Minnesota wants to win a war of attrition

As masked and armed men in combat armor swarmed throughout the Twin Cities, Gov. Tim Walz took to primetime television to ask Minnesotans to film ICE. The videos, he said, would “create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans — not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”

While the feds besieged hospitals and school bus stops and Targets, Walz imagined a future with something akin to the Nuremberg trials. His speech emphasized the legal system and the ballot box, a promise of peaceful regime change and a process of accountability. And it was as much emotional solace for his constituents as it was a demonstration for the courts. Minnesota is not in insurrection, Minnesota is not in revolt, Minnesota will follow the law — so, will the law now protect Minnesota?

The state of Minnesota, along with the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, is asking a federal judge to pause what the Trump administration is calling “Operation Metro Surge,” the descent of 2,000 masked and armed ICE agents on the Twin Cities. The lawsuit tries several different avenues to get there. It’s an uncurated shotgun blast of legal reasoning in a time of crisis. But one common thread binds it all together: states’ rights. Minnesota should have a say in what is happening on Minnesota’s turf; by locking the local authorities out and running roughshod over them, the feds have violated the basic compact of the Bill of Rights.

It is primarily liberal states that have been targeted by Donald Trump, and liberal cities with sanctuary policies have been hit the hardest. The complaint in Minnesota v. Noem hammers at this in particular, going even further to point out the times Trump has complained about losing Minnesota in each of his presidential elections. The cities that Trump has already targeted — such as Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago — are led by Democratic mayors. Resistance there has been fierce both on the ground and in the courts. A couple days before Christmas, the Supreme Court handed down a shadow docket decision in the National Guard cases, a rare instance in which it ruled against Trump. The president then announced his “withdrawal” from those cities (he had been prevented from deploying the Guard at all in Chicago and Portland); within days, he turned his attention to Minnesota.

“The Tenth Amendment gives the State of Minnesota and its subdivisions, including the Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, inviolable sovereign authority to protect the health and wellbeing of all those who reside, work, or visit within their borders,” says the lawsuit, alleging that the ICE surge has paralyzed the city with fear and dysfunction.

In the logic of the lawsuit, the feds have undermined the local authorities by inflicting terror on Minnesotans: “They have the right to go to work, take their children to school, and move through public and private spaces free from fear of violence against themselves or their loved ones by their federal government. They are entitled to access city services and use city facilities without being harassed by federal agents in parking lots.”

The desire for self-determination is central to the conflict between Trump and his victims. Sanctuary cities are cities that, to some degree or another, have democratically chosen not to aid federal immigration enforcement. In that sense, of course the fight is all about states’ rights. That would be perfectly obvious.

But in another sense, the whole affair is inflected with an exhausting degree of irony. “States’ rights” has been a conservative talking point since the Civil War, lingering on and morphing into a pro-segregation dogwhistle during the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. As right-wing extremism grew in America, “states’ rights” merged with the militia movement in bizarre and incoherent ways.

An 11-day anti-government standoff in 1992, now known as Ruby Ridge, along with the Waco standoff the following year, spawned a very specific flavor of anti-government subculture. The bare facts of the Ruby Ridge standoff read like a series of hashtags from tradwife TikTok: homestead, homeschool, birthing shed. Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of Oklahoma City in 1995 was motivated in part by Ruby Ridge and Waco. Obama-era militia movements — like the militia that took over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 — treat Ruby Ridge and Waco as “primary symbolism” of federal overreach.

In the end, the state of Idaho charged an FBI sniper for shooting and killing a woman at Ruby Ridge. And under the same reasoning, argues law professor Carolyn Shapiro, Minnesota officials can prosecute the ICE agent who killed Renee Good. A conviction under state law, moreover, would not be pardonable by the president.

Parallels between an ICE agent shooting Renee Good in her car and an FBI sniper shooting Vicki Weaver feel obvious. If anything, Weaver’s shooting — which happened in crossfire that also killed a US marshal — feels rather tame. A mountain homestead bristling with guns is simply not the same as a car that is slowly rolling away.

But either way, a mother is now dead, and the militias have not risen up in Renee Good’s name. If they are in Minneapolis now, it is most likely on the other side. Even before Trump began his second term, militia groups have offered their support in carrying out mass deportation; we don’t know whether militia members are hiding behind ICE’s gaiters, but we do know that ICE recruitment screens its applicants so poorly that a journalist named in a right-wing watchlist for “antifa” was able to get a job offer. If the militias don’t have members in ICE, it is either because they lack follow-through or because they are the only people who have ever been rejected for the job. The thin veneer of anti-authoritarianism has shattered. The real opposition to federal tyranny is not being fought with guns on homesteads, but in city streets with smartphones and whistles. And the only chance of justice for Renee Good comes from a hypothetical state prosecution, should Minnesota fully exercise its states’ rights.

Nick Shirley’s YouTube video got millions of views, but most importantly, the attention of the president himself, who would repeat the word “fraud” over and over again as his pretext for Operation Metro Surge. The content mill left a mother dead and bleeding in her car.

Content brought ICE to their door; now, for better or worse, Minnesota is fighting ICE with content. The Minneapolis city council president is posting videos every day, including one where an ICE agent shoves him. “If this is how they treat the President of the Minneapolis City Council who is legally observing, just think of what they’re doing to everyone else in our City,” he posted. The governor is on television telling people to “carry your phone with you at all times, and if you see ICE in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record.”

Video after video is uploaded to social media networks. In these clips, Minnesotans flock to and cluster around arrests, holding up their smartphones as faceless thugs wrestle their victims to the ground.

Walz’s promise that the videos will be used for accountability is not totally baseless. Minnesota v. Noem is already scattered throughout with references to videos of arrests of US citizens. The footnotes of the complaint are an eyesore, filled with links to YouTube, X, and Truth Social. The administration’s hyperbolic, all-caps posts are presented as evidence of irrational animus and malice directed at the state of Minnesota; the clips of the ICE arrests as objective proof of how that animus has manifested into a regime of terror that has nothing to do with immigration enforcement.

But what happens at the end of the day if a judge doesn’t grant an injunction? What happens if there is no Nuremberg? What happens if the regime never changes? What happens if the law doesn’t free Minneapolis from the federal incursion?

A marginally less demented government would have withdrawn ICE from Minneapolis the day after Renee Good was killed. Instead, the feds are trying to put her wife, the mayor, and the governor in jail. Trump is behaving as though he craves civil war — or maybe more accurately, like we’re already in one. Walz’s call to film ICE anticipates that either the courts or the electoral process will bring Trump to heel. Sousveillance is the last weapon of states’ rights before they get ugly in a uniquely American way. When states’ rights are exercised peacefully, that is merely the Constitution in action. Once they step beyond those confines, we are on course toward the civil war that Trump is so desperate for.

Meanwhile, the steady stream of videos from Minneapolis has become a narrative unto itself — in a strange reversal of the xenophobic hysteria that swept Trump into office, ICE has been cast in the role of outsiders marauding across the homeland. Like the feds rolling up to Ruby Ridge, they are unwelcome and unloved interlopers, hounded by whistles and Honda Fits. The invader must be expelled. Minnesota should be for the Minnesotans.