Image by Sophie.
Amidst the ICE terror that descended on Minnesota this past winter, tens of thousands of everyday people packed into community centers for legal observer trainings. Trainers handed out photocopied know-your-rights zines and bright, 3D-printed whistles. Yet appeals to procedural law and the Constitution offered zero physical defense against state-sanctioned abductions. ICE agents and their army of prosecutors couldn’t have cared less about constitutional rights. The only force that offered a real challenge to the machinery of terror was raw, organized collective power.
“Stay loud, form a crowd,” ran the headline of one popular zine. The tactic was deceptively simple: pierce the air with your whistle and force a confrontation. The deafening, high-pitched shriek was meant to warn residents and draw crowds large enough to halt a raid dead in its tracks. On social media feeds, videos showed everyday people swarming in real time—clashes that frequently escalated into pepper spray, tear gas, police batons, and, in two instances, fatal gunfire.
And for all its viral momentum, the so-called migra whistle possessed no magical powers. By itself, the whistle was no armor against an occupying force of federal agents. A close comrade recounted to me the paralyzing shame of standing on his porch while his neighbor was ripped from his home. He blew his whistle until his lungs burned, only to be met by a dizzying wave of panic and helpless tears. He was forced to witness a human being dragged through the snow, torn from his family, and thrown into the back of an unmarked SUV. Behind the genuine heroism of neighbors shielding neighbors lay thousands of these devastating scenes—moments that never broke through mainstream headlines and will be omitted from the slick, retrospective documentaries. The names of our vanished friends, relatives, and neighbors will never receive the public tribute their loss demands.
And still, a critical dimension of the Twin Cities resistance remains overlooked. Beyond the street-level standoffs, thousands built encrypted neighborhood Signal networks designed for rapid response. Access passed strictly through word-of-mouth trust networks, anchored by a rigid tactical communications protocol borrowed directly from military intelligence: SALUTE.
S – Size: Exact count of agents, unmarked SUVs, or spotter vehicles seen.
A – Activity: What agents are actively doing (e.g., surrounding a porch, breaching a door, or idling at a curb).
L – Location: Exact street intersection, alleyway, or cross-street.
U – Unit: Uniform insignias, agency patches, or plainclothes markings.
T – Time: Exact timestamp of the sighting down to the minute.
E – Equipment: Visible weapons, tactical vests, battering rams, or license plates.
Neighbors reported ICE and Border Patrol sightings using this protocol, enforcing a strict rule: post only what your own eyes can verify. Raw, eyewitness data pinged smartphones, surging in frequency during the hours ICE activity peaked, from 6 AM to noon.
This reporting discipline acted as a firebreak against the wave of paranoia and viral disinformation that explodes during moments of crisis. It produced two starkly different realities: the unfiltered ledger of an occupying federal force pinging through working-class neighborhoods, and everything else that was sanitized by corporate media or misunderstood by outsiders. For a time, news coming from outside the community or the trusted rapid response networks was useless for grasping the raw reality on the ground.
On my walk to work, a neighbor stopped me. We had seen each other before but had never done more than acknowledge one another. “We’re living in an alternate reality,” he said to me as he loaded up his work truck. As a Black contractor who spent his days remodeling suburban homes, he found himself caught between white homeowners who either cheered on the masked ICE agents or wrung their hands in polite horror over morning coffee. To him—to us—the raids were not a terrifying rupture of the status quo, but an ongoing continuation of it. “Trump wasn’t the start of this,” he said, tossing tools into his truck bed. He recounted how his grandparents fled the Jim Crow South, only to hit the cold wall of segregation in the “Deep North” of Minnesota. We discussed what the calls for a “return to normal” really meant for Black and Indigenous people—a return to an acceptable, quiet baseline of everyday violence.
As I walked away from this conversation, I wondered how long our ancestors had been using the SALUTE protocol for survival, and how the militarization of occupation had radically shaped our ancestral and collective consciousness to innately distrust anything that was not an eyewitness account of what had actually happened. Because our own accounts of our lives have always been systematically discredited, living under the thumb of an occupying force hardwires a deep, ancestral skepticism into your nervous system. It is a survival mechanism we must learn to trust. When official press releases, courtrooms, and police blotters have spent generations writing off Black and Indigenous reality as mere rumor or lie, you learn to reject the official narrative entirely. Entire genocides and wars have been built upon these falsehoods. You trust only the neighbor who stood on the porch, watched the dust settle, and saw the truth with their own eyes.
I tell my students to remember how they felt during this occupation—the profound distrust they felt toward official narratives, and the trust they placed in their fellow human beings to relay the truth. In moments like these, truth ceases to be an academic debate; it becomes the line between freedom and captivity, life and death.
This piece first appeared on Red Scare.
