As the Trump administration unveiled an indictment earlier this year against 15 anti-ICE activists, many of whom identify as radicals, for purportedly tormenting federal agents last winter, a top U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official took the podium.
There were two types of protests, said Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge Michael McCarthy, who oversaw the ICE agents in a St. Paul, Minnesota, field office who conducted the investigation.
“Peaceful protest is a protected right, and a cornerstone of our democracy,” said McCarthy. “When protest turns into rioting, violence or criminal activity, it becomes unlawful and it will not be tolerated.”
McCarthy’s comments stood in stark contrast with ICE’s record in Minneapolis, where a federal judge had been forced to issue an injunction to stop federal agents from pepper-spraying and arresting peaceful protesters during their enforcement blitz, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.
Legal experts, too, had criticisms of the indictment: The Justice Department, one pointed out, had concocted a federal conspiracy out of what would normally be misdemeanor charges.
In the months since, criticisms of the case have only grown louder. Court filings revealed that McCarthy’s agents secretly infiltrated groups that preach nonviolence, including labor unions and nonprofits. They also wielded subpoenas in a fruitless hunt for financiers of “domestic terrorism,” taking a cue from President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 labeling swaths of the far left as terrorists.
The Trump administration has won some success in going after left-wing protesters under NSPM-7, but the Minneapolis case is proving to be more challenging.
In other prosecutions targeting activists, like the Prairieland case in Texas, mainstream groups have shied away from supporting the defendants. In Minnesota, though, groups once wary of being associated with the 15 defendants, many of whom are self-described anarchists, have rallied to their side.
Powerful labor unions that make up the backbone of the state’s progressive movement have raised funds on behalf of the defendants, incensed at the infiltration from federal undercover agents. Rather than dividing and conquering the left, the case has united it.
“They’re trying to split the movement and absolutely failing.”
Supporters of the defendants, who have collectively come to be known as the Minneapolis 15, recently packed a bowling alley for a fundraiser. On October 3, hundreds of labor union members marched through downtown Minneapolis, demanding that the charges against the activists be dropped.
Meanwhile, the defendants themselves have so far mounted a unified, joint defense; none of them have taken a plea deal.
“They’re trying to split the movement and absolutely failing,” said Emmett James Doyle, a defendant in the case. “There’s been just complete solidarity behind us from basically every sector of Twin Cities life.”
“Can’t Indict 100,000 People”
Doyle’s ruddy face and wild beard would have been at home in Big Bill Haywood’s Industrial Workers of the World a century ago. By day he’s a union carpenter, by night he plucks a banjo and sings songs about America’s radical past.
Federal prosecutors allege that he brought those songs to life on the streets of Minneapolis.
In a 94-page indictment, prosecutors claim that Doyle and the other 14 defendants were members or associates of a group called Direct Action Minnesota that “infiltrated and exploited lawful protests” to target ICE.
Prosecutors painted a dark picture of DAMN. Their tactics allegedly included blocking access to a federal building used by ICE with disabled cars or trailers, bringing shields and gas masks to protests, and, in one instance, following an ICE agent across state lines to his home in Wisconsin.
Government attorneys also leaned heavily on the defendants’ comments to each other in private messages about their frustration with more mainstream protesters and the need for “militant” action.
Despite the prosecutors’ claims about rioting and violence at the June press conference, however, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, was unable to identify injuries to federal officers when reporters pressed him.
There are committed anarchists among the defendants charged in the indictment, several defendants told The Intercept, but there was little difference between what they did and what thousands of Minneapolis residents did during the federal immigration crackdown.
Ordinary Minnesotans walked frigid streets with whistles dangling from their necks to alert their neighbors about ICE raids. They sent license plate numbers of federal vehicles to Signal group chats. Members of rapid-response networks trailed suspected agents in their cars.
The indictment is replete with examples of protesters trailing agents in vehicles, a tactic known as “commuting.” Yet that was a tactic so widely employed by rapid-response groups in Minneapolis that it was even adopted by a congressional candidate in a suburban district who recently won his Democratic primary.
“I think there are people in the government who really do believe that there is like a small cabal of people who are fomenting all the dissent, and if you get rid of them, that everyone will be quiet,” Doyle said. “And that’s fundamentally wrong.”
Doyle, like the four other defendants interviewed by The Intercept, declined to discuss the specific allegations in the indictment, citing advice from his attorney.
“They’re just trying to find people to make examples of.”
Still, another defendant, Treasure Thoreson, was adamant that none of the defendants ever used violence. Thoreson is a special education teacher whose elementary school’s lanyard was still dangling from her neck during a recent interview. She believes the group was targeted because of its radical views.
“They clearly had people that they had identified as problematic in some way and have been trying to tie these people to leading the resistance,” Thoreson said. “They can’t indict 100,000 people, so really, they’re just trying to find people to make examples of.”
“Attack on the Movement’
Thoreson said she has received steady support from her teachers union since the indictment.
She and many other defendants believe the charges against them are a way of attacking Minnesota’s powerful labor movement. By the count of defendants who spoke to The Intercept, at least 11 of the 15 have been involved in union organizing.
The internal Homeland Security Investigations files unearthed by the defense team lend credibility to this theory. Undercover agents attended an organizing meeting at the United Labor Centre, a building that houses multiple unions. HSI, the investigative wing of ICE, also subpoenaed the financial records of the SEIU and the Communications Workers of America as part of an overlapping probe into “domestic terror financing.”
Several defendants interviewed by The Intercept were amused at the idea that they were receiving funding from mainstream organizations. They have long lobbed critiques at the labor movement’s institutional core from its fringes.
After some initial hesitance, unions and nonprofit groups responded in force to the case. Days after the indictment, some labor groups signed onto a joint statement denouncing the charges. After a court filing from the defendants revealed the subpoenas of the unions’ financing, more labor organizations raised their voices.
“Generally speaking, the labor movement is awfully conservative — too conservative — on issues like this, and can sometimes be scared out of solidarity with people who are fighting back,” said Kieran Knutson, the president of CWA Local 7250 in Minneapolis.
More unions rallied, Knutson said, as it became clear that prosecutors could not point to examples of physical harm, as union locals pressured statewide organizations, and as the defendants themselves articulated why the case was important.
“These are active people in the labor movement, and I think in many ways people see them as an expression of the movement as a whole,” Knutson said. “And these charges were an attack on the movement as a whole.”
Knutson said he knows the value of solidarity: In 1993, he was charged with assaulting a man wearing neo-Nazi patches during an antiracist demonstration on the University of Minnesota campus, according to news reports from the time. He was acquitted with the help of attorney Keith Ellison, who later went on to win election as the state’s attorney general.
“I know what it’s like to have the weight of the charges just hanging over you,” Knutson said.
The leading candidate in the Hennepin County Attorney race, state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, who also works as a lawyer for labor union Education Minnesota, told The Intercept in a recent interview that the charges should be dismissed.
“I think they’re trying to, for lack of a better word, ‘Trump’ up some charges to continue his pursuit of retribution against Minnesota,” said Frazier. “I mean, look, they don’t like labor groups.”
A broad coalition of labor groups including the state AFL-CIO endorsed an October 3 rally and march in support of the defendants, another sign that skepticism of the case has gone mainstream.
Hundreds of janitors, teachers, public employees, and hospitality workers joined the march, said Isaac Sant, a defendant and longtime labor organizer. He said seeing them on the streets was “humbling.”
Sant recently joined defendants from other cases with political overtones, including Prairieland, to form what they are dubbing the NSPM-7 Defendants Union.
“I can only speak for myself, but I don’t have any problem linking my case to the Prairieland cases. I think what happened to them was a travesty and a miscarriage of justice,” Sant said. “I think it’s very important that we stand in solidarity with people who are in that position, and especially with people who are getting railroaded even worse than we are.”
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