I interrupt your doom scrolling with flowers courtesy of Philly. 💜
06.03.2026 23:35
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I interrupt your doom scrolling with flowers courtesy of Philly. 💜
The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence, and the Politics of Policing in America by Michelle S. Phelps
Michelle S. Phelps
Congrats to @michellesphelps.bsky.social, whose book The Minneapolis Reckoning won the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Outstanding Book Award. This urgent work describes how Minneapolis arrived at the brink of police abolition and why reform is so difficult.
Get your copy: hubs.ly/Q0453BKz0
This morning, more arrests of activists were made as the federal government unsealed the full superseding indictment from a grand jury that charges 39 people who were allegedly involved in a January protest at Cities Church in St. Paul where an ICE field director is also a pastor.
Throughout the Twin Cities, residents are carrying on the state’s long-standing tradition of solidarity. You can read my latest piece on mutual aid and 'Minnesota nice' in The Conversation. theconversation.com/minneapolis-...
in 2020, voters for the winner (Biden) outnumbered eligible people who didn't vote for the first time in about a century.
In 2024, even though Trump got a *slight* majority of those who voted, people whose decision was "nah, not going to do this" outnumbered people who voted for Trump.
This has nothing to do with fraud.
The agents Trump allegedly sent to investigate fraud are shooting protesters and arresting children. His DOJ is gutting the U.S. Attorney’s Office and crippling their ability to prosecute fraud. And every week Trump pardons another fraudster.
Chart showing that the 213 forms filed by the govt are overwhelmingly for people with no criminal conviction
We sued for I213 forms, records the govt uses to prove that a person is in the country illegally. The forms detail a person's criminal history.
We got 8 months of records and only 23% of people had a criminal conviction
Really appreciate this data reporting from the @startribune.com, which comes with the appropriate cautions about the crowd-sourced data. Looks like the ICE/DHS surge in MN is down significantly, but (a) was HUGE compared to other cities, (b) impacted the suburbs A LOT, and (c) is still happening.
IV. CONCLUSION An anonymous government is no government at all. It cannot be held accountable. A masked agent freely uses force without justifying his actions, and the public cannot name him to challenge his conduct. A regime of secret policing has no place in our society. Here, the Government’s power is derived by the People, and the People must be able to identify the Government when it acts to infringe on their liberty. Masks obscure government action and deprive the public of its Fourth Amendment protections.
An anonymous government is no government at all.
It cannot be held accountable.
...A regime of secret policing has no place in our society.
Here, the Government’s power is derived by the People, and the People must be able to identify the Government when it acts to infringe on their liberty.
Huh, well apparently electeds are being told the number is 500 and still dropping: bsky.app/profile/star...
At the stage of exhaustion where my husband had to convince me we should order pizza instead of having cereal for family dinner. That's partnership. 😂
Screenshot of a graph reads Figure 1. Projected total excess rent debt since the beginning of Operation Metro Surge given different scenarios about the proportion of immigrant households behind on rent in January and February 2026.
New study from @curaumn.bsky.social: "We estimate that 30–50% of immigrant renters may be at least one month behind on rent by February 2026."
Researchers estimate that excess statewide rent debt linked to ICE's occupation reached between $27.4 million to $51.3 million by February 2026.
Graph showing estimated ICE deportees at MSP Nov 10 - Feb 20; sporadic activity of around 40 people per flight some days is shown before Jan 5, followed by a large crescendo to 250 people per day that lasts several days, before decreasing, with no flight on Feb 13, and a handful of people shown each day for the last few days.
7 detainees were loaded onto today's ICE Air flight at MSP.
The number of detainees leaving MN is down, but demand for rent/food assistance remains high.
📊 Data: ottergoose.net/ice-flights-msp/msp-ice-flights.numbers
💵 Help: standwithminnesota.com
🚗 Airport Parking: mn50501.org/donate
Observed ICE flights out of MSP is one possible metric. It's harder to track abduction sightings outside the cities bc there's less organized ICE watch.
bsky.app/profile/otte...
We should know how many DHS agents are still in MN. There's definitely fewer abductions happening in Minneapolis, but it's not over.
Let me explain what this genuinely EVIL memo does. The admin is doubling down on its plan to arrest, detain, and interrogate tens of thousands of legally present refugees; people already vetted who’ve lived here legally for 1+ year.
Hundreds were arrested in Minnesota before a court blocked this.
There's always that delightful moment of surprise, like "oh! You want me to PROVE I am not a teenager?!" And then you realize the clerk's annoyance that they are once again waiting on some middle aged person to dig out their ID. 😂
If you like Will's writing, you should read his book of essays called Farewell Transmission:
bookshop.org/p/books/fare...
My friend, the brilliant essayist Will McGrath, wrote an essay about the beauty of resistance in all its forms here in Minneapolis.
"Everyone is doing his part here, each to his ability. This is easier to accomplish, it seems, when joy and love are the engines."
🎁:
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/o...
But he will also be remembered for the quiet moments. If you were in his company, you would feel seen. You would feel seen in your own struggle to be understood, in the fight for this country.
His fight for justice, for humanity, for Black liberation & Black joy lives on in every one of us.
These are the conditions under which the Trump regime wants to detain noncitizens indefinitely. It violates international law, the Eighth Amendment, and our own laws & regulations.
And the DOJ and DHS are willing to manipulate any law, defy any court order, to keep doing so.
26/
Operation Metro Surge resulted in a $203 million impact on Minneapolis. Every penny is a loss to the City’s economy, people’s livelihoods, shelter and food security.
Read more about the preliminary impact assessment released by the City: https://www.minneapolismn.gov/news/
‘Our opponent is tricked out with military gear, staying in Hilton hotels and renting Enterprise cars, with technological support from Palantir and Amazon Web Services.’
NEW: Amna A. Akbar writes from South Minneapolis
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...
But this is not an expression of despair. It is a diagnostic question, posed here to a profession that has long claimed stewardship over constitutional meaning. If law is to function as anything other than a retrospective vocabulary for state violence, as a lens inverted to minimize and occlude the contours of such violence and its meanings, then it must be wielded deliberately—naming what is happening, clarifying what doctrine permits, and refusing to continually mistake restraint for good judgment.
a beautifully written and powerful piece from University of Minnesota Law professor Emmanuel Mauleón on the stakes of how the legal profession responds in this moment.
lpeproject.org/blog/whistli...
Here’s the thing: All non-violent political movements are engaged, at some level, in a contest of persuasion. In such a contest, images matter. Optics matter. Always.
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾✊🏾
It's also still unclear exactly what the sheriff / state traded away for this and the consequences. Homan indicates he got greater access to the Henn Co jails, which would make sense with Witt's public handwringing. (But, hey, at least it seems like they failed to ransom the state for voting data?)
Not to mention there's still been no accountability for the killings of Good or Pretti, and who knows how many people wrongly detained or deported. And it's not as if the DHS goons are disappearing into the ether -- they'll just go to another city to see if civil war sparks there. It's all so grim.
It remains to be seen how this promised "drawdown" in MN will go, but in the meantime as the prez admin declares "victory!" people in MN are hitting a new crisis of overdue rent, failing businesses, and traumatized kids with learning loss. This was always the "best case" end and still it's so bad.