Minnesota shows the way forward – Fight state terror with class struggle!

Over the last few months, thousands of ICE agents – federal immigration officers – have descended on the US state of Minnesota.

Centred on the cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, these officers have been snatching people they suspect to be undocumented immigrants from their homes, workplaces, and even off the street.

Widespread anger erupted following the murder of Renee Good by ICE agents at the start of the year. Appalling images, like a five-year-old in a bunny rabbit hat being detained outside of his pre-school, fanned the flames further internationally.

The movement we’ve seen in response to this state terror has exposed not the power of the state, but its weakness.

Confronted with mass, collective struggle by the working class in the de facto general strike on 23 January – and the protests following the murder of legal observer Alex Pretti the day after – the mighty American capitalist class flinched. Trump has been forced to backtrack. “We are going to de-escalate a little bit,” he snivelled.

These events demonstrate the immense capacity for self-organisation that exists in the working class. No one has been leading this movement. Ordinary people, facing down the state’s violent thugs, realised they could not wait for someone else to step up and save them.

Networks of Signal chats constituting thousands of people were set up to track ICE activity in the city. Patrols were co-ordinated in detention hotspots, with residents tailing identified ICE vehicles. Over 65,000 people signed up as ‘legal observers’, trained to intervene in ICE raids.

Neighbourhood warning systems were put together, involving people using whistles and car horns to warn of agents in the area. Some workplaces even established protocols, such as barricading the doors to prevent their coworkers being detained.

This follows on from the experience of Los Angeles residents last summer, when Trump flooded the city with ICE agents, and then again from the experience of Chicago in the autumn. All of this builds on the lessons of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

In Britain, we too can learn from the Minnesotan masses, in our fightback against Starmer’s state repression.

The Labour government is ramping up its attacks on migrants, and not just verbally. Starmer has promised to spend a further £280 million on ‘border security’, and has boasted about deporting record numbers of ‘illegal’ migrants.

In January 2025, there was a 73 percent increase in Home Office immigration raids and arrests. 600 migrant workers were arrested in over 800 raids, which deliberately targeted industries with large migrant workforces.

Meanwhile, the British state is ramping up political repression, too. Over a dozen pro-Palestine protestors were arrested just last month in London, for expressing solidarity with Gaza. Political prisoners, meanwhile, were left to starve on hunger strike.

Labour’s ‘law-and-order’ ministers are continuing the Tories’ agenda of beefing up police powers, and deploying state forces against activists, strikers, and dissidents.

No wonder, therefore, that the scenes coming out of the USA have elicited the anger – and inspiration – of workers and youth in Britain, and across the world.

The Minnesotan masses have shown the way forward: the way to fight back against state terror is with class struggle!