Minneapolis Fights Back: An Episode of The Dig

Dan Denvir: Emilia González Avalos, Greg Nammacher, and JaNaé Bates Imari, welcome to The Dig.

JaNaé Bates Imari: Thank you so much. Emilia González Avalos: Thank you for having us. Greg Nammacher: Yep, we’re excited to be here in these very hard times.

Denvir: The organized people of Minneapolis have, with truly heartbreaking sacrifice, waged a struggle that’s now shaken the MAGA regime unlike anything we’ve seen yet. To ask this in a bigger picture way before we get into a lot of specifics, how have organized masses of everyday people in Minnesota forced this extraordinary crisis upon Trump’s authoritarian project? How has resistance in one particular place effectuated a crisis of such giant national proportions? 

You all are winning, though of course at great cost, with two people murdered, many more abused, and so many snatched from their homes or off the streets into the deportation machine. What should the rest of us across the country, in the world, know about why this fight back has been so organized, so tenacious, so brave and, really, so successful?

González Avalos: I think that there’s some historical context people have to understand about Minnesota. We have a very long generational tradition of labor organizing. There is also a very important history of social welfare and community organizations using structural, institutional nonprofit vehicles. And so the ecosystem has been populated and pollinated for years on takes and errors that are hyperlocal battles, from maintaining the right to collectively bargain to having people access driver’s licenses. Like very meaningful, hyperlocal, material campaigns.

And so there’s also a couple other elements of the civil society of Minnesota. One is that we have the highest turnout of electoral voters in the country. People in Minnesota have a civic public life. And we also have the highest census participation in the country. The social fabric has a robust appreciation for public and civil life. And so in Minnesota, at least — I am an immigrant. 

We are not a big population. This mass enforcement is a big injury to our state, because we are not a big density of immigrants, undocumented people in Minnesota. California, there’s Texas before, Colorado, before, Nevada, Illinois. Even Oregon or Washington, have larger populations. Wisconsin has a way larger population of undocumented folks than Minnesota. And this is part of — I think that it’s our way of life. I think it is because of our civil life and our organizing that we are being targeted at this moment. And so the way to respond to that is by getting deeper and more ample in organizing. That’s what we know how to do, and we just are doing more of it.

Bates Imari: I mean, everything that Emilia just named is absolutely right. Minnesota has a long history of deep organizing, institutionally, but also what we have seen recently, even with block-by-block neighbors and parents organizing together. And so the beauty of Minnesota is that we do build these really deep relationships that unfortunately, as a state that has had to go through some very hard things in these recent years, we’ve really had to lean on. So I think there was just an immense amount of learning that we collectively had during the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, about what is required of us to actually build the real resilience to fend off the level of vitriol and violence that we’re finding from the federal government right now.

I will also say one of the heartbreakingly beautiful things that has happened in Minnesota is that we’ve gotten very sophisticated with our response, knowing that part of what is happening in Minnesota is a needling by the federal government to try to get us to respond in a particular way. And Minnesotans across the spectrum have said we will not take the bait.

And so there has been across the ideological spectrum some clarity about, like, we are going to collectively care for each other. We’ll fight it out later, about tactics and tools, when we are not facing this existential crisis, about our lives and about democracy itself, with the level of just — even the constitutional crisis that we’re in right now.

Nammacher: The three of us come from organizations that have been doing base-building, institutional power-building for decades. And that is an important part of the story, and I think how those relationships and some of the tactics that we have been experimenting with for many years have been able to be used on a broader scale than we’d ever used them before. And that is part of, I think, what underlay what was successful on Friday.

At the same time, the exact opposite is also true, which is, there are so many centers of gravity. There are so many players in motion right now, organized on their blocks, organized through Signal groups, you know, structures that didn’t exist, or didn’t exist at an organizational level, just literally weeks ago, that are now playing key roles.

And so from my perspective, this is an incredibly hopeful story of the combination of systematic, intentional, self-conscious organizing with humility, with clarity, at the same time as understanding in a movement moment when the entire community is provoked, things will move far beyond your organizational control. And that is a beautiful thing, and it requires a certain way to be in that space, because that’s different. 

You know, usually when a union gets ready to strike, or we are trying to do a turnout to an action, you know, every single person that we are engaging with has been carefully, relationally propositioned to step into action, supported in a very intentional, systematic way. And in this moment, there is a surge of momentum that is just breathtaking and comes from every direction, and it is that heroism and the risks that people, even outside of organization, are willing to take that has been absolutely what has been able to combine to make this so powerful.

Denvir: I want to talk first about organization in terms of what’s been happening in the streets in recent weeks, resisting ICE and Border Patrol. And then I want to zoom out and get into this broader, longer story of how organizers in Minnesota, over a decade or decades, have built the most progressive democratic trifecta in the country alongside this incredibly robust, dynamic, diverse array of popular organization.

So yes, let’s start with the past few weeks. How should we understand what sort of organization lies behind this incredible, and again, remarkably courageous resistance movement that we’ve been seeing in Minneapolis? What, in terms of tactics, strategy, organizational models, did you learn from cities like Chicago? What have you innovated on your own? 

And Greg, to follow up on a point you made, how did structure-based organizations, the sort of organizations you all lead, that build bases, respond to and navigate a movement moment where things are just exploding beyond anything that your organizations can directly or totally control?

Bates Imari: It’s important to note that in Minnesota, we were already experiencing a surge of immigration enforcement, law enforcement — ICE agents in the streets — for months, before the murder of Renee Good. And there were dynamic organizations like Unidos that had built infrastructure to try to respond to the groundswell of people who are waking up to the notion that I need to do something to protect my neighbor right now. And so there were already some pieces in place by organizational capacities to respond to the hundreds of ICE agents that were in our streets.

Once the particular surge took place, where we went from hundreds to thousands, and then the murder of Renee Good, there was what I imagine happens anytime something like this takes place, where there is a groundswell of people who are like, I am ready to take action. I want to take action. Or, I am terrified and angered and in despair; what can I do? There were a series of organizations who were also grappling with this question, and in real time, very, very quickly.

And so, because we are organizations that represent a base, so a population of people who are building their own leadership capacities, are developed to have agency, our bases, as well as the community at large, felt a desperate need to do something. Because beyond the murder of Renee Good, we are also having hundreds, if not thousands, of people experience ICE in a way in which they are being assaulted, they’re having surveillance, they are there as their neighbors are being taken from their places of work, being handcuffed at hospital beds, having to create systems where they’re patrolling, where there are parent patrols around child care centers. I need people to realize: You drop your child off at a child care center so that they have a healthy, safe place to learn while you go to work, and you can’t go to work because you have to patrol that center.

So it became really clear that as much as Minnesotans are building all of this amazing muscle to care for one another, it was not sustainable for the long term, and it was not enough to get us to the place where we actually would be able to have this masked militia that has now come upon us in the most violent and horrible ways — to get them to leave. So we knew it was going to have to go beyond a march. And so many of our organizations that do have infrastructure capacity were also thinking — I mean, have been for months, if not years — also talking about, what could it look like to have an economic blackout? What could it look like to get people to that place?

And I will say, from my own organization’s perspective, we have been thinking about Mahatma Gandhi in India, where he called for the day of prayer and fasting. And in that time, it had just become a law that you could not do a strike. You couldn’t strike from work. It was illegal, and they would throw you into prison. And so a call for a day of prayer and fasting was the way in which you could call people into a culture where we understand that fasting also means that I am fasting for food. I am fasting from work. It is a cultural understanding that this is what we need to do to care for one another. And it was highly political, but it was also highly successful. And so as a faith-based organization, we recognize that both the political and the prophetic are intertwined, and so calling for a day of prayer and fasting was really important.

And so many of our organizations were having these conversations about, what would it take, what would it require for us to actually get there? And we’re building muscle and tools for that, again, for months, if not years, to be able to build for something like that. And so it was, what, a week and a half, 10 days before, where we decided that we’re going to move forward with this together and launched it. And so we had a press conference where our organization and Emilia’s — and we launched that we’re going to have this Day of Truth and Freedom, and it is going to be no work, no school, no shopping, and it was, like I said, 10 days before the day was going to take place. And so from then, labor unions across the state were also enrolled. They were already in conversations with their leaders and their stewards, and we were able to get to a place to make it real.

But I want to be clear that — and I’m sure my comrades on here will speak more to this — but just to say we’re calling for a day where everyone doesn’t work or shop or go to school, that requires an immense amount of infrastructure and capacity and organizing that has to happen long before and absolutely, once you call for it, the ground game has begun. It should have begun two minutes before you said it. And so it is something that we didn’t take lightly, and we took it with every bit of seriousness that was required, which was why it was able to be as successful as it was.

González Avalos: I want to add, from the immigrant rights perspective, in a place where we are considered a specialty group and we’re not the majority, the structural organizing has helped from not being considered part of the progressive coalition 20 years ago to actually being a core part of the heart of the progressive coalition in this moment — that trajectory required structural organizing, coalition building, passing things at a local, state and national level. 

And I think at the cusp of that was when we moved the Minnesota Miracle: the progressive coalition was like, ​“Yeah, you’re going to get your driver’s licenses and then you’re going to be fine. Here, have your thing, let’s move right along.” And we were like, ​“No, there’s still other things that undocumented Minnesotans don’t have access to.” And that was health care. So we had just moved through a pandemic. Our workers, predominantly essential workers, cannot work remotely, and we were trying to pass policy that actually cost taxpayer dollars, dollars that they themselves contribute to Minnesota pockets, to the state funding. 

And so that public battle was another experience that shifted culture in Minnesota. Who are we? Who is accepted?

We lost the majority in the last election, in 2024. The only thing that actually was cut from all the popular benefits was undocumented health care. That undocumented health care protected paid Sick & Safe time. It earned Sick & Safe time pay, family and medical leave, daycare assistance. All the other — green energy, big funds for schools — this was the thing that was cut. And the reaction from regular people was visible in public. People did not want to leave immigrants behind. It was a very hard decision for Speaker Hortman, and that was one of the most politicized talking points at the time of her assassination.

And so that was still raw with all this immigration enforcement. And so what we had to ponder as organizers was, how do we stop being a specialty group and actually become a popular front? What is the on-ramp for a popular front?

And so that’s how we thought about this constitutional observer on-ramp, where we made the bet: People are going to observe. It feels a little passive, but if the enforcement becomes vitriolic, violent and mean, it will create ripple effects on the person’s consciousness. It’s going to get deeper than an agitation. We do that as a practice, like Alinsky practice. It’s going to be deeper than an agitation. It’s going to be more shocking than an action. They don’t know it’s an action, but it is an action, because they’re in real time facing the cruelty, and we’re asking them: Only film, only bear witness. 

And so what happens with a regular person that is in the face of seven ICE agents trying to arrest a home father that is taking his children to school, and we’re asking them, just film, bear witness is — it’s groundbreaking. It changes people.

We are seeing all of these constitutional observers wanting to do more, and then the leadership development — the popular front is getting built on constitutional observation. But then the institutional organizing from their different unions or faith-based organizations or worker centers, or whatever it is that consistently provides a space for them to build capacity is creating that path and that on-ramp for people to actually take action in a structural way, with discipline, with rigor, with a strategy. 

And so I think that the magic of Minnesota is that we’re not trying to wing a big protest, and then ​“let’s see what happens.” We know that the investment on people and having a face of working class and poor communities, immigrants, faith institutions, students, educators and small businesses, professional people, the face of regular Minnesotans — not ideological, not partisan — is what is actually creating a wedge and an opportunity for us in the state.

Nammacher: My response to this question just comes from within Local 26’s experiences in the last month, and so starting there. My name is Greg Nammacher and I’m the president of our Local, SEIU Local 26, which represents 8000 property service workers in the Twin Cities seven-county metro area. Janitorial, security, window cleaning, airport workers, Uber/​Lyft drivers, are a part of our membership. Almost entirely immigrant, almost entirely people of color.

So for us, a union participating in a community call for an economic blackout is something that is complicated. 

A lot of U.S. labor laws have been built since the 1930s to very narrowly define the ways in which workers, especially workers under a contract, but often workers just by the law, in the public sector, in the private sector, can engage with this kind of a community uprising — have really been curtailed. 

And so for us — leaning into this moment and trying to figure out how we could support our members that had made the decision to support this community call that was coming from organizations like ISAIAH and yes, like Emilia and JaNaé’s organizations — this was a moment of uncertainty. We were walking on some new ground here.

So where that came from is, for us, we had 20 members abducted by federal agents just in the last month or so. This was not distance. This was not in solidarity. This was a raw attack on our direct membership.

And while the national narrative from the administration is that this was about going after criminals, none of the people who were detained and abducted had any criminal backgrounds. While the national narrative from the administration is that this was somehow about helping American workers make more money by having fewer immigrants in the workforce, the only actual substantive impact was to undermine wages.

One of the people who was abducted is Don Vicente, a long-term window cleaner. The brother was 75 years old, a longtime member of our union. He’d worked window cleaning for 30 years, and he was a part of a strike to win the highest safety standards for window cleaners in the country. 

That just happened a few years ago. Key leader, abducted. Actually he was on a flight getting flown out of a Texas holding camp to Mexico, and they actually had to pull him off the plane because they didn’t give him any of his diabetes medicine, and stabilize his condition before they could take him out. All this was before he’d been able to make contact with his family or even a lawyer.

So these were the kind of stories that were coming in daily. Uber, Lyft drivers being dragged out of their car that are part of our organizing committee, through the windows. Just this raw violence on our membership. So from that, we had a member meeting. 

The first layer is, truthfully, service and mutual aid. Just the raw need that happens must be addressed as organizations first, even before we can really look up at the power dynamics and getting people into motion. 

And that’s hard, because in many ways, our organizations are built to fight. But we do have to take that first moment and really make sure that we can support people where they are. So, Know Your Rights trainings — which Emilia’s organization had been a core part of for years beforehand — finding resources, legal support, food, all of those things. That was kind of the first wave of response.

But then members’ own fury on this was just getting increasingly, increasingly large. And so we had a Zoom meeting right around the time of the call that JaNaé was talking about, of the press conference declaring this day, and multiple members on the calls, about 150 of our top rank-and-file members, started saying, ​“We’re not going to go to work.” And so we just asked at the center, ​“Hey, we’ve heard that this call is out there from the community. We were seeing you in the chat saying that people want to honor — let’s just understand how many people are planning to not go to work for this day? And literally, 95% — again, we as union leadership were not organizing this whatsoever — 95% of those leaders said, ​“We’re not going to work.”

So I just think it was an incredibly powerful measure of, when community organizations have the courage and the clarity to call for a date and are ready to start building the infrastructure, that people’s anger needed a place to go. And we’d already done multiple, very large — in Minnesota by that point, I think we’ve done three 10,000 person marches, at least; that was just since ICE had gotten there, and a 70,000-plus-person march on the No Kings Day in the fall — so it was just such an important moment of congealing, here is something concrete that we can do, because we are so full of anger right now.

Each union has its own contract, has particular laws, sectoral dynamics. So we just had to really be thoughtful. We reached out to the employers as soon as possible and just said, ​“Look, we understand there’s tons of workers that are not coming in, so we want to be transparent with you and help understand what is happening.” Those were some of the first steps that we did, and those were the key first pieces.

And then once that had happened, there was this tectonic shift within the rest of labor. Not every local union is as impacted directly as Local 26’s membership is, but across the board, I think unions were really hungry in a way that I have not seen in many, many years of being within the labor movement, and willing to take risks. 

I think it was about four days after the press conference that JaNaé mentioned calling for this day of no work, no shop and no school, that the local Central Labor Council, the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, formally endorsed. 

And it really was just an incredible breakthrough, because some of the Locals in that CLC had not even taken a position explicitly about ICE’s presence in the city up to that point. It was just an incredible acceleration. This dynamic that has been so powerful in the last few weeks, which is, sometimes labor is the leading front on certain issues. 

Sometimes labor falls back a little bit, then community needs to lead. Sometimes, you know, spontaneous actors outside of organization take the lead. And just really trying to find the best strengths of each of those sectors, and running with that.

Denvir: Emilia, I want to break down a bit more what Greg was just saying there about the relationship between the provision of mutual aid and then organizing the mass fight back — two sorts of things that sometimes, on the left, get pitted against one another. How have you seen those operate together in Minneapolis?

González Avalos: I have seen mutual aid or service-based interactions act as a carrot in front of the person to be an agent for mobilization. And I have seen how that has enabled some simple, superficial transactions in ways that can ruin turfs. 

I have seen turfs in small towns in greater Minnesota that when they get an invitation, they’re like, okay, Am I gonna get a gift card? Am I gonna get a backpack? I’m like, ​“No, you’re gonna get freedom! You’re gonna be more free! We’re gonna get more free!” 

But that requires an actual different investment. If you do your mutual aid — this is a theory that we start trying to prove, because these are new findings on the go — if your theory is that there actually exists a path from service to power, the one non-negotiable is the leadership development that happens in between, so that people can make sense of how we cannot fundraise and food-bank our way to freedom. 

I am wondering, like, truly, I sometimes go to bed at night thinking, how did the Black Panthers do food banks and create free food places, and were able to translate that into such a radicalized leadership development that was taking an incredible amount of risk on the ground? I’m sure that all of this is information that has been kept in very relational containers of that legacy work. But that’s one of my curiosities, because I have seen how mutual aid has enabled powerlessness, has enabled victimization, and has enabled codependency. And you know, it can get you someplace. You can do a GoFundMe, and you might get $20,000, $50,000. That’s about it. Freedom, changing systems, changing conditions, having choices, is something that only can happen when you organize with other people. I wrestle with that. I wrestle with that when we have associate organizers that want to take shortcuts.

And so what I am learning right now is: Research shows us that there has been mass mobilization more than the 3.5% that folks argue is the right amount of people to topple fascism. But I think that what I’m learning right now is that this type of protest movement helps us create moral clarity, but we need to build a majority that imposes political consequences on these actors. 

So like movements are early, brave and clear, but they are not majorities. Alone, they can be insulated, demonized and repressed without backlash. Fascist projects expect this. This is why we’re seeing this oppositionary character demonization of people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed publicly. But majorities, by contrast, move differently. They’re cautious, there’s contradiction and they’re also risk-averse. 

So that’s the reality. We’re talking to businesses. We’re talking about the risk of not meeting the bottom line, and what are the consequences for the spreadsheet, and just different things that we did not contemplate when we were organizing people with a self interest of changing something in a lane. 

We are seeing the legitimacy break. This is wrong. This is not normal. Safety in numbers appears: participation feels collective, not heroic. Participation feels collective, not heroic. And then a credible alternative exists. Like there is a plan and a path forward for the bigger ​‘we.’ This is part of the popular front that exists to lower the cost of participation and normalize resistance to millions of ordinary people.

So what does that mean for the regular organizer? It means that you have to wrestle with how much of your ideology is your organizing, versus your relationships is your organizing. 

And relationships are always going to be the compass to create that kind of bigger ​‘we.’ Regular people do not care about ideology. There’s already a court and a condition set for sterilizing ideology and demonizing ideology in ways that we don’t have time right now to address and vaccinate, I guess. But the relationships, the actual listening and the relationships without the — the ideology is for the self, but like the actual relationships meet people on common ground. We don’t believe we should have fascism. That’s common ground. 

It doesn’t mean we get to compromise our ideology. It means that your ideology, it is not the tool for relationship building to be able to be successful at what we’re trying to build. So that will be my number one tool. And the thing that I address with our team who is on the ground and hears problematic things, and say they didn’t use my pronouns right—it’s a relationship. We want people who do not think like us. We want people who are regular, and regular people say this shit. And we still have to organize them.

Nammacher: One of the pieces that I think we have worked hardest on in the Twin Cities leading up to this point that allowed us to move fast — at the same time as also really blew my mind, how much we still didn’t know about the power that we were sitting on — is around coalitional dynamics and how to move effectively. 

I think in so many communities — I’ve organized in many cities around the country — labor unions are pretty turfy. They don’t generally cooperate with each other very directly, and are often competing over a pretty limited pie of political attention from the electeds. I mean, some states literally have a saying within the Democratic Party: Look, we’re going to move one bill this year, so you guys all fight it out, which one it is, and then we’ll move it. So I think labor unions are used to being in very light, un-meaningful coalition, where mostly everybody is protecting their own turf. I think in community organizing, there is tension over extremely limited resources. Competition and turfiness are built into the de facto structures of social movements in all the cities, at least in our country, that I’ve been in, and definitely in the Twin Cities.

So we have some theories, I think, that have been very important leading up to this, which is 10 years of intentionally not trying to build a big tent, broad coalition on any event that comes up, but trying to build a deep alignment of a set of organizations that are clear about building power. That means that it’s not big in number, but it is a set of leaders that are ready to take risks, and that are crystal clear — because at least on the Local 26 side, we are crystal clear about this: We are big enough and strong enough to win 3% raises each year. But if our demands are bigger than that as a union membership — and they are, because if we win a 3% at the bargaining table and our bargaining committee gets deported, then we have not moved forward one iota — if our demands are bigger than small, incremental steps forward in traditional bargaining, then we must be a part of a set of power organizations that can move faster and more powerfully.

But again, that does not mean that we jump into a big tent coalition with everyone. That means that we think systematically about who are the powerful organizations and sectors in our city that are ready to take risks, that need more than they can win by themselves, and that are hungry about that. The term we use for that is alignment. It’s a deeper thing. We’re underneath each other’s hoods. We are critiquing — Emilia used the term agitation, coming from the Alinsky tradition — we are agitating each other. We are pushing each other because we have a self interest in each other’s bases becoming stronger and us being able to grow and have more power. 

So I think that first concept of alignment is super important, and it was those core set of organizations that were the first ones that were able to really look each other in the eye and say, ​“Look, anybody can call for a big protest at this moment.” And that, of course, is important. In fact, the same group called for a big protest like three weeks earlier. So it’s not against big protests; those are absolutely essential in the first phases of mobilization. But that is just the first step.

I also think there is a second lesson, which is, once that alignment has made its choice and is serious and is real, then there is a second question, which is, is that alignment powerful enough? And I think in — again, we’ve got 10 years, 15 years of history of pulling off things that we refer to as weeks of action, which in some ways have the same architecture, where each different group would do its own action, on its own issue, on its own target, and that was wonderful. And then sometimes we do a unity march at the end. What was great is we again were supporting each other and building out a sense of deep solidarity. But it is also true, we did not trigger the imagination of the broader community in many of those. We almost always accomplished more than we would have by ourselves, but it was not this level of being on top of a wave. I think there was a choice then also. Once the press conference that JaNaé had named happened, once the small group of the aligned organizations came together and said, Okay, we can help seriously bottom-line this infrastructure, then there was a decision to open up to a broader set of organizations. And I just want to name that decision, because I think this is important.

We also spend a lot of time probably correctly analyzing the weaknesses of the other parts of our movement. No Kings, they’re great. They can do turnout like stuff that we’ve never seen in our lives. But man, those people cannot hold folks and do leadership development. Community groups, labor: They got money, they got political connections. But good Lord, if they ever moved their own base, we would actually be somewhere, plus half the time they’re racist. So all those critiques: probably pretty righteous. The clergy: Speak a good game. They can rain it down from the pulpit, but like, where’s the beef? So anyway, all these wonderful critiques.

But this was a moment, and I think this alignment intentionally — in addition to the bases that it was moving — made a choice that there were going to be players that were not traditionally in our tent, flawed players, but players that brought something that we knew we didn’t have. And I’m not talking about being humble. I’m talking about being extremely surgically clear that there are flawed characters and actors in your community that can, for sure as hell, deliver areas that you can’t. And if that’s true, you got to figure it out and figure out how to run with them. And that is just not how most of our local movements are built.

The numbers were mind-boggling. 700 businesses, small businesses, came out. Again, that was in part because of our organizational muscle, actually anchored by Unidos and others, but also because we were willing to dance with some folks that, frankly, had kind of opposed us very recently on some policy stuff. And the labor unions themselves, the state AFL-CIO ended up endorsing — again, just a tectonic shift with labor unions there. Students were doing walkouts throughout the week, in the week leading up to it, as well as the day itself. The Signal groups and the very decentralized, beautiful pieces that had been doing a lot of the immediate raids response that Emilia was talking about, and kind of a neighborhood based layer underneath that — again, limited in some of the things that they could execute on from our perspective as power-based organizations, but absolutely decisive in being able to move in this moment. So, to me, it was that that intentionality about understanding others can deliver what you can’t, that also opened this up to be at a level that was so much bigger than this structure and these organizational muscles have been able to deliver before.

Bates Imari: Yes, a million times yes. And I think both to the point of what Emilia was naming about needing this majoritarian support, and then what Greg is naming about — I would even use the term like respecting where other people are as well, because we know that that doesn’t always happen either in our organizations and in our different corners. And so actually respecting what others can bring to the table in a new way. It allowed for us to also have a clear strategy around defections. And I think that is something that you know, in this new era of this new level of a Trump administration, many of us have been getting clearer and clearer about — that we actually do need a number of people to defect from this current authoritarian regime. Part of the strategy as we were building not just toward January 23, but in knowing what we actually need in this political moment, it is going to require a whole set of people who drank the MAGA Kool Aid to say, ​“Oh, actually, this is awful,” and to say it with their chest, right? So we had to construct and flank them to be able to have a permission structure to do that. 

I know we had what Greg has named, like the 700-plus businesses who loudly signed on, but — and I know Emilia can speak to this as well — there were well over a thousand small businesses and midsize businesses that were closed on this day. And maybe those extra 300 were like, We’re closing in solidarity, and maybe can’t sign on the dotted line to be really bold and public about it. But recognizing that that is also a sign of the cracks in the systems. And I know we’re going to probably talk more about the actual impact of the day itself, and all of the many, many signs of defections that we’re recognizing. But I think it is important to note that that also required us to have intention about that as we were going into it. Like we had to have a compass towards this is not just about—like it is absolutely about ICE out of Minnesota, and that means we have to make sure that we are making room for a whole crew of people who would be willing to say that, who probably wouldn’t have a couple months ago.

Denvir: You know, general strikes are often called for on Twitter or little pamphlets or whatever. Yet they’re very rarely made a reality. In fact, I think the last U.S. general strikes were in 1946 when there were citywide general strikes in Stamford and Hartford, Connecticut; Camden, New Jersey; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Rochester, and Oakland. And of course, Minneapolis the prior decade, in 1934, was the site of a historic citywide general strike led by Trotskyist Teamsters, the same year that there were citywide general strikes led by other socialist and communist tendencies in San Francisco and Toledo.

And then you pulled off what you pulled off in Minneapolis on January 23, whether we call that a general strike or something else. What did it look like to pull this off, and what was the impact in terms of the balance of forces between mass resistance movements and the federal occupation, and in terms of within the mass resistance movement, building the strength, density, depth; transforming the collective subjectivity of the movement of movements that you’re building?

González Avalos: One is scale in day-to-day organizing in peace times, to adapt and code-switch into not-peace times, to like pre-fascism. And one of the understandings for organizers is that we are not seeking ideological agreement. We are trying to build collective capacity. Collective capacity: that means actual infrastructure, actual people. The agreement is not the key. The collective capacity is the key. There are three things that I note — again, this is the way my brain works. The way my brain works. I’m neurodivergent, so I like to put things in containers.

It was about being numerous enough. Like, are there enough people who are angry about this stuff? Who are showing up to our trainings and who want to do more? The second one: are we as institutions embedded enough? It doesn’t mean that there is a top tier of various smart people telling us what to do, but are we as institutions embedded enough with some sort of agreement on how we’re going to wield what we have built with our infrastructure in the past five to 10 years? And the third one is, are we disciplined enough? Are we disciplined enough to remain in this nonviolent, peaceful escalation that takes risks, that take that takes sacrifice, so that we can protect the normies that are coming and being onboarded, so that they feel that they have the courage to march in below zero degrees and not shop, not go to school, not use services for a day.

Those are the containers that I thought about as we were thinking about this. And when we’re talking about embedded institutions, embedded enough, it is about having like the comms folks, the people that know about like — JaNaé is an expert in communication. We have to also track what’s happening at the legislature and in the federal government. Everybody comes to their gifts in this embedding of talent and capacity and brain, so that then their popular front can take this collective risk in the public arena to move things and to move the needle in the direction that it’s required to topple pre-fascism.

Bates Imari: You know, thinking about that particular day, and what we were really intentional about building and constructing as we went there, and what I think we were very successful at was knowing that we needed to have a mass demonstration in the midst of very, very clear, illustrative violence that we are all seeing, right. By that point, I think we were getting polling that 80 plus percent of Americans had actually already seen the video, at least one video, of Renee Good being killed. So there was already a collective sense across the country that the federal government could murder people. We were simultaneously getting news that the FBI was refusing to investigate. They actually were instead choosing to investigate the family of the victim. There were just multiple stories that were swooning about what was taking place, and we needed to construct a massive action of people being very clearly nonviolent, but also being in a noncompliant, noncooperative mode, together, unified, and have that very broad contrast taking place for the world about the rampant violence, people’s cars being rammed, people’s windows being broken. 

You know, these mass militia literally snatching people from the streets as folks blow whistles and have their cell phones out. 

To Minnesotans in negative 20 degrees, negative 50 wind chill at some point throughout that day, together, cheering, chanting, in a full display of ​“we didn’t go to work, we didn’t go to school, we’re not spending a dime, what’s happening here is wrong, and the rest of the world needs to see this.” All of these different configurations of people that we’ve named, from the block-to-block work that’s been happening, to the institutional work, to the mutual aid, to the corporate actions that have been taking place across the state and continue to, simultaneously coming together in a large day. 

And from just the news clippings that I’ve gotten to see, and from just hearing from people all across the country, from hearing from even my normie parents in Ohio, I think that that was the thing that was wildly successful, even more than what we initially thought as we were in our planning. And the notion that people across the country and across political spectrum, were in the mode of, ​“I know that what’s happening is wrong, and I know there is something that I can do”, and the notion of nonviolent noncompliance being something that is, frankly, in this country, a tool that has been beautifully used, and I would say underutilized, being able to be levered in a moment that really calls for it.

Nammacher: I mean, some of the numbers from my perspective were just breathtaking. As I said, we had a recent tradition over the winter, since ICE’s occupation, of 20,000 plus folks in the streets on Saturdays. But it was consistently on Saturdays that those big manifestations were happening. And this was — different estimates are out there — but 75,000 to 100,000 folks on a work day, in the middle of the work day. That has just not been attempted. 

So that was amazing, let alone the wind chill that sister JaNaé was just laying out. And 100 clergy arrested at the airport making these demands on Delta, on the biggest companies in Minnesota, 3M, General Mills, Target, the biggest companies that at that point had been completely silent as to if they stood with Minnesotans or not. You know, filling a basketball stadium, and I think the tickets for that ended up going out 12 hours before we were going into the stadium, and filling the stadium as a warm place, frankly, for the march to go, so the speakers didn’t all speak outside. 

These are things that were not imaginable two weeks before. So it really did feel like history to our members. I know many Uber, Lyft drivers just started crying when we were checking in with them that day about seeing those pastors getting arrested at the airport, seeing all those people pouring downtown to defend them. You know, it was just incredibly powerful. And you know, the impact on the rest of the state? We did this major national poll which looked at likely voters in Minnesota. So not in the Twin Cities, not in Minneapolis, but in Minnesota. And they found that 80% had heard of the Day of Truth of Freedom on the 23^rd. 80% across the state of Minnesota. 25% said that either they or their loved ones took part. So if you extrapolate that, that would mean roughly a million Minnesotans took part in some way in the day. This is an event called for literally 14 days before. So it was really amazing. 

And then, of course, the short term impact is small. The big term impact is what we really care about, which is to end ICE funding at the national level, to get these fools out of our neighborhoods across the country. But in the short run, it absolutely broke the dam of the silence from the business community, and there was a letter that came out three days later for the first time, saying that they called for an immediate de-escalation. That letter is not enough. We continue to engage the corporations until they are much more decisive about whose side they’re on. But that said it was unquestionably a breakthrough, as well as the demotion or firing of Greg Bovino. You know, whatever they are going to do with that guy, who really cares? But you know, there was no break at all in the administration’s perspective that they were all full-tilt forward until [Jan. 23]. So I’m proud to have been a part of all the people who sacrificed for that day. And obviously this is just one step on a much longer path.

Bates Imari: And I think it’s worth noting what Greg is naming that we had our Faithful 97 who did risk arrest and were arrested at the airport, juxtapositioned to 20 hours later, where Alex Pretti is then murdered. I mean, violently beaten and shot to death. It is a very clear juxtaposition about what is happening here in Minnesota, what is the vibrancy of the fight of Minnesotans, as exhausted as we are, but not tired, moving forward together in the midst of the continued occupation, the continued violence by this particular regime.

Even as Greg is naming the shuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic is not at all like the very clear demand that came from folks who from this million plus in Minnesota who are demanding that ICE leave, with a whole other series of demands around what does it mean for us to, frankly, be clear that we’re caring for Minnesota, we’re caring for our neighbors, but we’re also very clear that Minnesota is being used as a test subject for what could happen in other places. Regular Minnesotans recognize that we are on the front line of a fight about whether we are going to be able to fully exist as free humans in our country? We want to stand in the affirmative, not just for Minnesota, but for all of our states here.

González Avalos: There’s different amounts of risks that people are taking, and there’s levels accessible for everybody. So clergy, they’re super leaders. They exist in their power organization. A few days before that action, there was a sit-in of regular moms in a Target nearby, and that’s a different risk. They sat down and spoke about what happened to Renee Good. This was before Alex Pretti was murdered. So they spoke from the perspective of being a suburban mom, a metropolitan mom. And nobody was arrested, but nobody was trespassing. But it is a level of risk that meets people in their own path. So having organizers that do not get in the way of people’s self agency and can be as ambitious when leaders and regular people are unleashed, is incredibly important.

Nammacher: I hope that this is a part of a national discussion, so thank you so much for opening up this space between organizers and different communities about how we learn from this experiment. 

I mean, there are many errors that we made, many things that could be better. This was just a first step down, I think, an intentional road to push the envelope and try and do something to your point that has had very little ability to execute in the US for decades. So we really look forward to that discussion. 

But I do think it’s also true that we’ve just got to be very clear. Just as we are training ourselves and trying to figure out how to do this, this administration is training itself. I mean, literally, it’s just viscerally true when you see them on the street. They are clearly learning from what they learned and responded to in LA. And then they went to Chicago, and they did a set of experiments based on that. And then they came to Minnesota, and they’re doing a set of experiments based on that. They’re systematically learning from each experience they have. And you see them in the street, I mean, they’re just like untrained, completely undisciplined people, tripping over each other, slipping on the ice. You know, we all entertain ourselves with that, you know, running into each other’s cars. Like they are just not very tight right now, but they’re training. They are training, and they are getting sharper. And each community they go to, they are going to be improving on what they did. And we have to do the same. 

And we should just be completely clear that while they’ve started politically by going after the group that this administration thinks is most vulnerable, thinks that is best for their TV ratings, they are building an internal, unaccountable army that will go after any and all domestic opposition. And so whether that is community, and community organizations that have nothing to do with the immigrant community, or that is churches, or that is unions — none of those structures are safe from this training that they are giving to them right now to use on all of us. And I just think the more folks are clear that while our immigrant brothers and sisters are unconditionally and unquestionably the front line and are taking the most risk, this is a set of tools that will absolutely be used on all of us, unless we use these opportunities to push back and learn faster than them.

Denvir: A few follow ups there. First, Greg, what might it look like to build a national infrastructure, or a national infrastructure of state and local infrastructures perhaps, that could support these sorts of actions across the country at scale?

Nammacher: So let me first say what I think it doesn’t look like, and then at least some instincts on what it could look like. And obviously we all got to build this together. So I don’t have a complete answer. You know, there is already in the Twin Cities, three new calls for new dates, for the next date that can be economic blackout or general strike. Again, it’s a beautiful spirit, the fact that this conversation is on the table with our community, and this community has so many centers of gravity and powerful, bold, courageous people that are ready to run, that is a beautiful thing.

But it is just also true, this is a new tool that I think we have to as a movement, really take seriously and understand the serious organizing that goes into it, just as the Civil Rights Movement did, you know, with its intentional acts of civil disobedience, as the Gandhian movement did, as any successful revolution around the world did. You just have to build very structurally and intentionally towards this. So we’re really excited about engaging in that dialog. But I think just naming dates and hoping that, you know, the whole community will show up, just risks two things. One thing is just, you don’t move the ball forward very much if it’s small. And you also just — if everything is a general strike, then, you know, every protest is a general strike. So I just think this is a beautiful tool. We stand on our ancestors’ shoulders in trying to use it in this new, contemporary context. But we just should be very serious about it and do the real work so that the next times that this needs to happen, it’s twice as big and much more national.

But in terms of the infrastructure that needs to be contemplated. I can just speak first within the labor movement and let my sisters speak to the other pieces. Labor just has to decide if it is going to be a leader in helping to set the conditions for these kind of citywide shutdowns. Obviously, each Local, each sector, has their own legal requirements, and we need to do our best to comply by those, but it is just also true there is a certain level of risk. And I think I don’t know of in the last 70 years, a people’s movement that has successfully fought back the slide from democracy into authoritarianism without a labor movement that is at the front — not alone, again, labor by itself cannot do it — but is at the front of the other leading sectors of the society, pushing back. Because we do the work, and the billionaires that back Trump’s agenda are dependent on our work. They get their profit from us. So I think this is a real reckoning moment about how can we actually relate to this as labor, and I think for those that are ready to go down that path and take those risks, I think then there’s just a systematic set of tools that we need to build.

I mean, the majority of labor unions in the U.S. have not struck just on their own bread and butter terms at the end of their normal contract expirations, in many cases, for generations. There is just a set of muscles and tools for how labor unions can support workers who choose to not come to work based on a community call for an economic shutdown. There’s just a set of tools that I think we have to help support our brothers and sisters to do. And I think if Minneapolis shows anything, it’s that these are concrete tools. We have many of these tools. 

This is not some Martian universe that we’re talking about. This is just another city that has been jacked up by a federal occupying force. And this can be replicated anywhere. Minnesota, we stand on incredible history here, but there’s nothing we’re doing that’s rocket science. This is basically just good organizing. And not even that good, semi-good organizing. The challenge is to take this off the pedestal, take this out of the history books, and let’s just start doing some concrete trainings on it. And we’re going to make mistakes, but we’ll start to get there.

González Avalos: I have more questions here. For example, I wonder how neoliberalism has affected the culture of organized labor. There’s some gains for the institutional labor movement in the U.S. and like, how does that affect the culture and their courage? And the same happens with a nonprofit industrial complex, like there is a natural ecosystem that can exist because of neoliberal policies that allows us to build some monetary foundations so that we can do and exercise our work. I don’t think it’s healthy to be oblivious about those forces and about the financial systems and how we’re trying to organize with those in the United States of America. 

The other contextual condition that is unique is that we are organizing within what people can call the belly of the beast. It is not the same to try to topple pre-fascism from Latin America or like colonized countries, than actually trying to do that in First World, where this quote by Gene Sharp, I can’t exactly paraphrase it, but he says something on the lines of by using the means of the oppressor, we have to understand that they have more guns than us. Like this is why we have to remain peaceful, because they have more guns than us. Just like power mapping, it’s just tool auditing. And it cannot be more true than in the United States of America, where the military budget surpasses the budget that many smaller countries live on. 

Those are contextual questions that we have to understand when we have to make decisions. Like we’re building a new reality. We’re building a better offer. I don’t think we’re going to be back in neoliberalism, because people cannot afford to be in that reality. It has not worked for the working people. But then this project of democracy, is it asking us to give something away in terms of our infrastructure, in terms of the way we relate with the billionaire and their funding and their money? I am very curious about that, but I tell you, for me as a person, I don’t know if my bosses at the board will be happy if I say this, I will be happy to work myself out of a job. Unida then wouldn’t have to exist. I’m not trying to build the most powerful organization. It’s not empire building for me, but I think that all of these questions will be answered in the next three to five years, as we’re trying to actually consolidate a majoritarian agenda that absolutely has to have a different relationship for working families in terms of the economy and financial systems.

Bates Imari: Yeah, I think that as we are thinking about what could happen in terms of building national infrastructure, I think a lot of that is happening right now, and you know, to Greg’s point that we want to do it with intentionality and be really thoughtful and make sure that we’re doing as much cross pollination as possible — I 100% agree with that. 

I’ll say it like this. Very recently, I got trained in Kingian nonviolent direct action training. And the beauty about Kingian training that is, of course, completely grounded in the philosophy of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, it talks about nonviolence as it is a posture and positioning that is both internal and external. It is an embodiment that you have to use in all aspects of life. 

That’s important to lift up right now, because what Emilia is saying is that where we were before is something that no one wants to return to, and where we go next is going to completely be grounded in where people are being cultivated to embody a particular kind of way. If we are thinking really about, what does it mean for us to build the kind of infrastructure to have a truly national infrastructure that could make possible a national strike or some sort of mass action of noncompliance in a very well-disciplined way, I think what is happening in terms of people being really clear about that we were all sold a story. I mean, many of us didn’t buy it, but definitely a lot of us did — bought a story about how the 2024 election was about being able to afford your life when a lot of people couldn’t. We realized what we bought was a spectacle of cruelty, like to show us this horror and violence and hatred toward certain groups of people. Like, if we could demonize Black people or immigrants or Muslims, surely you will forget that the money that we said you were going to get, we’re going to give it away to billionaires, and we’re going to put it into more spectacles of cruelty. 

More and more folks are waking up to, okay, that happened. Where do we go from here? 

And I do think it is going to be these institutions, places in Minnesota, in Chicago, in Portland, in DC, who have started to build this muscle, and have built a pretty good one, about how do we start to embody the next stage and get in some alignment together, about how we move together. I think those things are totally possible. I also think we need to think strongly — and of course, this is the faith lady in the room saying this, but we also need to think about our faith communities and faith institutions. You know, 64% of Americans go to church every Sunday and what does that mean about these institutions and what is possible? And that is a place where they are getting cultivated to embody a particular way of thinking. And from what we’ve seen just in Minnesota, when we had literally hundreds and hundreds of faith institutions sign on to the day of prayer and fasting for truth and freedom, either saying like, we’re going to open a space for vigil or we’re going to create spaces of mutual aid for people, but we are absolutely, unequivocally calling for ICE to leave Minnesota, and we’re talking about even evangelical churches. 

I do think that this is a really rare and prime opportunity, not just for what’s happening in Minnesota, but what is continuing to happen in our country, because you know what’s happened in Minnesota, of course, is not just about ICE. It’s also about, our federal funding is getting cut off, department by department. We haven’t even gotten to the fact that our child care assistance program has been cut here, our food assistance program has been cut here, our farmers federal funding has been cut here. There are ways in which this squeeze that’s happening here is expected to happen in other states. We are seeing it with our health care assistance that’s happening across the country. So how are people getting regimented and ready for what’s next? And we can do that together.

Denvir: Emilia, you mentioned that they have way more guns than us, and I think that’s an important point given debates that sometimes exist on the left, it would be highly disadvantageous for us, to put it mildly, for this conflict to become primarily an armed one. And yet not punching or even shooting back — I mean, easier said than done, because, as you’ve mentioned, the Trump administration has wanted nothing more than to provoke a certain sort of response from the people of Minneapolis, and they’ve been committing violent, brutal, rude outrage after outrage in an attempt to get that response, and yet they haven’t gotten that response. Minneapolis has shown remarkable discipline, staying nonviolent in the face of unbelievable provocation, just monstrous actions from these MAGA thugs in uniform. How has that happened? How have so many people stayed so disciplined?

González Avalos: I think some of that doesn’t have anything to do with our organizing. This is Minnesota. That’s what people call ​“Minnesota Nice” — like a lot of Scandinavian immigrants and you know, you have to really understand the history of what kind of settlers moved into the state. And it’s not perfect. I’m not trying to romanticize Minnesotans, but I think that tradition of welcoming refugees — let’s not forget that Minnesota was one of the places that welcomed a lot of refugees out of the wars in Southeast Asia, and then welcomed the refugees from Somalia. So that happened in the material facts of history. But I think that for organizers, it is a responsibility to understand history, to actually nerd out about what has happened in other places. 

And one of the things that became very clear to me happened during a visit to Chile. Like the Chile story is so interesting. There was a popular front. This has been the incubator of the most fascist and violent regimes that the history in Latin America has ever experienced, and the freedom looked like horrible neoliberalism that has created just basic food [insecurity]. Access to basic food is one of the key issues that people in Chile have to deal with. A few of us were there during the times where they were arguing about the plebiscite, a deep reform plebiscite, that they needed to remove these guardrails in order to create the reforms that will benefit working people. And in my conversations, there weren’t enough relationships, there wasn’t enough mistrust, and there were so many ideologies at the table, and I don’t think the task that the job was to defend the whole society was clear enough. So without that big material win, what happened — and I’m saying this in simple terms. I don’t mean to offend any Chileans. This is just very simple, high level, superficial for a podcast — but this is what shook me: from plebiscite to electing a Nazi. It’s mind blowing to me. It speaks to me about the actual efficiency that community organizers have to get very serious about in terms of ideology, in terms of organizing discipline, organizing math, and understanding the task that the defense is for the whole society. It is not for our lefty, socialist utopia. We can get there, maybe. I don’t know if that will be my job. But the task right now is a defense for the whole society.

When you have a democracy, we can continue to do reforms and make bets. A majority can create the conditions for governing. What I have seen is that revolutions have created conditions for counter fascism, for actual regression and more violent authoritarianism. I say this as I am a grandchild of the revolution. My great grandfathers were assassinated for trying to own land in the state of Mexico, they came to the village and killed all the men that were 14 and over, including my grandfather’s parents. 

And so the consequences, the actual generational consequences of that kind of violence when you’re trying to build an armed revolution is not just felt by the people experiencing that at the moment, it has been felt through generations of trauma. My grandfather developed alcoholism. God bless his soul, he was a very violent man. We have to understand what are we enrolling people to do and the risks that don’t end when the newspapers leave our state when the flashes are not here, when people are not writing about this. I don’t want to have that kind of responsibility with my members. I want to know that the things that we’re embarking on doing together are disciplined enough, studied enough, wrestled enough, because that is the job of organizers. 

That is the job of leadership, and I think we have to take that very seriously. There are consequences. There are deep, generational consequences of armed revolutions, whether or not they’re righteous, and I don’t want that for my children. I can say that as a person that actually grew up with those consequences in my family in Mexico City.

Bates Imari: I have been thinking about this question about the ability to maintain the kind of rigor and discipline that we have been able to in the midst of violence here. I agree that it is certainly not just organizing that has made that possible, and I would not overstate the role of organizing that has made that possible. I think this new flavor of Minnesota Nice, and I say that in a good way. Minnesota Nice is not always used in a positive, often in a pejorative, especially in Black spaces. But I do think it’s a strong bit of that has played a role. And I also do think that organizing and organizing capacity has played a large role, because what we’re seeing is that folks are mirroring where the center of gravity is. 

For example, the airport action that took place on Friday, where we had several hundred clergy who led that action, and then we had a few thousand who were there to show up and do what they thought they needed to do. And the clergy held the hold. They made it clear that this is a very somber moment. We are here in meditation and prayer for our state and for our country and for the over 2000 people who have been taken from this airport and sent somewhere, who have been disappeared and abducted. And holding that, it made it possible for the entire crowd to be singing with them instead of just shouting, ​“F--- ICE.” 

It is a mode, I think that that comes out of the discipline of those who have made the choice to lead, and as Emilia rightly named are taking responsibility for what happens where they are. I think about, speaking of history, what happened with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. And I think that’s very appropriate for what we’re talking about today, because people tend to talk about the linchpin of that happening was, of course, Rosa Parks being arrested on a bus. I got real bad public school education on that. First of all, let me say public school education is amazing, and we need to invest in it at every turn. I was taught years ago that Rosa just her feet hurt and she didn’t want to get up. And now, after like, actually finding out the very expansive way in which there were hundreds of people who organized for that — like Rosa was chosen among many.

Nammacher: She was the field secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, I think.

Bates Imari: And was absolutely chosen because of her ability to manage her emotions, her mastery of self, even down to the hue of her skin. They were very, very intentional and selective about who is going to be the one who does this today, on a particular day, at a particular time of day. Everything was meticulous. And I think that story needs to be told, because even from there, you’re talking about what happened after that, the meeting of 5000 in Holt Street, Baptist Church in Alabama, where they voted. They took a vote together to say, this is what we’re going to do so that they were taking responsibility for 381 days, which they didn’t know how many days it was going to be, but they were taking responsibility to make sure that people could still get their kids from childcare, that they could still get to work, that folks could go and get their groceries like literally having to build the infrastructure as they went along. But they got to lead that. 

And 5000 is, frankly, not even that many, but it ended up growing to many, many people being a part of that movement. But it’s because you had to have folks who were decisive, saying we are going to be disciplined, this is how we’re going to lead together. 

And I think it is that spirit, even here in Minnesota, that continues to lead. This is what we need. We need this nonviolent direct action that, again, is going to be a very clear contrast for what is happening. No one will be confused about who the peacekeepers are in the midst of what’s taking place.

Nammacher: We’ll add on the organizational side, which is, all of us have said, in some ways the smallest part of that incredible level of discipline and art and knowledge that we have to resist this violence with non violence and strength. So knowing that the majority of that is not done directly through our organizations, I do think that this is one of the hard things to hold organizationally, is that usually we run towards very clear deadlines. We run towards very clear objectives in a very sort of linear way. That’s not bad. That’s what organizations are good for. 

And obviously, in the last week and a half, two weeks, there was a very clear objective and a deadline, but we would not have met it if we had not built a capacity beforehand, built a capacity that we did not yet know how it would be used. Unidos trained I think 30,000 observers, legal observers. ISAIAH trained hundreds and hundreds of clergy, some of our close allies, trained thousands of folks in nonviolent disobedience, civil disobedience. 

Local 26 spent years, preparing our members to be able to defend their rights when they did not go to work. Those were muscles that we had to build, and I think particularly a call to our movement that now needs to be systematically built, even though we don’t necessarily have a date when we know we’re going to use it. Because it was the murder of Renee that made our deadline clear in the Twin Cities. 

I think this is going to be one of the hard organizational things to hold amongst us as organizers is, how do you build the capacity without knowing the date you’re going to use it on, but knowing damn sure you’re going to have to use it, but really being able to build that muscle and then have the flexibility to understand when conditions move such that you can use it.

Denvir: I want to zoom out and look at the longer story. A decade — in some sense, decades — of organizing and coalition building went into building just this really remarkable, durable progressive power at the local and and state level in Minnesota, a project that became known as the Minnesota Miracle, when Democrats took trifecta control of the state in 2023 and passed what’s been described as the most progressive legislative agenda since the New Deal. What did Minnesota organizers do, and what sort of strategy and infrastructure did they build to do it? How did various social movements and base building organizations, labor unions, religious leaders, various others, all strategically build this mass organizational capacity to transform local and state politics?

Bates Imari: Honestly, what we saw on January 23 was really an iteration of the concentric circles and configurations of organizations and groups that made that kind of thing possible. So in Minnesota, as we’ve named, there has been an investment into real organizing, into base building, into development of leaders, into development of people, regular Minnesotans being able to have agency. And because we are working with a bunch of regular people, we also know that a regular person is not — very, very, very few, if any, one-issue people exist. In the same way that Greg is naming that like, yes, their leaders want this 3% increase, but they also want to make sure that they can ensure that their neighbors are getting snatched off the streets. They want to, make sure that we have thriving education systems and health care, etc. That is also true of regular people, which means that, frankly, it is a whole lot easier for us to be in real relationships with one another when we do have bases to be able to construct the kind of muscle needed to where we’re not going to have this crab in a barrel mentality and fight over crumbs, but actually make the decision. We got to make the decision together. And it didn’t happen out of anywhere. It was literally years of us working together to then be able to say, Okay, we’re going to fight together for the whole pie, and not for the crumbs of the pieces of that pie. The example that I love to give in case folks are needing something really concrete around this: So I was one of the leads around voting rights restoration for formerly incarcerated people, and Emilia was one of the leads on driver’s licenses for all. And so years ago, when there was a trifecta in like 2010, there was a push, of course, for driver’s licenses to get passed, and for voting rights restoration to get passed. And those coalitions could have worked together, but were told by legislators, in the same way that Greg is saying can happen. like, you get one bill. We can’t do two controversial things. You get one. Figure it out. 

While it never came to a big brawl, these two coalitions kind of went to their own corner and tried to get their thing, and then at the end of the day, at the end of that session, they said, sorry, we ran out of time. We’re not doing either. And so we learned our lesson. These coalitions, along with so many others, around paid family medical leave, around childcare funding, around education funding, around healthcare, actually got into real relationships and alignment. 

So it was not coalition, but it was actually alignment with one another, so that we could then go and fight for, when the conditions were ready, to go pass all of our shovel ready bills, because we’ve been working on them for forever. It was just really important, yes, to be able to pass all of these together, and knowing that, frankly, many of these groups also helped to create the conditions so that the political conditions were ready to pass these bills.

González Avalos: I think for us, Unidos is one of the largest undocumented and mixed-status constituencies in the state. We used to be an immigrant rights organization only, and then we started adding constituencies, and we’re now a multiracial organization, and immigration continues to be a key project in a key campaign. But from the perspective of undocumented folks — and I was not a citizen, I was very undocumented back when we started the actual infrastructure — the conversation with legislators was entirely about political consequences, and for them, the only political consequence was best measured in electoral participation. We’re not an electorate that can vote. We’re not sizable. We are essential workers; we do not have a heavy economic power or any organized monetary alignment per se, like business associations or organized labor, AFL-CIO. We had to build political means of production. We understood that all these benefits that First Amendment provides through c-3 c-4 and PACs did not forbid immigrants or non citizens from that kind of infrastructure building and participation. 

So we built our c-4s we build our independent expenditure. We have the option of building a coordinated PAC, but we didn’t do that because we didn’t have enough pro-immigrant majority to be considered as part of the Democratic Farmer and Labor project. That kind of infrastructure allowed us to not remain in the nonpartisan, very rigid c-3 infrastructure, but gave us a pathway to start getting at some battles from the social welfare side, which is — c-4 money is harder to raise. But also contest some of the political means with infrastructure and for example, our first bet was to talk from our c-4 side, about Al Franken. 

Al Franken actually verbally opposed DACA, even though this was not a congressional project. He thought it was unsustainable, which it is, but it was something. It was a material gain for undocumented students, and we didn’t have a vehicle to talk about that in the public arena from a c-3 perspective. We needed an independent expenditure with some oppositional bandwidth. And we did a very small project, I kid you not, that cost us less than $1,000 with a very small positional project. And we were able very fast, to get a meeting with, to have access to a whole lot of different strategies and political conversations that we had been very foreign to do. 

Caucuses are very big in Minnesota. I could never enter a room where caucuses were taking place, because I’m not a citizen. I was not a citizen back then. I am a citizen now, but I was not a citizen when we started building Navigate, now Unidos. 

So these vehicles, like the actual infrastructure, as mundane, as simple as that can be, but like having the intuition and the sharpness that this type of infrastructure will break barriers so that we could participate in different and unexpected ways, created a whole new arena of contesting and building that then led to the trajectory to contest power, organize voters and set up an agenda that became part of the combination of the Minnesota Miracle 2.0.

We organized the largest Latino GOTV operation in the state, larger than the party, which, I must say, do not think highly. It was a very low bar building something bigger than the party was not a high bar. They were not taking this constituency seriously at all. We did, and we had the receipts for that. We also changed the way in which they relate to the Latino voters in the state and in other places. We also, with ISAIAH, were able to change the rules of caucusing, and we transformed the conditions so that regardless of citizenship or incarceration history, anybody can caucus in Minnesota. That is incredibly empowering for undocumented folks to get the calls from the congressman, from the senator, in ways that not even sometimes citizens experience. So in our lane, that part of infrastructure, those types of lessons were formative so on how we could hold our ground and our agenda when we had the majority in 2023. 

And we also had agreement with labor and organizations about what’s a social contract. We just don’t leave people behind. Mean it, not just say it, don’t get in our way. Respect our leadership. We’re going to do our work on our side. It doesn’t mean that I’m expecting the AFL or SEIU to build our term, give us comms and give us money. We build a reputation, we build the term, we build the infrastructure, and we utilize it and operationalize it to deliver the wins that our members deserved. But we didn’t have a piecemeal where we were fighting each other for breadcrumbs. We were clear that we were not going to tolerate that kind of inside and outside divide and conquer. And I think that is one part of the key elements on how, this alignment of Minnesota was actually able to pass so many important, groundbreaking reforms with a majority of one in the Senate. So now we are in a different project. We built this infrastructure, and now it’s scaling. So we’re thinking about scaling for the next time.

Nammacher: So completely agree with what JaNaé and Emilia said in terms of, you know, the electoral infrastructure that was built, the clarity at all times on this being an alignment of organizations that are building power. 

Again, advocacy organizations are wonderful. We need them for smart people to help us figure out how to land the plane. But power organizations based on real memberships and working class Minnesotans — that is what distinguishes all of our organizations, and running hard understanding of those bases and how to organize them was at the center. 

And of course, as JaNaé talked about, if there are real power bases and you are making a play on electoral power, then the way that you approach policy and the kind of negotiations that you have to do change, right? And we’ve been able to navigate those, you know, some successes, some failures. Obviously, we didn’t win everything we wanted to, even in the 22-23 sessions. But I think we’re at a much higher level of coordination than we were before. 

I think that the other pillar I would hold up is what you were asking about, is a set of legislative breakthroughs. One of the pieces that I think was also critical was around a clarity and a power analysis in Minnesota, which was that there are a set of the corporations, in fact, the same corporations that did this letter three days after our economic blackout on the 23^rd of January, those same corporations, we believe, are the ones that really dictate the parameters and the extent to which policy can move and politicians can have narrative in our state. Only engaging the politicians themselves is not enough. 

There has got to also be a direct engagement of those corporations that are so powerful in our state. And I think that’s true in many states. There is a set of large corporations that really dictate the parameters upon which folks can play. 

Going 15 years back, we ran unified campaigns across our different constituencies on many of those different major players, and won incredible breakthroughs. And I just think this was important, because a massive legislative set of breakthroughs is hard to generate in a single session. 

That was built on a decade of work. It’s critical for the movement to get small pieces as you go. Those can be small policies, God bless. But also the incredible power of running directly at those puppet masters who dictate the terrain of politics in our states, these large corporations, we have been able to get an incredible number of concrete wins from engaging them directly through things that we call Weeks of Action, multiple different organizations doing actions, leadership schools, where we’re training folks from across our different bases to understand each other’s fights and how to build pressure in direct action on those companies. 

So a whole set of just very specific tools at a certain level, but those have been helpful in feeding the movement and feeding our separate bases with very concrete wins on this longer road, as we contested for, as Emilia said, the production and the reproduction of the political space, as we contested for a set of very concrete wins along the way that then also were these muscles that we then were quite familiar with, albeit in different, smaller instances, that we could then use on comparatively short notice when this federal set of agents came and occupied our city.

Denvir: Emilia Gonzalez Avalos, Greg Nammacher, JaNaé Bates Imari, thank you all very much.

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