Of all the Trump administration’s efforts to expand and consolidate its authority, the ICE operations in Minneapolis feel the most terrifying. In the U.S. system, we are accustomed to police being limited in their ability to grab people up on the streets and send them away to detention centers without hearing or trial. Seeing that happen gives us a sense of what a true police state looks like. Careful, thoughtful writers and analysts who have been wary of drawing analogies between Trumpism and fascism are starting to use the term less guardedly. That’s a direct result of the atmosphere created by ICE.
And yet. For all the terror associated with what’s happening in Minneapolis, the city’s residents are also showing us how constitutional democracy can be preserved. Minneapolis is serving as a guide to the essential importance of sustained resistance to preserving constitutional democracy.
For all the terror associated with what’s happening in Minneapolis, the city’s residents are also showing us how constitutional democracy can be preserved.
As everyone knows, large numbers of people have been out in the cold every day, drawing attention to ICE activities. The deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have justifiably drawn the most national attention and outrage. But those deaths are significant in part because they are manifestations of the presence of citizen resistors.
Here’s the key point: Where citizens consistently and publicly resist and protest extreme and unlawful government action, it becomes far more difficult for a totalitarian police state to emerge.
The reason is straightforward. The government doesn’t have the capacity and resources to suppress a large percentage of the population. In the U.S., the government also doesn’t have the legal authority to do so. And although legal authority can be overcome by force, the conditions for that to happen depend on public acquiescence.
So long as a substantial part of the public continuously and regularly expresses that it does not accept what the government is doing, it signals to the government that it will not be able to suppress existing legal norms successfully.
Think about it from the standpoint of the would-be fascist or the would-be totalitarian. You want to change the system so that you can do whatever you want. To do that, you want to scare people so that they will be afraid to speak out. If you succeed in scaring enough of them, you can do whatever you want. But you’re always looking, always scanning the public to see how your efforts are going. Realistically, you can’t arrest everyone. You certainly can’t do that early in the process of trying to gain power.
So when you see regular, consistent, sustained resistance, that’s a signal that the public is not going to roll over and play dead.
So when you see regular, consistent, sustained resistance, that’s a signal that the public is not going to roll over and play dead. Institutions like the courts and state governments and yes, even Congress, are watching too. When they see that the public is continuing to resist, that tells them that they shouldn’t roll over and play dead. The courts then continue to insist on the rule of law. State and local officials express their outrage at what’s happening and try to use the legal tools available to them to resist. Members of Congress begin to speak out. In turn, the public notices and feels empowered.
This is the virtuous circle of the preservation of constitutional democracy.
All this is happening in Minnesota – for a fascinating, surprising reason. The Trump administration chose Minneapolis for its ICE surge because it wanted to create conflict on the streets. It wanted to target a blue state. We know this because Trump had already tried to put National Guard troops into cities in blue states.
But the conflict in Minnesota between the resistance and the Trump administration has served to demonstrate the extent to which Americans aren’t prepared to acquiesce in the end of the rule of law and American norms and values.
If the Trump administration had been smarter about trying to erode democracy, it would have deployed its ICE agents in some strongly pro-Trump place. Imagine the public in that place had not bothered to resist massive sweeps in which potentially undocumented people were grabbed up and detained. The message we all would have gotten was that the public was just fine with this new state of affairs.
That, in turn, would have begun a meaningful process of undermining the rule of law. By the time the Trump administration began to deploy ICE agents in blue states where there might be resistance, the message would have gone out that at least some significant part of the public supported Trump’s policies. That would have made everyone, citizens and government officials alike, more nervous about resisting. The circle would have become vicious, rather than virtuous.
The takeaway is that you need to participate in sustained, sustainable resistance. If ICE hasn’t yet deployed where you live, that resistance can include speaking out online and to your friends and neighbors. It can include donating money to organizations that are supporting protestors. The main thing is not to be silent. The main thing is to keep sending a clear message that what’s going on isn’t normal, isn’t okay, and won’t be tolerated. The purpose of doing this is to participate in the collective act of sending the message that constitutional democracy isn’t going anywhere.
Your participation in this process is not, and can never be, trivial. Constitutional democracy is ultimately sustained by the support of the public. That’s all of us. No administration, no government has the capacity to fully suppress the entire population at once. The signaling process that I am describing isn’t just an abstraction; it’s the lifeblood of sustained democracy.
Your participation in this process is not, and can never be, trivial.
Our institutions aren’t perfect. They have their strengths and weaknesses, and the weaknesses are especially on display right now. But like all institutions in a democracy, or indeed anywhere, they depend on public legitimacy and support. Speak out, wherever and however you want. Believe it or not, that’s what’s going to keep constitutional democracy alive.
All great points, Professor. Collective solidarity and resistance to oppression has long been a central tool in the Black freedom struggle. And, as you know, that struggle shows us something basic and enduring: when people act together, they can slow, expose, and sometimes stop the expansion of state power used against them.
One thing your post helps surface, but that is worth making more explicit, is the direction of the Nazi fascism analogy. The risk isn’t that the United States is copying Nazi Germany. Historically, it’s the other way around. As you know, German lawyers and race theorists in the 1920s and 1930s studied the United States closely. They looked at Jim Crow, immigration bans, racialized citizenship, and how the U.S. used law and bureaucracy to control and exclude whole groups of people. The Nazis didn’t invent these ideas from scratch. They learned that a modern country could keep democratic institutions on paper while enforcing harsh, unequal systems in practice.
That’s why what’s happening with ICE feels so familiar to so many Americans, even if it feels shocking at the same time. The U.S. has long operated with two sets of rules, full rights for some people and sweeping police powers for others. Slave patrols, fugitive slave laws, Indian removal, Japanese American internment, mass deportations, domestic surveillance. All of this happened without the country formally abandoning democracy. These actions were framed as legal, necessary, or temporary, and they targeted specific groups.
This history strengthens your point about resistance. We know that Governments don’t usually become authoritarian overnight. They test limits. They watch to see who will speak up and who will stay quiet. The Black freedom struggle understood this early on. Being visible, organized, and persistent made it harder for injustice to become normal or invisible. Resistance didn’t always win right away, but it raised the political cost of repression.
It also shows why silence is dangerous. The state doesn’t need everyone to agree. It only needs most people to think the repression isn’t about them. What sustained resistance does is break that illusion. It says, if the government can do this to them today, it can do it to others tomorrow.
So Minneapolis matters not just as a site of protest, but as part of a much longer American story. Democracy here has always depended less on the strength of institutions alone and more on whether people refuse to accept exceptions, exceptions for migrants, for racialized communities, for people labeled “undesirable.” That refusal, over time, is what has expanded democracy rather than shrunk it.
And it’s not just sustained protesting, Noah. The resistance effort here in Minnesota is broad-based. In addition to attending marches, for example, my wife and I deliver food and diapers to Hispanic families too afraid to leave their homes. We also try to frequent minority-owned restaurants and businesses, and boycott other businesses—like Target—that are unwilling to take a principled stand against authoritarianism. Oh, and we visit memorials to people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Resistance is NOT futile.