The Battle for Minneapolis, and the Fight for Texas

Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: Democrats could win a Senate seat in Texas this November. Texas is not so much a red state as it is a low-turnout state, and that’s the basis of the campaign Jasmine Crockett is running for the Democratic Senate nomination there. Steve Phillips will explain, later in the show. But first: the battle for Minneapolis. John Nichols has our report – in a minute.
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Minneapolis right now seems to be the target of the single largest deployment of immigration agents in the history of the United States. And the resistance there has been amazing – it’s been huge, and hugely nonviolent. For our report, we turn to John Nichols. Of course, he’s The Nation’s executive editor and he’s just returned to the magazine offices in New York City after several days in Minneapolis. John, welcome back.

John Nichols: It’s great to be with you, Jon.

JW: For starters, I think we should note that the size and the scale of the resistance there is really too vast to fully comprehend. Even the most experienced organizers who’ve been working there for decades say they can’t keep track of everything that resistance groups are doing. So you had a challenging job there. You started with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. He’s been a national leader developing the legal strategies of the resistance along with New York State Attorney General Tish James and California Attorney General Rob Bonta. And he has an article right now at thenation.com. Tell us about what Keith Ellison is saying and what he’s doing.

JN: Well, he’s saying a lot. So many of the responses to what’s happening in Minneapolis really go to what Ellison describes as first principles, core constitutional questions. Do you have a right to assemble a petition for the redress of grievances, i.e. protest? That’s just First Amendment stuff. Then you get into the 10th Amendment and what protections that gives states from federal intervention. For Ellison, there’s these core premises, but then there is the complexity of it. Going into court to address issues like the mask issue, the identification issue, all sorts of other things. But then at a broader level, and one of the things he’s been addressing is the basic question of, should they be there? And so he has multiple lawsuits and legal actions in play right now.
One of the challenges is that they are in an appellate court circuit that’s very conservative. So sometimes he will win a case at the local federal court level and then get it knocked down at the appellate level or threatened at the appellate level.
And this is before we even begin to talk about the Supreme Court. At the end of the day, he maintains a confidence that the core constitutional premises that are at stake here, as he writes in the article for The Nation, people have a right to assemble a petition for the redress of grievances, they’ve got a right to speak. They have a right to move as they choose. They have to be given due process as another amendment requires. And all of those amendments, all of those premises are being undermined at this point by the Trump administration.

JW: So that’s at the top of the state government. From below the size and the range of what people are doing to fight ICE in Minneapolis really is awesome. On the one hand, they’re the big, experienced longstanding community organizing groups like Faith in Minnesota, which is an activist group of Christians and Muslims. They had a training a couple of weeks ago, downtown Minneapolis at the Convention Center – 5,000 people showed up. This was not a Zoom event. This was an in- person day long training, 5,000 people. But there are also so many self-organized people in smaller groups, neighborhood groups, and groups doing things that most of us never would’ve thought of. I learned there’s a crew of carpenters going around fixing kicked indoors. There are tow truck operators who recover cars left behind after ICE has abducted the drivers and just left the cars standing there. There’s a people’s laundry that for people who are afraid to go out will pick up their dirty clothes and bring them back clean.
And of course, there’s lots and lots of neighbors delivering food and groceries to families afraid to go to the store. And there are, of course, what’s called the rapid response groups based in the neighborhoods, ready with whistles and video cameras if ICE shows up. Nobody really knows how many local rapid response groups there are, but the best estimate is at least 80, maybe a couple of hundred of them. Let’s talk about those whistles. They’re small, but they’re a crucial weapon of the resistance.

JN: Right. And they are a symbol of it at this point. This has been an incredibly traumatic moment for Minneapolis. And yet at the same time, it has become a moment where everybody that I talked to said, “I know my neighbors better. I know my community better.” There are huge groups of people that are involved on a daily basis and things like walking kids to school and back from school because their parents are concerned about leaving the house. |
I went by one school where there were dozens of people gathered at around 2:30, 3:00 in the afternoon getting ready to walk kids. And so this is quite a remarkable thing that’s going on. At the heart of it is the whistle. If you go into any store, community market or record store or bookstore, whatever, they’re going to have a big bowl with whistles and they’re for free, you could take as many as you want. And they have brochures that explain how to use the whistles. And the bottom line is that the whistles are used to alert people that ICE is in the area or that ICE may be moving in some direction, the border patrol folks may be moving in some direction. And you might think that this is in this era of all of our technology, cell phones and everything else that it’s sort of old-fashioned, quite the opposite. When people hear whistles, a lot of people, especially in targeted neighborhoods, they know what the whistles mean. And the whistle is also a way of saying, this might be the time to get out of this space or might try to move someplace else. When there is an actual confrontation where ICE has arrived, then the whistle is sometimes a way to signal your neighbors very quickly.
It’s become such a big deal, Jon, that Justin Vernon, the guy who leads the much awarded band, Bon Iver, wore his whistle on his lapel when he went to the Grammys, because he had been nominated for several Grammys, he had his whistle there and he explained it on the red carpet. And what he said was, “this is a symbol of the observers, of everybody up in Minneapolis that is watching what’s going on, helping their neighbors, engaging in ways, nonviolent ways to try and protect people.” And what he said was that “it’s great to be honoring musicians and songwriters and folks like that, but the real heroes are up in Minneapolis and they’re wearing a whistle.”

JW: A couple of my other favorite activities going on there: There’s the chorus that sings late at night outside the hotel where the ICE agents stay trying to keep them awake. The chorus has 2,000 people and there are organizations I’d never heard of that have just sprung up and are doing incredible work. Haven Watch is a group of people who wait in their cars outside the building at Fort Snelling, the Whipple Building where detained people are held by ICE in deplorable conditions. Sometimes they’re released and Haven Watch gives released detainees a coat, a burner phone, and a ride when they’re put out in the cold with none of those things. Did you get out to the Whipple Building when you were there?

JN: I didn’t go specifically to the Whipple building but was very aware of it and very aware of what’s happening with this program you’re talking about. And it’s a big deal because it goes to something deeper, as was explained to one organizer about how ICE is operating. ICE raids often sweep up all sorts of people. They might take a couple dozen people out of a neighborhood, and that includes folks who are fully documented, have all their paperwork, US citizens, and then they’re taken out to this Whipple building and they are there sometimes for a substantial amount of time, but ultimately, they show, look, you’ve got no grounds to hold me here. And instead of returning them to their neighborhood, they are put outside the door. And remember, you’re put out that door sometimes at night and sometimes it’s substantial numbers, not just one person, but a number of people, and you may not even know exactly where you’re at in the city. And so this program to get them home is a huge, huge deal.

JW: There’s one other historical element in this whole story about the Whipple building. It’s at Fort Snelling that ICE is detaining the people it picks up. In 1862, Fort Snelling served as a concentration camp for native people, the Dakota who had been captured in the US Dakota War. 1600 Dakota non-combatants, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were held in a concentration camp at Fort Snelling for the winter of 1862 and 63 – 300 died from cold and from disease. And then the survivors were exiled to what’s now South Dakota. So there was a concentration camp at Fort Snelling in 1862 and 1863, and now there’s a new one there created by ICE for the people that has detained. The native people of Minnesota know this story very well, and so do a lot of other people in the Twin Cities now.

JN: Yeah. There’s a lot of history here, Jon. ICE came into Minneapolis very unprepared, very unaware of the messages that it was sending of the trauma, frankly, that it was bringing. And that when you are in a coffee shop or on a street corner or in the basement of a union hall with folks who are up there, they want to tell you the history that you just recounted. They want to tell you other aspects of this, not in order to – it’s not like they want to take you on a historical tour or something like that per se. What they really want to do is give you some sense of what this occupation, which many people refer to it as, is doing to their city. I found with a lot of people that they were very emotional about it. They were very emotional about what ICE is doing to them.
And the other thing that I heard everywhere was real concern about what it’s done to the economy in the city. When you come into a city like this and you create this chaos, and you’ve got the detentions, the deportations, the grabbing of children, all of the stuff that we’re talking about. And then you have two instances where people were shot and killed on the street, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. You end up in a situation where people are not inclined to leave their homes. And so that means a lot of workers and restaurants and hotels and businesses are afraid to come to work. It also means that a lot of people don’t go out to dinner or don’t go out to shop in the ways that they might normally do. And also that the downtown is people aren’t coming in in the ways that they historically did.
The overall impact, and I heard about this from political figures, from business owners, from all sorts of other folks, is that this is dealt a real blow to Minneapolis’s economy. So we end up in this situation where an awfully lot of people are deeply concerned, not just about the moment. People are most concerned about what’s happening to their neighbors, the threats, the fear and all that, but they are also concerned about the future, and they are concerned that the Trump administration may deal a blow to their city that takes years and years to recover from.

JW: There’s one other thing we should talk about: The Nation has nominated Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize. Did anybody there talk to you about that?

JN: It is very interesting. I was in a shop one day and a young woman we were talking about it all and she said, “we got nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.” And then she explained the whole process.
Now, Jon, listeners to this podcast may or may not know that Jon played a real role in this in reaching out to do the nomination and being in contact with the Norwegian Nobel Committee and all that. What I can tell you is there are young people in Minneapolis who know that story. People were telling me about it unprompted. They didn’t know I was from The Nation. And I can also say that when I did radio shows on WCCO, which is a big radio station up there, as well as television and other things, it was interesting. People engaged in that discussion in a classic Minnesota way. They weren’t really sure that they should be such a big deal, but then as they talked about it and as they thought about it, they realized what we realized at The Nation, that they are a big deal, that their resistance is a model that will have relevance for years, decades to come, in how we deal with authoritarianism.

JW: John Nichols – you can read this report at thenation.com. John, thanks for talking with us today.

JN: It’s a tremendous honor to talk to a son of Minnesota.

JW: [Laughter]
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Jon Wiener: It won’t be easy for the Democrats to win control of the Senate in the November midterms, but it is possible. We have to hold Georgia, that’s Jon Ossoff’s seat, win the open seat in Michigan, flip Maine, defeating Susan Collins, flip North Carolina, where we have a strong candidate, that former Governor Roy Cooper, flip Ohio, strong candidate, Sherrod Brown. That gets us to 50. We got to get to 51. How about Texas? For comment, we turn to Steve Phillips. He wrote the bestseller, Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. He also hosts the podcast, Democracy in Color, and he writes for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The Nation. And in April, his new book will be published. It has the wonderful title, Are White Men Smarter Than Everybody Else?: Playing Offense in the Fight for Racial Justice in America Steve Phillips, welcome back.

Steve Phillips: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

JW: No Democrat has won a Senate seat in Texas since 1988. That’s, what, almost 40 years ago. That’s why people say Texas is a Republican state.  Bbut you say that’s not really right. How would you describe Texas politically?

SP: Fundamentally, Texas is a low-voting state. People don’t realize that because Texas has been so big in the popular culture, and so you have Dallas Cowboys and the show, Dallas, and all of these different images of what Texas is. Texas is a majority people of color. The state is 61% people of color. Eligible voters are 51% people of color. So the issue is not that it is this cowboy, hat wearing conservative white person, which is what the mindset has been. It’s that the state is majority of people of color, but the voter turnout levels are dramatically different. And so Latinos and African Americans and Asians don’t vote at as high a level as the white population does to a combination of active suppression, misinformation, et cetera. But that’s what the numbers are. There are four and a half million Black and Latinos did not vote in the last election who are eligible to vote in an election that was cited by around a million voters. Biden lost to say by 600,000 voters. So the problem is not it’s being conservative. It’s who is turning out to vote and at what levels are the different groups turning out to vote?

JW: Yeah. It turns out Texas has the second lowest voter turnout rate in the country in 2024. Under 50%.  Only Arkansas was worse. Best: my home state of Minnesota.
So the Senate race there, there’s a primary on March 3rd. Both parties have very contentious and important primaries. The Democrat’s best chance would be if the incumbent Republican, Senator John Cornyn is defeated in the Republican primary, which is quite possible by the right-wing Attorney General of the State, Ken Paxton, who’s been impeached for corruption, but got off, a big time Trumper. The latest polls of the Republican primary show the far-right wing corrupt Paxton ahead of the incumbent Cornyn by seven points.
In the Democratic primary, we also have two candidates. Jasmine Crockett, the representative in Congress from Dallas, first elected in 2022. And James Talarico, a state legislative representative from part of Austin, who’s been in the state legislature since 2018.
The pundits say this looks like a contest between a Black progressive running against a white man with a background as a Presbyterian minister who has therefore crossover appeal to moderate Republicans. What do you think?

SP: There’s a deep-seated, and I would actually argue delusional hope and belief that there can be an age of enlightenment candidate, that somebody who will just say the right things in the calm, rational way, and that’ll bring all of these different crossover voters to us. There’s no empirical evidence for that being the way to win. Democrats have lost statewide in Texas for 30 years in a row. And then multiple times they’ve tried to run these candidates who would have this mythical crossover appeal. The closest we’ve ever come in the past 30 years was Beto O’Rourke’s candidacy in 2018 for the Senate where he ran an inspiring grassroots campaign that boosted enthusiasm, boosted turnout, and he came within 200,000 votes of winning. That’s the way to look at how do we go about winning in Texas, that model, and then how do you close that gap?
And so Crockett is the best positioned and she has a lot of enthusiasm from the various communities of color. So can you replicate the Beto model and then add in an additional 300,000 plus voters out of the 1.2 million Black voters who did not vote last time? It’s a far more empirical, plausible, and achievable path to victory than the deep-seated hope that somehow people are going to gravitate over and back Talarico because he went on Joe Rogan’s show and talked in calm terms.

JW: Yeah. Let me just underline the numbers here. Beto lost by 215,000 votes. And remind us how many eligible Black voters stayed home in 2024?

SP: 1.2 million eligible Black voters did not vote. That alone should be able to get us across the finish line.

JW: So what is the Jasmine Crockett strategy for victory?

SP: Well, she fortunately is really very clear on and is trying to both replicate, I would even probably call it a combination of the Beto and the Obama appeal. And so you have run an inspiring, unapologetic, strong, forceful candidacy. She’s been one of the fiercest critics of Trump over these past several years and has really built a national brand and an identity. So it’s not trying to walk this moderate line and try to not upset people. It’s forcefully, unapologetically saying, this is what the country should be and what they’re doing is wrong. We should go in a different direction. And she’s really leaning into organizing and spending time in and boosting the infrastructure and the turnout potential in the communities of color. She’s going to the churches. She’s going to talking about creating these like Crockett clubs of different local activists and whatnot. That’s the path we need to go in Texas.

JW: In the entire history of the United States, only four states have ever elected a Black woman to the Senate. Let’s remember who they are. Illinois elected Carol Mosley Brown in 1992, first Black woman ever elected to the Senate. 24 years later, the second was elected, Kamala Harris from California, 2016. Eight years after that, 2024, just we got two in the same year, completely unprecedented. In Maryland, Angela Alsobrooks was elected, in Delaware, Lisa Blunt Rochester was elected. What do you conclude about this for the candidacy of Jasmine Crockett?

SP: Well, I mean, it says a lot about this country in terms of what our conceptions of leadership are. And so in her book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson, she has this chapter where she says that “we are all stepping onto a stage where the roles were decided a long time ago. And it’s very clear who is the lead and who is the sidekick.” So we have a picture of what leadership looks like in this country. We’ve had 46 presidents, all of them men, and all of them except for one are white. And so the conception of what a leader is very deeply rooted in the psychology and the ethos of our culture. And so anyone running and aspiring for statewide leadership has to deal with that reality. And so I would say that’s the essence of what the situation is. We’ve had four Black women elected to the Senate.
We have had no Black women ever elected governor, any state in the history of this country. And that’s not because we haven’t had talented, smart people, it’s because the conception of what a leader looks like is very different. And so it’s very important to have a candidate like Crockett. But the flip side of that reality is that people who have been alienated and marginalized and not had somebody to look up to, become very excited and mobilized and galvanized the way that happened when Obama ran. And so that’s what people are missing is really the catalytic potential for Crockett to excite people who finally sees somebody, who looks like them and who sounds like them, who cares about their issues, and then they will come out in larger numbers and sufficiently large enough numbers to win that seat.

JW: Now the doubters on this issue point to the victory of Abigail Spanberger in Virginia last November. They say her surprisingly large margin of victory suggests it’s centrist politics that are the path to power, especially for women, especially below the Mason Dixon line.

SP: Virginia is a great example of a narrow aperture around trying to understand what’s happening in politics and happening in social change within this country, and also for people to kind of reinforce their pre-suppositions by looking at, frankly, cherry-picking data. So yes, Spanberger ran and Spanberger won, and Spanberger is more moderate, there’s no question about that. Two points about that. One is the reason that she won is because of the work of groups such as New Virginia majority run by Tram Nguyen, a woman of color, to boost turnout of people of color and to change the composition of the electorate in Virginia over the past 15 years to the extent that Democrats have won like 80% of the statewide elections because the electorate has changed. But more important even than that is that people can say, “Oh, look at Spanberger. She won for governor.” They say nothing about who won lieutenant governor.
And so Virginia elected Ghazala Hashmi, the first Muslim elected statewide anywhere in the country, as an unapologetic woman of color, Muslim elected to become the second top person and poised to become the governor of Virginia four years down the road. So where does that factor in this analysis that we, oh, it’s a moderate white person is the way we have to go when they elected a Muslim as the lieutenant governor and an African American as the attorney general.

JW: And you say there’s an even better example of how to win from the 2025 elections. Instead of Virginia, you look to New York City.

SP: Oh, absolutely. It’s just we’re totally – I think there’s so many people trying to look the other direction in terms of realizing the dominant story in politics in many ways was Zohran Mamdani winning mayor of New York City, that you have an unapologetic, progressive person of color, younger person, running and inspiring a whole generation of people to get involved in politics and get involved in social change. And that’s how he won, unseating a longstanding incumbent. They made many of the same arguments like, “Oh, well, Cuomo has this broad appeal, et cetera.” But that it was the boosted turnout through the enthusiasm and the mobilization of the multiracial electorate that propelled Mamdani into this office. And that is a formula that not only worked in New York but can work elsewhere. And the other part is New York its demographics are much more similar to Texas than even Virginias are.

JW: Yeah, that’s a striking thing. Most people don’t think of Texas as having similar demographics to New York City but remind us why that makes sense.

SP: So New York is a majority people of color city, and as Mamdani proudly said in his election night speech, “its a city of immigrants, built by immigrants and will be run by an immigrants.” And then Texas is 61% people of color. And it’s important to realize that too. And all this mythical and desire for there to be some kind of crossover, moderate voter is to understand how deep within the Texas identity is this existential battle over what is the nature of this country. Is this a multiracial democracy or is this a white nation? Texas itself was formed because they wanted to continue to practice slavery, and that’s when they formed the Republic of Texas and went to war with Mexico over the issue of being able to continue to practice slavery so that the whites there could own Black people. And then after that, then you had the United States weighing in around the whole Mexican-American war where the United States took the majority of the landmass of Mexico and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in the 1840s.
And so people say, one of my friends got married in a border town in Texas and at the wedding reception, he’s a Latino and people were saying, “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us” – which is historically accurate. And plays out in terms of the dynamics of the situation and the struggle there.
So because of those realities, you have a situation where it’s majority of people of color, 61% of color, African Americans and Latinos and nations are 51% of the eligible voters, and that is really the proposition and the composition, which is also another piece in terms of jasmine running and being part of the ticket mobilizing African Americans. Gina Hinojosa, who is going to be the nominee for governor. So we’d be running a Latina who has deep roots comes out of the border area as the nominee on the gubernatorial side. So you could have a very strong Black and brown female-led ticket, which would be a way forward. And also what I’m trying to argue in that piece is to show the empirical numbers that that is the greatest upside in terms of winning within Texas.

JW: Zohran Mamdani has shown what can happen when a young progressive candidate of color sets out an entirely different vision of what society could be. He captured people’s imaginations. He gave them energy and hope. He inspired young people to turn out in large numbers. It could happen in Texas if Jasmine Crockett wins the Democratic primary. Steve Phillips wrote about it in The Nation Magazine. You can read his article, “Jasmine Crockett Can Win the Texas Senate Race if Voters of Color Get to the Polls,” that’s at thenation.com. Steve, thanks for talking with us today. 

SP: Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.