The ‘Minneapolis 15’ ICE-protester indictments are meant to shut you up
An outrageous federal conspiracy case against 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota really seeks to silence all dissent.
In the tumultuous five-plus months since masked federal immigration agents descended on her hometown, the Rev. Jen Crow of the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis has already been arrested at an airport sit-in, organized a vigil after the murder of her neighbor Alex Pretti, and held trainings at her church for volunteer observers.
So when Crow learned on Tuesday that 15 local activists had been indicted by federal prosecutors on felony conspiracy charges for monitoring and allegedly at times impeding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers, she did the one thing the Donald Trump regime does not want anyone to do.
She went down to the St. Paul federal courthouse to protest, again. Crow told me by phone Wednesday that everyday Americans who oppose immigration raids can’t surrender to the fear that the Justice Department wants to create by threatening long prison terms.
“When you see the federal government turning on its own people, the thing is we have to act anyway and just trust in the purpose and trust in what we’re doing and our care for each other, and just really lean into that,” Crow said. “To let the fear wash through, but not get stuck in it.”
Crow and as many as 200 other Minnesotans chanting “Free them all!” outside the 15 activists’ arraignment on Tuesday were rewarded for their ongoing courage with a blast of chemical irritants from U.S. Marshals, which, according to videos, started with little or no provocation by the outside protesters.
“Witnesses tell me that what was going on at the time is that they were holding the doors open, so that you could hear the chants inside the building, when suddenly somebody saw folks putting on gas masks inside the courthouse,” local journalist Pilar Pedraza of KSTP-TV reported. “And all of a sudden they came out and started spraying a chemical irritant at them.” Videos showed other protesters hit with pepper spray, with one violently thrown to the ground.
The indictment of the Minneapolis 15 — a so-called “conspiracy” that included innocuous acts of dissent like discussing ICE activities on the Signal app or publishing an article on a pro-anarchist website — and the chemical assault against citizens exercising their free-speech rights are all the same instinct from a violently repressive government.
They want you to shut up. They want you to stay in your home. And they want to make you very afraid — five months before an election that they are practically screaming they plan to do everything in their dictatorial powers to steal.
The good news is that the government’s intimidation campaign is being met with renewed resistance in the Twin Cities — the place where regular folks with whistles and cell phones eventually drove away most of the immigration raiders, albeit at the horrible cost of more than 4,000 immigrant arrests and two citizens gunned down in the street.
“The only thing I did was care about this, my community and my neighbors,” Natasha Rakotz — one of the Minneapolis 15, a caretaker whom prosecutors accused of sideswiping an immigration agent’s vehicle — told reporters after her arraignment.
The charges against the Minneapolis 15 — tied to a protest group known as Direct Action Minnesota, or DAMN — is arguably the most aggressive in a flurry of actions by Trump’s Justice Department aimed at convincing the public that the ideology of aggressively fighting fascism, known as “antifa,” is some kind of highly organized terrorist cell along the lines of ISIS or al-Qaeda.
It’s one more over-the-top lie from a regime that swims in a stinky green algae pool of falsehoods.
Federal prosecutors have been racing to crayon in the blanks since Trump’s September 2025 executive order that declared “antifa” — again, not an actual group — as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The Minnesota indictments are the most dramatic of a myriad of federal cases from New Jersey to Oregon.
These prosecutions have run the gamut. In Texas, an actual criminal act that warranted charges — when a protester at an ICE detention site fired a gun — became the impetus for a sweeping dragnet that led to convictions against nine activists. In Spokane, Wash., prosecutors recently gained convictions against three protesters who tried to stop ICE agents from transporting two Venezuelan immigrants, even after an acting U.S. attorney resigned because he believed the charges were unwarranted.
But other Trump efforts to criminalize dissent have collapsed, almost farcically so — from a jury’s speedy acquittal of the Washington, D.C. man who threw a salami sandwich at an agent, to the implosion of a case against Chicago ICE-detention-center protesters, including congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, known as “the Broadview Six.” The former defendants and some members of Congress are calling for an investigation of alleged grand jury misconduct by Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros and his underlings to obtain their indictment.
In Minnesota, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen strived on Tuesday to defend the new prosecution as skeptical reporters asked him why felony charges were lodged when not a single agent was hurt, why the urgency of this case when there’s been no prosecution of the agents who shot and killed Pretti or the unarmed motorist Renee Good, and whether the case amounted to what writer George Orwell famously called “thoughtcrime.”
Rosen insisted that “whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime.”
Still, the federal case against the Minneapolis 15 contained just a couple of instances of alleged property violence ― the sideswipe and the kicking out of a vehicle’s tail light. Mostly, the indictment describes a lot of activities —like Signal chats, monitoring the movement of immigration agents on public streets, discussing the use of protective gear like shields, or an anarchist’s speaking tour about the protests — that would seem to be constitutionally protected free speech.
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With the enactment of the First Amendment in 1791, America’s founders vowed to protect “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Just days before the nation’s 250th birthday, an authoritarian regime in Washington wants to make this a crime for which you could spend a large chunk of your life in prison.
“It does look like the government is throwing the book, maybe even over-charging some of the protesters,” Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, told me yesterday, noting that any act of actual violence wouldn’t be protected by the First Amendment. But he added that “even if some of the charges end up being thrown out, the breadth of the government’s arguments and the weight of the charges certainly send a message to protestors.”
Exactly. Although the indictments are a living hell for the Minneapolis 15, the real target here is regular American folks like you — citizens who aren’t normally inclined to protest the government, but are starting to wonder what to do as the regime and its 80-year-old and increasingly out-of-touch leader spiral out of control.
Before you even dare venture out to a church meeting where they pass out whistles and teach you how to warn your neighbors that masked ICE agents are snatching people off the streets, they want to plant seeds of doubt. Am I risking my freedom, and my family, just for posting something in a Signal or WhatsApp chat?
They want you to be terrified, and on some level you should be afraid, not just of what the government is doing but why they are doing this now. Trump was already nearing record-low approval numbers before this week’s humiliating surrender deal aimed at ending the president’s foolhardy war of choice with Iran. The near inevitability of a Democratic House in 2027 all but guarantees Trump’s next impeachment and two years of political hell to end his 47th presidency.
Thus, Trump’s desperate determination to interfere in the November election is becoming increasingly clear, with everything from unwarranted meddling by the U.S. Post Office to his insistence that grossly unqualified loyalist Bill Pulte serve as his director of national intelligence, in order to invent foreign election plots.
Criminalizing dissent isn’t a sideshow. It’s central to the plan. They want to stop you from taking to the streets in massive numbers if and when they take illegal actions to keep the Republican Party in power. They are using these bogus indictments to lay the foundation for the solution that Vice President JD Vance proposed for Minneapolis back in January — to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in tanks.
The case against the Minneapolis 15 reminds me of the remarkable novel Every Man Dies Alone by the German novelist Hans Fallada, based on the true World War II era heroism of Otto and Elise Hampel, who placed postcards around Berlin criticizing Adolf Hitler and the Nazis for two years before they were arrested and executed by guillotine. Are we now becoming such a totalitarian society?
Hopefully not, if American citizens like the Rev. Jen Crow continue to speak out.
“We’re not going anywhere,” she said after the feds’ courthouse chemical attack. “Those of us who care about each other and care about the rule of law and care about following the rules we’ve set out as a society that protect basic human rights, we’re not going anywhere.”
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