the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
February 2, 2026
From the start of the ICE crackdowns, ordinary people have been horrified that their friends, neighbors and relatives are being brutally beaten, arrested, interned and often deported to faraway places. So, they have mobilized to call attention to what repressive forces have tried to do in the shadows.
Throughout the Twin Cities region, which includes Minneapolis-St. Paul, this mobilization has gone the furthest. The Trump administration has struck back, bringing in even more forces to try to crush the mobilization. But even after the second brutal murder, of hospital worker Alex Pretti, a man with a cell phone in his hand, shot ten times, eight while on the ground, the population stood their ground.
After the murder of Pretti, the demonstrations grew larger. While authorities waited for the population to stand down, instead, even more people came out. After the second murder, an angry reaction spread, opposed ever more broadly, across the U.S., causing the media to declare an emergency, to say that the Trump Administration has gone too far, condemning it publicly. The Trump administration removed Bovino, head of the Border Patrol, making him the scapegoat for the murderous activity of the thugs. But it was not media—but the Minneapolis mobilization that did it.
Does that mean that ICE is out of Minneapolis and will be pulled from other cities? While the Trump Administration felt forced to pull its lead terrorist Bovino out of Minneapolis, and may even defuse that situation, they continue to carry out their strategic plan.
Last July, Congress tripled the ICE budget, making it the most richly funded law enforcement agency in the federal government, exceeding the military budgets of most countries, including Turkey or Spain. With all that money, ICE has gone on a hiring spree, increasing the number of agents from 10,000 to 22,000 in a matter of months, recruiting people with overt white supremacist and racist appeals.
ICE has also hired private companies to provide it the tools to spy on people through their cell phones, scrape social media from the web and provide information from data brokers, as well as use facial recognition software to identify local activists. All that in order to build a huge database of activists all over the country to prepare a much bigger crackdown.
All this comes down to a build-up of a national paramilitary force to discipline the population through intimidation and fear. Trump may have started by attacking immigrants. But that was only the wedge to go after all those who dared defy the American government and state, especially the working class.
In late January, the Trump administration issued a memorandum broadening ICE agents’ powers to arrest people without a warrant. “This memo bends over backward to say that ICE agents have nothing but green lights to make an arrest,” said one former ICE agent.
In fact, it is a public statement that ICE will not only continue but step up its reign of terror in spite of the fact that the Trump administration has come under fire. This in the face of the murder and brutality in the Twin Cities, carried out by thousands of masked and heavily armed federal agents. And this has been too much for even a part of Trump’s voting base to swallow.
The force that has been able to push the Trump Administration to step back has been a population that has been increasingly mobilizing itself in the Twin Cities, and to a lesser extent in many towns and cities, not just to protect immigrants, but to protect itself.
All throughout the Minneapolis and St. Paul region, more than 34,000 people have signed up to be a part of one of several loosely-knit ICE watch groups. The people in these groups are getting training from former ICE agents, former cops and military vets.
They are organizing, deepening the resistance of the community. Will the populations of other cities join in to support them, in preparation for attacks to come?
As people mobilize, they can discover that we have to get rid of not just ICE, not just the Border Patrol, not just a crew of rotten politicians, but the entire brutal system that they represent and defend. Because that is the reality we face today.