This is what borders look like
from the real police to the peace police
All the love and support for people fighting, resisting, and surviving in Minneapolis and everywhere.
Like most of us, I’ve been getting plenty of updates from Minneapolis. Recently, a very well meaning person forwarded me someone else’s mass email, which gave recommendations for “action” after the latest murder: donating to fundraisers and maintaining nonviolent protests. The writer of the mass email made no mention of the burning barricades that went up on some Minneapolis streets, or the last time that Minneapolis stood up for its neighbors (and how that ended and who ended it). There was also no mention of the strike and school walk-outs spreading across the country, nor were there calls for the abolition of ICE or the withdrawal of ICE from states other than Minnesota.
Most distressingly, after describing ICE’s most recent murder, they claim “Many now believe they [ICE] have come here to keep assaulting innocent people again and again, until they get us to be violent so they can justify deploying the 1,500 active duty military troops they’ve put on standby to attack our city in one big spectacle meant to scare the whole rest of the country into compliance.”
The email’s author is a white citizen, a professional artist and professional “Executive Director” from a long list of Arts foundations, and was previously a “business consultant” in the “corporate sector” (quotes from their webpage).
I rarely lead with this, but I want to be clear that I’m writing this as someone who has been attacked by police, someone who experienced sexual assault and threats of rape and murder by prison guards, someone who has lost people I care about in this struggle, someone who has gone through an attempted deportation process (with white privilege on the one hand, but on the other hand specifically targeted for my beliefs and political engagement). I am someone who will never again be able to see loved ones and family members if I catch certain charges, if I end up on a certain list, or if the current border regime continues to go in the direction it’s already headed. For me this isn’t about ideology or being right or putting someone down. It’s incredibly personal and also incredibly collective. It’s about confronting the lies and myths of those who have a possibility of living in peace with the police; lies and myths that endanger us and constantly set us back in our interlinked struggles for liberation.
It is mind-bogglingly naïve to think that the Trump administration needs any kind of ‘justification’ for repression. This wasn’t even the case before Trump: this is one more manipulation from the stockpile of manipulations used by non-profit pacifists to help criminalize and delegitimize effective forms of resistance. Since police and professional militaries were founded, they have systematically attacked and even slaughtered large groups of entirely peaceful people. They would not be useful to the government if they weren’t able to murder.
Spreading the false belief that police and military wait for justification to attack or kill people further marginalizes those who have to live with the daily reality of that unjustified violence: colonized peoples, Black people, Muslims, undocumented people, houseless people, trans people, poor people, those experiencing mental or emotional health crises, as well as people who resist and oppose such brutality. As for those of us who participate in revolutionary social movements, we also know what it means to face torture and prison, to be shot at by police, to lose friends.
The Black Lives Matter, police abolition and No Border movements were built up in tandem, over years and decades, from before the murder of Oscar Grant on New Years’ Day 2009 to its culmination in a countrywide uprising after the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. This increase in resistance was only possible because people fought back. What happened in 2020 in Minneapolis was so inspiring and it was only possible because people fought back, with stones, with fire, with everything they had. What killed that movement was not police repression and it certainly wasn’t the military—who were deployed in 2020 and in 2014 and on other occasions. It was people trusting this kind of non-profit bullcrap, trusting Democrats, trusting self-appointed community leaders.
The military was also deployed to the streets of Ferguson and St. Louis in 2014 after the police murder of Mike Brown. People continued fighting, attacking the police, even shooting at the police, and it’s no coincidence that their inspiring, brave resistance sparked the very first wave of antiracist uprisings this century that spread across the entire country, laying the groundwork for the even larger uprising of 2020.
And I call this resistance inspiring and brave without any romanticism. A friend was almost killed during the fighting, and many others faced serious prison time or were targeted by neo-Nazis. In 2014 I was on a highway bridge, helping to block it along with a crowd largely made up of some of the people most targeted by racist police violence—all of us fully aware of the multiple times cops or white supremacists without a badge attacked bridge occupations or drove their vehicles through the crowd, almost killing people.
Nonviolent nonsense is also used systematically to spread the myth of the “agent provocateur,” which is in its origins a racist trope that views “the masses” as a servile, unthinking mob who don’t make decisions for themselves. People who are singled out as provocateurs are often handed over to police to face the extreme violence of the prison system, or they are even attacked by nonviolent protesters. Yep: I’ve never seen the pacifists knock down a cop, even if it would protect someone else, but I have seen them beat up other people in the movement. And in 2020 at least two people were locked up thanks to nonviolent protesters spreading this conspiracy theory: one was a Black person in Seattle who was taking the very sensible action of setting fire to a police station where racist murderers are trained, paid, and protected; the other was a white person. She also happened to be the girlfriend of Rayshard Brooks, a houseless Black man the pigs in Atlanta had just murdered (June 2020) after some workers at a local Wendy’s snitched on him for sleeping in the parking lot. She and two Black men were arrested for setting fire to the Wendy’s after a few nonviolence advocates and online sleuths widely shared their photos in order to identify the supposed provocateurs.
In their email, this person also spread the idea that whistles were “working” and the idea that the system was getting overwhelmed by all the arrests they were carrying out, a nonviolent strategy already debunked by MLK’s failed 1961 Albany, Georgia, campaign. (To be clear, the whistles are being put to great use in Minneapolis, but more than whistling will be required to stop ICE)
Seeing all of that silenced or criminalized is upsetting. I responded to the mass email:
“As we have all seen, and as you want us all to forget, we can chase the police out of our neighborhoods and take over entire cities. We already know what it takes. But the first line of defense against uprisings like that is not ICE and it’s not the local cops. It’s people like you.
“People are rightfully angry. Unfortunately, we have to learn our history all over again because of constant erasure by people like you.”
I want to finish with a few last points. Below that I’ve provided recommended readings and further discussion on the deployment of ICE vs. the deployment of the military.
The discourse of “innocence” validates the kidnapping and deportation of people with criminal records, and it helps the police attack those who are fighting back. The discourse of “citizens” strengthens the border.
A dear friend who dedicated well over a decade of their life to fighting the border with Mexico and helping migrants survive the crossing is back in Minneapolis, where they’re from. About a week ago, their four-year-old asked them, “How do we make the polices leave town if we ask them to and they don’t?” As my friend responded, oh baby, that is the question.
We know from the history—the true history—of the Civil Rights movement that nonviolence won’t cut it. We even know that a major wave of riots and revolts that produce huge legal reforms, revolts like Birmingham in 1963 and the ones that occurred after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, are also not enough. A reform still preserves the State’s monopoly on power. Even reforms that make things a little better are temporary, as should be readily apparent in the era of Trump.
We need to well and truly abolish the police and the border. The police cannot be reformed. Borders cannot be reformed. All states are based on coercion, and the cops and the borders are among the principal tools for that coercion.
We need to continue to organize and support rapid response networks, legal aid for anyone kidnapped or deported, we need to protect schools, hospitals, daycare, and workplaces from the pigs, we need to do grocery runs and distros for clothing and medicine in a spirit of mutual aid. We also need to (re)learn how to barricade the streets and hold them, how to force the police out of a neighborhood and transform this liberated space so it serves the needs of the people who live there, how to force the cops out of an entire city. And then we need to learn how to keep going.
Death to the State in all its forms. For the free movement of all peoples as we move and share and migrate and adapt, as we flee and heal and rebuild in order to survive this world that is being decimated by the Rich, the Right, and their liberal lackeys.
Recommended Reading
“Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities: A Guide”
CrimethInc, No Wall They Can Build and as a podcast
Unfinished Acts: January Rebellions 2009, Oakland California
various authors, “Snapshots from the Uprising” (2020)
Idris Robinson, How It Might Should Be Done
NPR, “Guns Kept People Alive During the Civil Rights Movement”
Robert Williams, Negroes with Guns
Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie, No More Police: A Case for Abolition
Lorenzo Komb’oa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution
Ashanti Alston and William C. Anderson, Black Anarchist Futures
William C. Anderson and Zoey Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation
They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements
Fatima Insolación, “The Insurgent Southwest”
(the articles and podcasts above are free. if you don’t have the money right now to support independent bookstores and publishers, many of the books can be found for free on the internet. please don’t order from Amazon.)
A brief discussion on police vs. the military
Trump is using ICE instead of the military probably because they are the government agency most loyal to him, and they are well trained in running mobile snatch squads, beating up bystanders, and deploying general terror tactics. Unlike many people in the military, ICE agents specifically signed up as a more effective alternative to the KKK, they signed up to attack people of color and any white “liberals” supporting them. This is fun for them.
What they don’t know how to do very well is to hold their own against—not bystanders, not peaceful protests—large groups who fight back with forceful means. That is why the military is standing by: because they are far more effective than cops at dealing with a full scale urban revolt.
It’s not that the police don’t have access to military-grade weaponry (they do), but because cops tend to be stupid, prone to panic, and unversed in military tactics. Their mode is bullying, harassing, torturing, and kidnapping. They love beating a defenseless crowd (i.e. a crowd that refuses to defend itself, that ideologically romanticizes losing). They quickly get overwhelmed when more than a few dozen people start fighting back.
Many ICE pigs are military vets, which means they’re used to killing unarmed people. It does not mean that ICE as a whole will be nearly as effective at urban warfare as the actual military, since they lack the same military command structure and training-as-a-group on approaching an entire city as hostile territory. Driving around in one or two vans, for example, would be a pretty fatal mistake if ICE agents faced any real danger. And it would be no easy task for ICE or the city police, trying to take a barricade held by an angry crowd, especially if they had a good stash of rocks, baseball bats, hammers, gasoline, powerful fireworks, Molotov cocktails, cocktails version 2.0 (gas or gas and oil in a plastic bottle, sealed, with a lit firecracker taped to the side)… even more so if people make use of Minnesota’s open carry laws.
I definitely don’t recommend anyone without a lot of training bringing firearms to a situation like this, because the risks of hitting an actual person or creating an irresponsible escalation that you’re not prepared for are both high.
And I’m not advocating anyone engage in any training. In fact, I don’t advocate building barricades, setting fires, or any other illegal act. I’m just pointing out that without those and similar tactics, side by side with effective practices for strengthening neighborhood relationships and the generalized spread of revolutionary horizons, we are stuck with cops and borders forever. Or until rising seas, wildfires, and mass famine sweep us all away.
Just two notes: I added two additional sources (the last two) on the recommendation of a friend, an hour after this originally got published...
... and I also reached out directly to the author of the email I was responding to, expressing my anger and some of the arguments I share in this newsletter
...
and they wrote back a really constructive response, hearing my criticisms and also pushing back that they take risks as well in this movement and that they too have lost people they care about. So, go 2026! Here's to a movement culture with better communication!
A really good, clear, important post. Thanks for taking the time to lay it out.
I'm ready to admit I don't feel prepared for how much this accelerated, regardless of a lot of my life spent trying to be mentally "prepared" for exactly this threshhold. (I know that seeing it as a discrete threshhold might be silly and ahistorical, but it is landing for many of us with that quality, regardless.) I just thought it would play out inside the united states in more of a slow grind, and I think a lot of people feel the same--and that might be 1 of the 100 reasons the gut reaction people know how to look for is "uhhh.... where's a nonprofit!"
Anyway I think we need (among many, many other things, obviously) to accelerate how fast we learn, how fast we assess the situation--and this writing really seems like it can contribute to that.