The second Trump administration has placed Minnesota in its crosshairs, with multiple attempts to freeze federal funding for health care, child care, education, and other key social services; repeated lawsuits against and persecution of elected officials, cities, and activists; and the largest immigration detention and deportation operation in US history (Operation Metro Surge). Operation Metro Surge, which saw thousands of federal hirelings dispatched to the Twin Cities and surrounding areas, resulted in extensive civil rights violations, family separations and abductions of community members, psychological trauma, economic devastation, assault, and murder. It is difficult to overstate the lasting consequences of the state violence allegedly perpetrated in the name of “public safety,” particularly for immigrant communities and those closely impacted.
Minnesotans engaged in herculean displays of organized resistance in response to Operation Metro Surge and ancillary campaigns. While many lauded Minnesotans’ efforts and highlighted our community organizing and solidarity, commentators often failed to account for how gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality informed the work of resistance and heightened the risks associated with resistance for marginalized communities.
This microsyllabus analyzes federal aggression against Minnesota (including and beyond Operation Metro Surge) and resistance through an intersectional feminist lens. Pairing primary sources that document federal actions and local responses with multidisciplinary feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial scholarship, North Star Resistance surfaces the interlocking systems of oppression animating authoritarian regimes. So too, we highlight the coalitional solidarities, queer and sex radical tactics, and mutual aid networks implicitly guided by a feminist ethics of care. North Star Resistance records the various modes of feminist resistance that met this pivotal moment in US history.
We write as residents of the Twin Cities who were immersed in and witnessed firsthand the violence and rebellious camaraderie of this moment. Minnesota has a long history of organized resistance to state violence by Indigenous, Black, and other marginalized communities— although space does not allow us to account for how this past informs current efforts. We offer North Star Resistance to anyone who seeks to understand the converging forces that made Minnesota the site of a multilayered contestation with authoritarian forces that seek to violently enforce social hierarchies; circumscribe national belonging along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; decimate public services and systems that serve the common good; and diminish public trust in government institutions.
The “Other” Americans: State Violence and Cross-Community Solidarity
Operation Metro Surge indiscriminately targeted non-white populations and those whose gender or sexuality placed them on the fringes of white heterodomesticity. The months-long federal occupation rendered visible the ways race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender shape public understandings of and responses to state violence, including organized resistance by impacted communities. Media coverage of the killing of Renée Nicole Good—a 37-year-old white, U.S. citizen shot by an ICE agent– emphasized competing narratives surrounding her identity. While Good’s death generated widespread public grief, her lesbian identity was often minimized in sympathetic portrayals and explicitly mobilized in hostile ones, such as an account of an ICE agent referring to Good as a “lesbian bitch” or federal authorities labelling her as a “domestic terrorist.”
In the US, immigration is often framed as a Latine issue, but Operation Metro Surge revealed how the mass deportation regime impacts multiple, intersecting diasporic communities or communities of color, including Asians, Latine, Black and African diasporas, and Native Americans. Journalists noted growing conversations among people who had distanced themselves from immigration issues and ICE detentions, and strengthened cross-cultural solidarity among Minnesotans. Coalitional solidarity was evident in the grassroots, rapid-response networks that patrolled neighborhoods to warn community members and provided food, transportation, and financial support to residents who feared leaving their homes amidst enforcement operations. Many of these networks were helmed and populated by women, particularly mothers and immigrant women – such as the “Mamas of Cedar Riverside” group and “abuela” project.
LINKS:
Secondary sources
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
Butler’s examination of how political and media frameworks shape which lives become publicly grievable clarifies why media coverage of Good emphasized identities such as “mother,” “U.S. citizen,” and “community member” – forms of social recognition associated with belonging and legitimacy. Rather than treating grief as universal, Butler asks how social norms determine which losses become publicly visible and which remain politically marginal.
Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Puar analyzes how the figure of the “terrorist” became constructed through racialized, gendered, and sexually deviant imaginaries in post-9/11 political discourse. Her work contextualizes the portrayal of Good as a “domestic terrorist,” raising broader questions about how perceived deviance shapes who is depicted as threatening and who is positioned outside the boundaries of national belonging and protection.
Monisha Das Gupta. “Introduction: Deportation as Settler Carcerality,” in All of Us or None: Migrant Organizing in an Era of Deportation and Dispossession. Duke University Press, 2024
Das Gupta defines deportation as “settler carcerality,” arguing that the carceral state appeals to racist-nationalist-sexist calls for crime prevention, continually producing new felons and felonies. The settler carceral state also wields its tactics – including mass surveillance and deportation – over Indigenous people. Deportation agendas create non-normative family dynamics and queer modes of kinship – in which the practice of collective care becomes integral to survival.
Karandikar, Sharvari, Nadine Shaanta Murshid, Mery Diaz, Bridget Livingstone, and Margaret F. Gibson. 2026. “On Thin ICE: In Solidarity with Immigrant Communities.” Affilia 41 (2): 137–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/08861099261424090.
Written in response to Operation Metro Surge, this article highlights how immigration enforcement is not gender-neutral but rather a form of racialized and gendered state violence. Authors argue that deportation disciplines labor, regulates families, and produces reproductive injustice. The socio-economic costs of deportation are redistributed onto women, children, and extended kin networks through family separation, legal precarity, violations of bodily autonomy, and economic instability. Solidarity demands that we resist divide-and-conquer strategies that pit communities against one another in the name of security.
Alvarez-Hernandez, L.R., & Bermudez, J.M. (2023). Entre Madres y Comadres: Trans Latina Immigrants Empowering Women Beyond Marianismo. Affilia, 38(4), 597-614. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08861099231190095
Authors call for disavowing marianismo: traditional Latin American (and Catholic-influenced) gender roles, in which women are idealized as submissive, self-sacrificing, and devoted to their families. Highlighting trans Latinas’ community organizing, the authors propose “comadres” as an alternative model for community, which positions Latina feminists and activists as agents of change. This model clarifies how Latina women transform Marianismo ideals into collective community organizing practices.
Krstić, A., Shen, W., Varty, C. T., Lam, J. Y., & Hideg, I. (2025). Taking on the Invisible Third Shift: The Unequal Division of Cognitive Labor and Women’s Work Outcomes. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 49(2), 205–219. https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843251330284
Cognitive labor–the conceptual work of managing lives and relationships–is disproportionately performed by women across racial and economic classes. The burden of cognitive labor results in burnout and high levels of emotional exhaustion. Community organizing and cognitive labor work in tandem, often provided by women of color organizers. This research highlights the importance of recognizing the weight of cognitive labor in social movements. Without proper support, community organizing often withers.
Gendered Care Work
If the Twin Cities are now known for anything, it is the outpouring of mutual aid (or “neighborliness”) in response to Operation Metro Surge. Women-, people of color-, and queer-owned small businesses (such as Black Garnet Books, A Room of their Own, Smitten Kitten, Moona Moono) and events such as the “Love Melts ICE” market, organized by Sappho Social Club and Brass Strap, combined fundraising, artistic production, community food drives, and volunteer labor to support basic needs, rent relief, and immigrant justice efforts. While journalists periodically noted the leadership of marginalized groups (women, LGBTQ+, immigrants, and communities of color) in the mutual aid networks that emerged in response to Operation Metro Surge, they rarely explored why these networks were led by such actors. Mutual aid can be seen as a form of social reproduction – the daily, unglamorous work of reproducing human life (cleaning, cooking, and care for others), often done by women in their own families for free or for other families for low pay. As feminist and queer scholars have long argued, social reproduction or care work is essential and highly gendered and raced labor that the formal economy depends upon.
The Trump administration has also negatively impacted child care and education in Minnesota, with stark gendered and racial consequences. In late 2025, the Trump administration attempted to freeze federal funding for Minnesota childcare centers (Child Care Assistance Program) amidst allegations of widespread fraud. For months, ICE presence disrupted childcare providers’ ability to work and immigrant, refugee, and other youth’s access to education and services. Childcare providers and educators are disproportionately female and lack of access to child care or closed schools can result in diminished labor force participation and lower earnings for mothers. In addition, the trauma of abductions, family separations, and persons unaccounted for in immigration detention camps means lasting psychological distress and long-term educational consequences for students, educators, and providers alike. It remains to be seen whether and how future administrations or governments will remedy these lasting socioeconomic harms.
LINKS:
Secondary Sources
Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso, 2020.
Spade distinguishes mutual aid from charity by emphasizing collective survival, reciprocity, and shared participation rather than top-down assistance. His framework reveals how Minneapolis mutual aid markets operate as political spaces rather than simply fundraising initiatives.The markets described in local coverage mobilize relationships and collective responsibility, suggesting broader forms of solidarity grounded in shared vulnerability and community self-determination.
Illouz, Eva. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Illouz argues that modern romance is deeply intertwined with consumer culture, as markets increasingly organize how love is expressed and experienced. Her analysis helps explain the political significance of Minneapolis’s Valentine’s Day mutual aid markets, which appropriate a holiday typically centered on private consumption by couples to redistribute resources and foster collective care. Rather than rejecting consumption altogether, these initiatives redirect it toward solidarity, transforming a commercial ritual into a practice of community support and political belonging.
England, P. (2005). Emerging theories of care work. Annual Review of Sociology, 31(1), 381–399. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.31.041304.122317
England provides five theoretical frameworks for understanding care work as gendered labor, including the “devaluation” frame, which argues that care is systemically undervalued because of its association with women and women of color. England’s frameworks contextualize why immigrant childcare workers in Minneapolis are uniquely vulnerable to both economic uncertainty and federal aggression. Political campaigns to discredit or target childcare providers perpetuate a persistent marginalization and devaluation of those working in the industry.
Powell, A. (2025). Nearly half a million early childhood educators are immigrants. CSCCE Berkeley. https://cscce.berkeley.edu/publications/blog
Immigrants make up at least 21% of the U.S. early care and education workforce, concentrated in home and family-based settings. ICE enforcement threatens not just individual workers but also the entire child and early education care network. In Minnesota, where childcare access is already expensive and strained, attacks on the childcare industry have the potential to destabilize the labor force, community networks, and pose serious gendered, economic consequences for individuals and families.
Gonzalez, G., & Patler, C. (2021). The Educational Consequences of Parental Immigration Detention. Sociological Perspectives, 64(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/0731121420937743
When caregivers are detained, trauma, stigma, and financial strain disrupt children’s education, leading to anxiety, academic struggles, and disengagement from learning. The authors argue that detention or deportation has lasting consequences, as stigma can affect children’s relationships with educators and caring adults who could provide critical emotional and material support. Since education is a key driver of upward mobility for refugee and immigrant families, school disruptions also affect immigrant families’ long-term economic and social wellbeing.
Lieberman, J. T., Valdez, C. R., Pintor, J. K., Weisz, P., Carroll-Scott, A., Wagner, K., & Martinez-Donate, A. P. (2023). “It felt like hitting rock bottom”: A qualitative exploration of the mental health impacts of immigration enforcement and discrimination on US-citizen, Mexican children. Latino Studies, 21(3), 323–347. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-023-00415-5
Children whose families have been impacted by immigration enforcement experience psychological distress, manifesting as anxiety, worry, depression, or intense sadness and somatic symptoms. These adverse experiences have negative effects on children’s educational engagement and outcomes, leading to sleep disruptions, behavioral changes, disengagement, difficulty focusing, and absenteeism. Racism and microaggressions related to children’s immigrant identities can further reduce participation and motivation in educational settings.
Queer and Sex Radical Resistance
Media coverage of Operation Metro Surge often noted the presence of sexual and gender dissidents within the resistance. What’s queer about resisting authoritarianism? Profiles of local sex worker rights organizations (Sex Workers Outreach Project) providing firearms safety courses for workers concerned about abuse by federal agents, feminist sex shops (Smitten Kitten) and other LGBTQ+ businesses serving as a mutual aid hubs, and of dildo-wielding protestors speak to sexual and gender outsiders’ vulnerability to and subversive defiance of fascist regimes which seek to enforce sexual normalcy and patriarchal gender norms.
LINKS:
Secondary Sources
Comella, Lynn Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure (Duke University Press, 2017)
Mutual aid within LGBTQ+ communities is well documented, but what explains public fascination with the feminist sex shop as a site for mutual aid? Comella’s history analyzes how establishments such as Smitten Kitten sought to balance sex-positive feminist principles and profit motives; owner-operators were motivated by social change and designed businesses to serve as alternative spaces for political education and community-building (not just consumption). Comella’s analysis clarifies how a “retail activism” guided by queer, intersectional feminism would make room for food and diaper donations, alongside sex products.
Berg, Heather. (2024). If You’re Going to Be Beautiful, You Better Be Dangerous: Sex Worker Community Defense. Radical History Review, 2024(148), 130–153. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10846865
Responding to state-produced vulnerability to (sexual) violence, some sex workers look to community defense tactics (information-sharing about self-defense, martial arts or firearms training). Drawing on interviews, Berg argues that sex workers’ approach to community defense engages Black radical and abolitionist critiques of the carceral state, while challenging transformative justice models that depend upon nonviolence. Berg’s article illuminates why sex workers would embrace community defense and nuances definitions of community and safety wielded in slogans such as “we keep us safe.”
Preciado, Paul B; Dunn, Kevin. Countersexual Manifesto. Columbia University Press, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/prec17562.
Preciado reconceptualizes the dildo as a transferable prosthesis rather than a substitute for the penis, exposing masculinity, sexual difference, and the heteropatriarchal order as political constructions rather than natural facts. This framework illuminates how the use of dildos during anti-ICE protests is a form of queer political aesthetics: the phallus is displaced from its association with masculine authority and re-signified as an object of ridicule and excess, destabilizing the symbolic power of militarized masculinity and the carceral state.
