As a Miinesotan this article has really touched on how connected and neighborly we are all here. Especailly here in the winter where it gets obvious that we need to all stick together or else the weather will kill us all. We would never let our neighbors down even if we have never met them. Minnesota Nice Hate ICE

Perhaps the Trump-administration officials had hoped that a few rabble-rousers would get violent, justifying the kind of crackdown he seems to fantasize about. Maybe they had assumed that they would find only a caricature of “the resistance”—people who seethed about Trump online but would be unwilling to do anything to defend themselves against him.

Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. They aren’t looking for attention or likes on social media. Unless they are killed by federal agents, as Pretti and Renee Good were, other activists do not even necessarily know their names. Many use a handle or code name out of fear of government retaliation. Their concerns are justified: A number of people working as volunteers or observers told me that they had been trailed home by ICE agents, and some of their communications have already been infiltrated, screenshotted, and posted online, forcing them to use new text chains and code names. One urgent question among observers, as the videos of Pretti’s killing spread, was what his handle might have been.

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Finally, there are those most at risk of coming into violent contact with federal agents, a group that’s come to be popularly known as ICE Watch, although the designation is unofficial—as far as I can tell, you’re in ICE Watch if you watch ICE. These are the whistle-wielding pedestrians and drivers calling themselves “observers” or “commuters” who patrol for federal agents (usually identifiable by their SUVs with out-of-state plates) and alert the neighborhood to their presence. Pretti and Good, the two Minneapolis residents killed by federal agents, fit in this category.

Trump-administration officials and MAGA influencers have repeatedly called these activists “violent” and said they are involved in “riots.” But the resistance in Minnesota is largely characterized by a conscious, strategic absence of physical confrontation. Activists have made the decision to emphasize protection, aid, and observation. When matters escalate, it is usually the choice of the federal agents. Of the three homicides in Minneapolis this year, two were committed by federal agents.

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If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’” Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.