Fifty Thousand at Ten Below
The Day of Truth and Freedom in Minnesota, January 23, 2026, was organized by a coalition of 100 faith community leaders, labor unions, and grassroots organizers in Minnesota. They called upon residents to boycott work, stay home from school, and refrain from shopping. They urged all to gather to protest the occupation of Minneapolis by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). They called for an end to the terrorism that has violated the rights of thousands, disrupted local economies, and left one person, Renee Good, dead of gunshot wounds. Approximately 50,000 people of all ages and backgrounds showed up at Commons Park in downtown Minneapolis to march one mile to Target Center on a clear winter’s day of ten degrees below zero. The idea of marching in such weather sounded audacious, stupid, and futile to some, but here in the Land ‘O Lakes, this is how we do democracy.
Resistance comes with the territory. When European settlers muscled their way into the St. Croix and Mississippi River valleys and beyond to mill their way to fortunes from lumber and wheat in the mid-1800s, they encountered the Ojibwe and Dakota. Natives resisted only land grabs, coerced assimilation, and removal campaigns; it resisted the ultimatum to assimilate a toxic world view. The Indigenous saw the earth, animals, plants, and people as sacred beings with lessons to teach us about the way of the Creator, and as gifts to be shared for the good of all (Ross, 1996). Americans rejected Native traditions about spirituality and saw people and all creation as objects to be privately owned and/or used at will, for making the world over in their own image of what was natural and good.
Resistance has always flown in the face of those who assault human dignity. In 1862, Governor Alexander Ramsey announced that, “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the State” (Keeler, 2023). At the time, Americans commonly believed that Indigenous people were subhuman, and devilish. As the U.S. expanded westward, Native Americans defied White encroachment and violence by refusing to leave territory when ordered to do so, refusing to assimilate white culture, attempting to negotiate with White authorities to keep their land and way of life, passing language and spiritual traditions onto next generations, and sometimes by waging war (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Meyer, 1994).
Immigrants who settled in Minnesota in the late 1800s practiced their own form of resistance. The Europeans who came to farm, mine iron, and harvest lumber were routinely subjected to brutal work conditions, low wages, and were at the mercy of banks’ high interest rates, and railroads’ high cost to haul freight. Resistance to the exploitation of labor became effective only when workers learned to speak each other’s language and create unions. To fight the exploitation of monopolists who banks, railroads, mines, and mills, many Minnesotans created cooperatives including dairies, fire insurance, and grain silos to share the cost of production and gain control over prices (Keillor, 2000). They joined the Farm-Labor Party, Populist Party, and Socialist Party to abolish land monopolies, and to establish an eight-hour workday, public ownership of railroads and utilities, and a graduated income tax (Naftalin, 1956). This was the face of white resistance to white exploitation.
The 50,000 who gathered in downtown Minneapolis were joined by protestors at other locations. At the Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport, hundreds more gathered to memorialize the victims and call for an end to Operation Metro Surge, ICE’s campaign of repression and retribution. Clerics were arrested at the airport as they prayed. Posters everywhere reminded everyone of children threatened in schools, workers arrested on the job, families separated, and the senseless murder of 37-year-old mother of three, Renee Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross (Woltman, 2026). Some came to the events to tell the world that Minnesotans will not stand for tyranny, others came as an act of faith and to announce God’s call to love and be merciful and just to the oppressed.
En route to Target Center, I walked among people representing all demographics lifting their voices for justice. In the clouds of our own breath was the story American resistance. The image of Liam Conejo Ramos, the Ecuadorean 5-year-old boy taken from school and detained with his father, who applied for asylum in 2024, merged with the image of Emmet Till, the 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and killed in Mississippi in 1955. The image of Renee Good became the image the images of Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, and Andrew Goodman, the three civil rights workers kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi in 1964. The image of Cong Ly Scott, the 56-year old U.S. citizen taken by gunpoint by ICE agents who broke into his home without a warrant, who was led out of his home in his underwear to face 14 degrees above zero, morphed into U.S. cavalry slaughtering Dakota men, women, and children on cold December day at Wounded Knee in 1890.
50,000 at ten degrees below zero tells the world that human beings are made in the image of God; that we are not disposable cogs in a machine or oafish tin soldiers who will fight wars for oil, empire, or ethnic cleansing. 50,000 at ten degrees below are people up against the reincarnated mercenaries of many faces: cops killing Rodney King, FBI agents infiltrating the anti-war and Civil Rights Movements, CIA operatives killing peasants in Latin America, and judges and elected officials sanctioning speedy genocides by way of bullets or slow genocide by way of policies and rulings that incrementally bled humanity dry.
Less than 24 hours after the Day of Truth and Freedom march, Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old trauma nurse, was shot dead. He was videoing ICE actions near 26th and Nicollet and as he came to the aid of a neighbor who was shoved by an ICE agent, he was wrestled to ground, beaten, and killed (Levietes, 2026). The temperature was ten degrees below zero.
References
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014.
Gilman, Rhonda R. “The History and Peopling of Minnesota: Its Culture.” Daedalus, 129(3): 1–29. (2000).
Keeler, Kasey R. American Indians and the American Dream. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press. 2023. P. 27.
Keillor, Steven J. Cooperative Commonwealth. Co-ops in Rural Minnesota, 1859–1939. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000.
Levietes, Matt. Federal agents shoot person in Minnesota, governor says. NBC News, January 24, 2026. Federal agents shoot person in Minnesota, governor says
Meyer, Melissa. The White Earth Tragedy. Ethnicity and Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservation, 1889-1920. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
Naftalin, Arthur. “The Tradition of Protest and the Roots of the Farm-Labor Party.” Minnesota History, 35(2): 53–63. (1956). P, 53–54.
Ross, A.C. Mitakuye Oyasin : “We are all Related.” Denver, CO : Wicóni Wasté, 1996.
Woltman, Nick. Tens of thousands march in Minneapolis to protest ICE surge in Minnesota. Organizers say more than 700 businesses closed during daylong economic blackout. Twin Cities Pioneer Press, January 24, 2026. Tens of thousands march in Minneapolis to protest ICE surge in Minnesota – Twin Cities.
