communities.