A Crucial Moment
This is a pivotal moment in a struggle between the people and tyranny. At the center of this conflict are the Twin Cities of Minnesota. In the winter of 2026, thousands of federal agents occupied Minneapolis and St Paul. They came under the pretext of immigration enforcement, and they abducted some 4000 of our Latino, Somali, Hmong, and other immigrant neighbors. In reality, the state's motive was political. It aimed to crush our cities' historically radical, horizontal, and community oriented culture. We must understand Operation Metro Surge as a campaign of retaliation for the uprisings of 2020.
ICE's violent escalation fomented a popular resistance that spread to every neighborhood in the Twin Cities. The residents' actions became one of the clearest demonstrations of horizontally organized power seen in modern American history. Without clearly defined leaders, people from every background, identity, and age provided for their neighbors and fought back against the federal occupiers.
This movement realized its power on January 23, when more than 300,000 workers collectively refused to work. and more than 100,000 people marched on the streets of Minneapolis. This action was either the first general strike in twenty years (since the 2006 Day Without an Immigrant), or in eighty years, since Minneapolis's last general strike in 1934. This mass action brought the administration's paramilitary takeover of an American city to a sudden halt. It provoked an immediate response from the capitalist class: the day after the strike, the CEO's of 60 companies sent a letter to the White House begging for de-escalation. The same day, Border Patrol agents murdered our comrade and fellow union member Alex Pretti. People in the streets widely believed his murder to have been retaliation for the strike. By January 26, the regime fired Greg Bovino as "Commander-at-Large" of Customs and Border Protection. It formally ended Operation Metro Surge two weeks later.
The federal government punished the Twin Cities community for its fundamental decency and self-preservation. Tens of thousands of people rose up in defense of their neighbors. ICE agents beat community members, saturated neighborhoods with tear gas, and murdered Victor Manuel Diaz, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti. After failing to get a single "Assault on a Federal Officer" charge to stick against 16 rapid responders, now the administration seeks to imprison a select few organizers.
The conspiracy charges against the Minnesota 15 are an attempt to legitimize state violence against the people, to intimidate anyone who would challenge this violence. More broadly, the campaign against the cities is an attempt to suffocate a young movement in its crib. Neither Operation Metro Surge nor the subsequent conspiracy charges produced their intended effect. Our enemies do not understand why we are effective.
The federal government wants to find a symmetrical opponent: it is looking to take out the leaders of an imaginary hierarchy. It can't understand a decentralized model of organizing in which we are all leaders, that relies on everyday people taking the initiative themselves, that no one organization could possibly control precisely because of the sheer density of autonomous action sweeping through the society. The state tried to strangle what it imagined as an infant movement. Instead, it encountered a mature resistance driven by shared values and commitment.
The DOJ's charges rest on the defendants' alleged membership in certain anarchist and anarchist leaning organizations. The government chose these groups as convenient targets not because they directed the whole resistance, but because they clearly articulated the principles underlying it. Anarchists place working class power, direct action, decentralization, democratic decision-making, community well-being, and inclusion at the center of our work. These qualities found their expression in the hyperlocal neighborhood groups that organically formed to resist ICE. It is not so much that anarchist ideas infected the resistance; rather, people adopted these methods for practical reasons out of trial and error. They're the only thing that worked.
Horizontalist Principles
The regime does not hate us for no reason. The vitriol the administration has for the Twin Cities is born from its fear of how effective the resistance has been. Our movements have been implementing horizontal (lead​erless) tactics to fight the state and support ourselves since long before ICE launched its occupation. Tactics such as "commuting", dispatched Signal calls, and filter blockades looked like new innovations to the casual observer. In fact, each of these tactics represented the mass generalization of practices that local anarchists had pioneered at least as far back as the Jamar Clark uprising of 2014, or in some cases even further. Many who participate in these tactics and systems call them "community", "mutual aid", or simply "helping our neighbors". Few use the term "horizontalist" to describe their beliefs or actions, but we recognize our politics in practice.
The Twin Cities held its racist and murderous police to account in 2020 when the George Floyd uprising erupted. There was no need then for convoluted leadership structures, top-down authority, or institutional power to inspire a global movement. During the recent federal occupation, the Twin Cities again demonstrated the power of these potent resistance principles. The intensity of the state's actions, both during Metro Surge and afterward, shows that it wants to eliminate hope in a future that organizes around these horizontal principles.
What is horizontalism? How was it implemented? And why does the ruling class fear it? Horizontalism refers to a situation in which people work together with equal authority and shared power. It rejects vertical structures, where one person, or a small group, exercises authority over the people below, who then exercise authority over the next level, and so on. In a horizontal structure, no one holds standing authority over anyone else. People discuss and vote on important decisions. Wherever possible, they reach consensus, meaning everyone agrees on a course of action. No one has the right to dictate another community member's actions. In Minnesota, thousands of people practiced horizontalism when they gathered in church basements, libraries, homes, and coffee shops to decide how they were going to help their neighbors.
Horizontal action took many forms during Metro Surge. People organized food drives, where less-affected people drove meals to immigrant neighbors sheltering at home. No nonprofits were involved; this avoided means testing people to see if they were truly hungry before offering food. The community helped the community. People created countersurveillance teams to respond to ICE directly at the level of neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and even alleys. No central hub barked orders to send patrols across the Metro area; instead, more than 80 neighborhoods had volunteer dispatchers who ran Signal calls to coordinate their local patrollers. Neighbors watched from apartment windows. They went out into the cold to blow whistles, yell, and record when agents detained people in their building or from their block.
There was no single hotline to call. No one issued nightly instructions. There were instead many different signal chats where local groups shared information about what was needed, what worked, and where ICE was operating. The people in these chats became more connected over time.
Even the traditional labor movement began to operate more horizontally. Some unions operate with rigid top-down structures, where leaders dictate what rank-and-file members should do. During the occupation, union leaders and rank-and-file members alike gathered at Workers' Assemblies. Some of these drew more than 400 participants. These bodies organized rallies, events, and work stoppages that spanned multiple industries and locations, including the massive action on January 23rd.
The federal invasion tightened the political space between every group of people who opposed ICE. Liberals, socialists, anarchists, and huge numbers of "apolitical" ordinary workers built informal coalitions to resist our common enemy. We found ourselves in the streets side by side with people with whom we had little in common. It was not uncommon to see a 70-year-old woman driving on patrol with a 20-year-old man riding copilot.
The state fears horizontal organization because it works. It reveals the power of community and cooperation. During the surge, people sheltering from federal assault received food. Workers took strike actions in multiple industries--including airport workers, telecom workers, educators, graduate student-workers, and Amazon warehouse workers. Community members prevented unlawful detention. Residents often knew ICE was coming minutes before they arrived. Children received escorts to school. None of this required orders or a central coordinating body. This work reminds us that we do not need, and should not want, the state to interfere in our lives to keep us safe, healthy, and happy. Much of the time, the state seems to be the problem.
In the Twin Cities, politicians from both parties, police, and businesses large and small refused to help the community. Many of them actually compounded the oppression. Tens of thousands of people realized that their neighbors would have to save them and one another. The marchers who walked through the streets chanted "We keep us safe!". People stopped begging the state, corporate leaders, and landlords to provide what they needed. When we all reduce our reliance on so-called authority, we directly reduce state and corporate power in both the short and long-term. The powerful fear horizontal organizing and self-reliance. They will do everything they can to destroy it.
Anarchism vs Vanguardism
Horizontalism is a substantial component of anarchist ideology. This is oppose​d to vanguardism which relegates decision-making to a small group that takes revolutionary action on behalf of the people. Vanguardist organizations proved to be impotent in fighting ICE's fascist paramilitary takeover of the Twin Cities. Marxist vanguard parties were mostly absent from workers' assemblies, grassroots rapid response chats, and hyperlocal community and neighborhood groups.
The federal government seems to recognize this contrast. The Pentagon declared their goal to use "whatever means available" to eradicate anarchist groups in the May 2026 document "United States Counterterrorism Strategy". Here, our opponents illustrate the power of anarchism and similar horizontal ideologies and how they threaten state power. The memo excludes vanguardist groups. This exclusion implies the state does not see high-control activist groups of the modern era as a threat to state sovereignty. These groups do not represent the values and effective tactics of the Twin Cities resistance. They provide no secure future for the movement born out of the resistance to Operation Metro Surge. We should focus our energy on the groups enacting horizontalism and effective resistance, and not on disparate vanguards attempting to build their own power upon the backs of the people.
Counterinsurgency Tactics of the State
The state has long used subterfuge, violence, and the carceral system to destroy effective movements.
The state recognizes no limit on its surveillance. It sends plainclothes officers into various groups pretending to pose as activists and gather information. These officers often try to push the members of these groups toward harmful and/or illegal actions. Such tactics formed a central part of the counterintelligence program used to dismantle the Black Panthers and Young Lords. When people dissent openly, the state also uses direct forms of surveillance. It collects wiretaps, phone records, bank statements, and more. These practices are intended to instill fear and mistrust. In groups with clear leadership structures, agents can infiltrate the decision-making body and alter the group's values and actions from within. Discovery evidence in this case shows that the state surveiled anyone who showed even a hint of anger at their neighbors being illegally arrested and paraded in the snow in their underwear. The surveillance apparatus spied on multiple unions, activist groups, nonprofits, libraries, and churches.
Once the state decides it has gathered sufficient evidence, it brings extreme charges and threatens bloated sentences over people's heads. Court proceedings then consume years of people's lives. Fear intensifies when comrades face thirty years in prison for moving a box of literature, as in the Prairieland case. The simple threat of imprisonment and very public court hearings and legal battles can instill fear on their own. This process upends and destroys lives, even when people have committed no illegal act.
When the state exhausts surveillance and carceral intimidation, it resorts to violence. At Whipple, protesters regularly face kettling, beatings, detention, and release into the winter cold without adequate clothing. At the site of Alex Pretti's murder more than 50 unmarked SUV's with tinted windows drove down 26th street. Agents hung from vehicle windows, fired indiscriminately at protesters, and gassed the entire neighborhood. Agents also killed community members before, during, and after the surge, both in the Twin Cities and around the nation.
We denounce these acts of repression and will continue to fight both the repression of the state and the counterinsurgency tactics it carries out. The Department of Justice accuses multiple community members of being members of the Black Cat Workers Collective (BCWC) and names BCWC directly in the indictment. Federal prosecutors attempt to justify these accusations and charges by invoking the Pentagon's earlier declarations, which characterized anarchism and other forms of resistance as inherently terroristic. These claims are patently ridiculous. The world can see it.
Our organization is a convenient target for the state for two reasons. First, because they want to make sure what happened in the Twin Cities never happens anywhere else. They can't indict everyone who resisted ICE. In order to threaten the entire movement, they need to find a scapegoat who they perceive to be its radical flank. It was a foregone conclusion that someone was going to be charged for the resistance. Second, we present a convenient target simply because Trump's NSPM-7 order directs the Department of Justice to focus on anarchists and antifascists. This is a bid to criminalize our politics and drive an artificial wedge between revolutionaries and the rest of the working class. Regardless of how modest a role Blac​k Cat played in the resistanc​e, conjuring up dangerous anarchists is how HSI agents get promoted.
Let us be crystal clear:
We will never stop fighting for the well-being of our communities. We will not be intimidated. We will continue to resist the state regardless of the legal tactics attempting to restrain us. We demand the immediate and unconditional dismissal of all charges against Minnesotans involved in resistance actions. We share in the thirst for freedom and love for and within our communities. We share the indomitable will of the Twin Cities, Minnesota, and the world. We will never leave our comrades behind. We will continue with courage until our communities obtain liberation.
Marathon of Resistance
To everyone sympathetic to our cause: the struggle is not over. It will not end soon and it began long before the present crisis. Everyone in this movement has entered a marathon of struggle and must treat it accordingly. When the state attempts to imprison your comrades, pack the courtrooms. When it surveils your workplaces, demand your bosses respond or else withhold labor peace. When it kills members of your community, grieve with their families and sing their names. When it attacks marginalized groups, protect them. When it demonizes love, love harder. Do not quit ever!
To sustain this work, the community must use the same practices that first placed a target on its back. They must help one another and accept one another's help. Those in the community must lean on those around them and, in turn, be a pillar on which others can lean. This community orientation extends beyond actions against the current administration. When planning your next community event, accept the help others offer. Use your skills where they can contribute most. Call your friends when they're sad. Call them when you're sad. Show up for your community. Grow and donate food. Eat the food someone offers you. We will get through this together.
The community must confront fear through caution and courage. Caution requires a culture of security. Speak when necessary and not otherwise. Vet people for roles that demand particular experience. Take reasonable steps to determine if groups or meeting places are being monitored and recorded. We also fight fear by holding fast to values that empower our communities. When they call us terrorists, the strength of our relationships and the breadth of our popular support will make it obvious who the real terrorists are.
Preparation does not guarantee safety. We must learn to live with the possibility that the state may direct its punitive measures in our direction. Anyone who protects and supports their community faces that risk. We must acknowledge it. We must act with courage. We must keep our goals and what we fight for in view while understanding the potential consequences. If we sustain revolutionary optimism and support for those who face imprisonment and abuse, this movement can endure any marathon, no matter the conditions or length.
The Innovations of the Twin Cities Resistance
Black Cat Workers Collective calls on our comrades everywhere to continue developing three innovations that emerged from this resistance over the past year: mass rapid response, mass mutual aid, and workers’ assemblies. These are horizontal forms of resistance. Communities everywhere should adapt and improve them as they work toward cooperation and inter communal support.
Communities must create or improve mass rapid response groups that hold law enforcement accountable. These groups alert the residents to violent federal agents who violate people's rights and break laws to conceal their actions. Twin Cities residents knew where agents were because of observers at the Whipple federal building, the airport, the courthouses, and the jails who stayed in constant communication. Whether going to work, getting groceries, or visiting loved ones, anyone could participate by reporting suspicious vehicles. These reports did not go to police departments, county officials, or the mayor’s office. They went to people like you. Because people watched every block, residents could know where agents operated.
When agents arrived to harass community members, residents surrounded them, recorded them, and blew whistles to summon others. Federal agents cannot sustain this abuse in full public view. When people witness what happens, they oppose it. The people must continue responding to overreach from law enforcement in this way so they can save as many people as possible.
Minneapolis did not invent the rapid response network, but we did refine it. Iterating on previous models people had developed in Chicago and LA during those cities' ICE invasions in 2025, Minnesotans took a good idea and made it even more effective by cutting out bottlenecks. We decentralized these models by having many separate but overlapping Signal calls running at the same time. Every neighborhood had its own dispatchers coordinating the movements of its patrollers. These dispatchers in turn shared information about ICE's whereabouts in real time through a relay system. Sometimes, the community already knew where the feds were going before they got there. Greg Bovino himself was forced to admit on national television, "Some of these groups have some excellent communications".
The reason this decentralized model caught on was not because everybody holds horizontalist values. In an environment where ICE abductions were over in a matter of 2 to 3 minutes, it was simply the only thing that worked. A nonprofit organization called Monarca attempted to set up a centralized hotline and text alert system in the early days of Metro Surge. The fastest anyone was ever able to respond to these alerts was reportedly 13 minutes, during the raid on the Bro-Tex paper factory in St Paul. To their credit, Monarca voluntarily retired its own hotline by early January. They recognized the decentralized Signal chats were responding to kidnappings faster than they could. This decentralization increased community engagement and local accounting of law enforcement. It fostered a type of deep civic engagement from community members.
Police departments throughout the country now collaborate with ICE and Border Patrol. The people's countersurveillance must therefore expand to city, county, and state authorities. Generalizing these tactics could impose a kind of community oversight over the police by direct means. It would be a public service.
Communities around the country must expand mutual aid networks. The people of the Twin Cities did more than give food to strangers. They created systems to ensure those without food received it. They built food sovereignty gardens in neighborhoods throughout the Metro. These gardens provide fresh produce grown for the people, by the people. But people need more than food. Mutual aid groups also provided caregiving, health services, housing cooperatives and even emergency services to varying degrees.
The labor movement must become more democratic. Workers throughout the country must be able to leverage their labor towards their own liberation. The Workers' Assemblies in Minneapolis represented a shift in power and purpose within some unions. At these assemblies people discussed, deliberated, and voted on the actions and ways to move their coworkers toward said action. Americans spend more time at work than almost anywhere else except in bed. These workplaces become communities of their own.
The Worker's Assemblies exemplified direct democracy within the labor sector. The assemblies contained myriad perspectives. Thoughtful debate and deliberation formed powerful ideas for action. Patient attendees worked through details and minutiae to ensure the most effective tactics were used. Workers of every experience level spoke. No one was ignored without consideration. No leader coerced decisions or threatened those with opposing ideas. The assemblies were novel and beautiful. They showed us that direct democracy is effective. They showed the rank-and-file of the Twin Cities that we can effect change.
Intentional participation by rank-and-file union members through these assemblies resulted in massive and effective actions on May 1, March 1, and especially January 23. As this movement expands, workers must motivate their coworkers towards class solidarity. They must use that solidarity to improve the lives of workers and their communities. Most of all they must participate in action as a solid, militant labor movement committed to real meaningful change. This movement must build an independent working class rather than one mediated and controlled by bureaucratic staff and institutional politics.
Recent court filings contain extensive inaccuracies and, in many cases, intentional falsehoods. One thing remains clear: the Twin Cities resistance succeeded. Groups with different values and priorities came together around the shared goal of community self-defense. Radical rank-and-file union members came together through the Workers Solidarity Circle, a united front composed of labor and community focused revolutionary organizations. Together, they formed a united front against authoritarianism and capital. Communities must continue cultivating this front here and around the world.
The Authoritarian Left and Democratic Party Cooptation
The world has responded to events in the Twin Cities in several ways. Authoritarian leftists groups have gained popularity. The Democratic Party hopes to capitalize on our suffering and solidarity. Individuals within these groups may mean well. They may even provide material improvement in the short term. Black Cat Worker's Collective nevertheless advises caution. This people-centered horizontal movement must not slip from the peoples hands and return to the control of a few.
Mayor Kaoly Her, Mayor Jacob Frey, Governor Tim Walz, and the Hennepin and Ramsey county sheriffs did nothing. They contributed to further suffering with their impotence and selfish political agendas. Her answered Grand Casino's call for millions of dollars to renovate the St. Paul stadium while insisting meaningful financial support “did not exist”. Frey performed outrage on camera while parading around with the chief of police and ensuring a culture of ICE collaboration. Walz negotiated a détente with Donald Trump and Tom Homan that ensured the collaboration of local authorities and granted ICE access to every county jail, effectively ending Minnesota's status as a sanctuary state in exchange for the appearance of normalcy.
Authoritarian socialist parties such as FRSO and PSL remained on the fringes of the movement. They only contributed to movement activities when the groundwork for an action was laid and they thought it would benefit their organization. Their leadership even admitted this at the time. They did not see Metro Surge simply as a crisis to be overcome but an opportunity to take advantage of and gain undue support.
The Twin Cities community will remember who saved them from the brutality of ICE. Politicians collaborated and gave way. So-called vanguard parties scavenged for relevance. There were many people within these groups who fought and continue to fight alongside their communities against fascism. They did this in their capacity as community members and in the context of the larger community movement. We must recognize these individual actions while being aware of the deleterious motivations behind the actions (or inaction) of these organizations. The Twin Cities will remember their neighbors, their community, their friends and family. We saved ourselves. Remind yourself and the world what we fight for and how we fought successfully here in Minnesota. Never forget that it was us who saved each other, and not an external power exerting its will upon the our people.
Prefiguration and Conclusion
Horizontalist groups are fighting for a world where no person holds coercive and presumed authority over another. That world may lie far in the future, but people can begin creating it now in everyday life. We can create mutual aid groups, rapid response networks, rank-and-file working class solidarity, and interdependent community networks. Through them, we can prefigure a new world within the hollow shell of the system we now inhabit. We need not wait for oppressors to be overthrown. We can build systems free from oppression. These systems can protect our communities and starve oppression to death. We can and will create this world, without the influence of highly controlling political organizations, one mutual interaction at a time.
In solidarity and liberation,
Black Cat Workers Collective.