We Faced Down Trump’s Secret Police in Minneapolis. Here’s How We Did It.

When Tippy Amundson was in middle school, she read the diary of a teenager hiding from the secret police. “Terrible things are happening outside,” it read. “Families are torn apart; men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” Amundson tried to imagine what she would do if she lived during such terrible times.

I would totally hide Anne Frank, she reasoned. But when would you ever have the opportunity to do that? This is a civilized world we live in now. This is America. A quarter century later, Amundson, now a 39-year-old travel agent and former kindergarten teacher, received a call from her 13-year-old neighbor. He asked if he could hide in her house if Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers chased him home from his bus stop. It was then she knew that the time had come.

Amundson’s teenage neighbor had been considering what he might do if he found himself in ICE’s crosshairs. His parents didn’t want him to go to school; they themselves were afraid to go to work. Every day when he got off the bus, he looked around for unmarked cars filled with masked agents wearing body armor and carrying guns, afraid that they might ask him for his papers or put him in their SUVs and drive away. As he walked up to the door, he checked over his shoulders to see if he was being watched, and he hoped his parents would still be waiting for him inside. Amundson agreed to watch the bus stop when he got home and to hide him if necessary. Their story, which only got more dramatic from there, is a prime example of how the people of Minneapolis responded to unprecedented state-sanctioned lawlessness: They mobilized en masse to protect their neighbors.

Early in Donald Trump’s second term, the White House issued mandates of ICE and Border Patrol to arrest 3,000 people a day. Lawmakers were denied entry when they tried to perform their mandated oversight duties at immigrant detention facilities. ICE’s mission broadened to police those opposed to the president. The Department of Homeland Security began to surveil social media posts of Trump’s political opponents, using facial recognition software to create “terrorist” databases of peaceful protesters and following the demonstrators to their houses, sometimes calling them by name. ICE and Border Patrol agents, in masks and unwilling to identify themselves, were empowered by the Supreme Court to demand the papers of people because of their accent, their job, or simply their “apparent race or ethnicity.”

In short, according to Lee Morgenbesser, who studies past and present authoritarian regimes and secret police, ICE meets the criteria for a secret police force.

Secret police, or something very near that description, swept through Chicago from September to December 2025. Senior Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, with masked and militarized federal officers, waged a monthslong rampage that saw protesters, first responders, and children tear-gassed, journalists arrested, citizens abducted and shot, and a man killed.

It was then that the Trump administration settled its gaze on Minneapolis. A haven for refugees fleeing a civil war in the late ’90s, Minnesota is home to some 80,000 people of Somali descent, most of whom are citizens. “I don’t want them in this country, to be honest with you,” Trump said to his Cabinet and reporters about Americans of Somali descent. “We’re at a tipping point. I don’t know if people mind me saying that, but I’m saying it. We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage to our country.”

On Dec. 2, federal police kidnapped a Metro Transit bus driver on his way to work because he was Somali. The officers unlawfully detained him (or, more accurately, trafficked him) in three different states, and he wouldn’t see his family again for a month. So began Operation Metro Surge, an invasion whose name was inspired by the war on terror and which was conceived to punish a place where Trump is deeply unpopular. “THE DAY OF RECKONING AND RETRIBUTION IS COMING,” the president tweeted in all caps at the height of the occupation.

“My kids were literally pointing out masked gunmen on the way to school,” Amundson remembered. Agents with their faces covered up to their eyes, in unmarked black SUVs with tinted windows, would wait outside churches, mosques, schools, daycares, courtrooms, and hospitals. They would sweep neighborhoods where they thought immigrants lived, cornering people alone, rolling up on them and throwing them into their vehicles for spot citizenship checks. Refugees, asylum-seekers with pending applications, green-card holders, citizens, and children alike were swept off the streets and pulled into detention.

When I left for work during that period, I would see legal observers in high-vis vests standing outside the school across from my house, keeping watch and signaling to students that they were safe and that they belonged. I drove to my job at a middle school, where more legal observers patrolled outside. In the relative safety inside, attendance plummeted among Black and brown students. Those who did come to school told me about the eyes of masked agents staring at them as they had left their apartments that morning, or the unmarked black SUVs that had followed them on their bus routes the day before to see where the brown kids got off, or the nightmares they had of ICE agents breaking down their doors and taking away their parents and siblings.

Some families hid in basements, parents telling their children to avoid going to the first floor at all in case they were spotted through a window.

It all came to a head when Renee Nicole Good, a mother and poet two years younger than Amundson, was shot in her car after dropping her 6-year-old off at school. When her wife got out of the car to film and confront ICE officers, Good was told to leave, then ordered to get out of the car. Confused, she started to drive away. That’s when agent Jonathan Ross moved in front of her car and shot her three times: in her arm, chest, and head. According to an independent autopsy, the shots to her arm and chest had not been life-threatening, but the one to her temple had.

“Fucking bitch,” Ross said, as the car careered into a pole.

Good remained alive for minutes afterward. A bystander begged to help Good, to check her pulse and perform first aid. “I’m a physician!”

“Don’t care!” another agent responded. This retort was familiar to Minneapolis residents. It was the message sent by local police officers who refused to let an off-duty firefighter help as officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Good was still alive by the time paramedics arrived, but they were unable to save her life. Her family has confirmed that Minneapolis authorities were finally granted access this month to the evidence in her killing, which will allow them to conduct a proper investigation.

When Floyd was killed, Minneapolitans were furious. But when Good was killed, our anger was tinged with fear. Many people retreated inside. For some, though, this only strengthened their resolve to monitor agents to make sure they didn’t kill others.

Three days after Good’s death, Amundson drove past a Latino grocery store in her neighborhood and saw a group of people sitting in front of the entrance. She pulled over to ask them what was going on.

“We think there’s an ICE agent,” someone told her, pointing toward an unmarked car skulking in the parking lot. Amundson went inside the store, where 20 people were hiding. She volunteered to walk them out to their cars, using her white body as a kind of shield. In the parking lot, a legal observer helped her download the encrypted messaging app Signal and join her neighborhood rapid-response group.

In the Twin Cities, neighbors tend to know one another, either from one of the 2,000 block parties held during the summer for National Night Out (the event boasts one of the highest attendances in the country), from volunteer work (again, Minnesota has one of the highest rates of any state), or from the logistical coordination required to move snow and ice from public sidewalks, a civic responsibility most Minnesotans take very seriously. This was a fertile environment for the proliferation of digital rapid-response networks at a time when they were most needed.

Using Signal, neighbors alerted one another when agents were near. There were large groups that covered swaths of the Twin Cities (all of South Minneapolis, for example), while hyperlocal group chats and voice calls tracked specific neighborhoods. Legal observers, volunteers who sought to surveil the activity of federal agents to ensure safety and compliance with the law, as well as to document who was being taken, came outside when alerted to their presence and blew whistles to warn those nearby. About 30,000 Minnesotans were trained as observers, all intent on making sure that the human beings around them were being treated with basic dignity and given due process.

The same week as her trip to the grocery store, Amundson was driving when she saw six masked officers jump out of a car and swarm a man sitting alone at a bus stop. They forced him to empty his pockets and demanded to see his papers. Amundson stopped, got out of her car, and filmed them.

“What was I thinking?” she reflected later. How was a “former kindergarten teacher, mom of three, going to take on these masked gunmen?” But she did it anyway. “We’re all trying to do what we can to make these people that we care about feel safe.”

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Amundson wasn’t an expert on the law, but she knew right from wrong. She was horrified that children as young as 2 were being imprisoned in camps where food is crawling with maggots, where the putrid water makes people sick, where dormant diseases like measles and tuberculosis spread, and where, more frequently than ever, people die.

“This is my neighbor,” Amundson explained simply.

Atlantic writer Adam Serwer describes what happened in response to Operation Metro Surge as “neighborism,” the ideology that one should care for, and protect, one’s surrounding communities. To me, it captures how people protect one another when the law and its appointed enforcers cannot be trusted.

“Who keeps us safe?” began a popular call-and-response protest chant I first heard during the George Floyd uprising and that resurfaced during Metro Surge. “We keep us safe.”

On Jan. 22, Amundson and her neighbor Heather Zemian were driving together, patrolling their neighborhood and ensuring that kids were getting home safely after school, when they saw masked agents with guns clustered near the area where kids would soon be getting dropped off by buses.

They honked the horn nine times to alert others nearby. The agents approached their car and warned them to stop. Zemian and Amundson complied and had started to exit the parking lot when a local police officer drove in. They pulled over and briefly asked the officer if she had been called in because of them. The officer told them no.

“Do I recommend not getting involved? Yes,” she added, abdicating all responsibility for the safety of the neighborhood.

“We’re getting involved. They’re our neighbors,” Amundson responded nonconfrontationally. “If ICE shows up to my house because they think neighbors are inside my house, should I call you?” Amundson went on to ask, the question ever present in her mind. Who keeps us safe?

But before the officer could elucidate a satisfying response, agents drove up and surrounded Zemian and Amundson’s vehicle. They asked the women if they had called the police, then ripped them out of the car into the subzero air and put handcuffs around their wrists. As they did so, another masked agent in tactical gear filmed them with a professional camera. The police officer watched Zemian and Amundson be taken away in an unmarked car.

As they were being driven off, the women noticed that something was wrong with the agent in the front passenger seat.

“I’m not feeling so well,” he said, before sliding down and convulsing. The other young agents were frozen, unsure what to do.

“He’s having a seizure,” Amundson said. At first they ignored her.

“Call fucking 911!” Zemian instructed them. Finally, they pulled over.

“He needs help. I have some medical training,” Amundson told them. “You need to uncuff me so I can put him in the recovery position.”

They did. Amundson, now uncuffed, walked to the side of the seizing agent, a man who had terrorized her own children. She eased the seat back and took the gun from his hip so he could lie on his side. His mask had slid off, and Amundson was taken aback by how young he was. She began soothing him. Zemian, who had also been uncuffed, started digging through the SUV, collecting spare tactical vests, then propped them underneath the agent’s head.

“Hi, my name’s Tippy,” Amundson said. “What’s your name?” He told her. “This was between seizures,” she told me later. “I watched him have three seizures. That ICE agent could have choked on his tongue had I not been there.”

In front of her was a human in need. The people nearby didn’t know what to do, so she did what she thought anybody would: She helped him. Eventually, the young agent was taken away by paramedics. Amundson and Zemian’s hopes that their behavior would warrant some leniency were quickly dashed. They were handcuffed again and taken to the Whipple Federal Building.

“Because you were so nice to us, we’ll give you your phone call,” the secret police told the women as they drove them to the site where ICE agents were detaining citizens and noncitizens alike. They were charged with obstruction. (Eventually, those charges were dropped.) As they left, their citations in hand, an agent in charge said, “Tell everyone how nice we were to you.”

Two days after Amundson’s arrest, ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis shot Alex Pretti 10 times in the back. Pretti’s last act had been to try to defend someone from pepper spray. Amundson watched the video, and what struck her most was that another agent started clapping and laughing after the 10 shots were fired.

Even after the second killing in a month, Amundson continued to observe her neighbor getting off the bus. As civil resistance grew, ICE agents were eventually forced to change their approach from military occupation to a new phase that relied on covert tactics and the collaboration of local law enforcement. People kept disappearing, but schools again filled with traumatized students.

“The kids are playing again, and it feels lighter,” Amundson told me months later.

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world,” a 15-year-old in Nazi Germany marveled, before she was taken by the secret police to a concentration camp and killed. “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

In the week after my own detainment by the secret police, I took time off work because I was afraid to leave the house. Out the window, I noticed a spot in the alley where the thawing and freezing of ice had created a ravine, where car tires would get lodged and trap the driver. Three separate times, cars got stuck. Hearing the futile spinning of tires, neighbors came out en masse to figure out how to solve the problem. People sprinkled cat litter, got mats out of their own vehicles to place under the tires. Once, someone laid down a broken door, which they had stored in their basement, underneath a car. Despite my fear, I got out of the house. I knocked on the doors of more neighbors to come out and push together. We did what we could with the resources we had, because being a neighbor means watching out for one another.

What do you do when the police are doing roving citizen checks on your brown neighbors? When constitutional rights are suspended and the orders of judges ignored by secret police? When doors are battered in without judicial warrants? When citizens are dragged out into the street in their boxers? When children are put in camps? When people are shot in the street for the crime of compassion? You find your neighbors, go outside, and push.

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