The Trump Department of Justice has indicted 15 Minneapolis residents for the crime of telling their neighbors where ICE agents were. One person in a comparable Texas case got 100 years in prison for moving a box of zines. This is the country we live in now.
Meet the Domestic Terrorists (They Are Teachers and Carpenters)
Emmett Doyle is a musician and carpenter. A few days after pleading not guilty to federal conspiracy charges, he performed an Irish protest ballad at a Minneapolis dive bar. The US government believes he is an antifa domestic terrorist. He believes he was watching out for his neighbors. Both of these things cannot be true.
Doyle is one of the group the Guardian is calling the 'Minnesota 15,' fifteen Minneapolis residents charged by the federal government with conspiracy for resisting ICE operations earlier this year. The group is primarily connected through Direct Action MN, a loose network of Twin Cities residents that organized community defense responses during what the feds called Operation Metro Surge.
'These are teachers and nurses and electricians,' Minneapolis organizer Kelly Peterson told the Guardian. 'They just have to keep going to work, knowing that they did what 100,000 other people did, and that they got charged for it.' That last part is the key. They did what a lot of people did. They just got singled out for it.
What They Actually Did
The federal indictment runs 94 pages. What did the Minnesota 15 allegedly do to fill all that paper? According to the Guardian, they coordinated with rapid response groups to alert people to ICE agent locations and organized blockades at the city's ICE headquarters. That's it. No weapons. No violence. They told people where the federal agents were, and they stood in front of a building.
Prosecutors have labeled the group as affiliated with antifa, which the Trump administration designated a domestic terror organization last fall, three days before releasing an internal memo directing the FBI's joint terrorism task force to target so-called anti-fascist activity. The administration has been building toward this for a while.
Here's the problem with the antifa label, as Chicago-based attorney Rachel Cohen explained to the Guardian: the administration is trying to 'build this narrative that there is some defined antifa group that exists in the United States, when there very much is not.' One defendant, Kyle Wagner, self-identifies as antifa. Prosecutors appear to be using that to tag the remaining fourteen people with the label by proximity. Guilt by acquaintance is not a legal standard. Apparently it is now.
Operation Metro Surge Was Already a Horror Show Before the Indictments
To understand why people were out there blocking ICE vehicles, you need to understand what was happening on the ground. In January, the Guardian reports, nearly 4,000 immigration agents flooded the Twin Cities for Operation Metro Surge, described as the largest immigration operation in national history. Residents responded by bringing food and essentials to people in hiding and setting up neighborhood watch groups to track ICE vehicles.
ICE agents pulled people out of cars. They forcefully entered homes. They repeatedly tear-gassed bystanders who were just watching. Two residents who had been monitoring ICE activity, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by federal agents. The Guardian reports no one has been charged for their deaths. Let that sentence sit for a second. Two people are dead and no one has been charged. Fifteen people organized a neighborhood watch and they got a 94-page indictment.
Federal conspiracy charges started flying during the height of the surge. Nine activists and journalists, including former CNN anchor Don Lemon, were charged with conspiracy to impede religious freedom over a protest at a church whose pastor is an ICE field director. After the formal end of Operation Metro Surge, another 30 people were indicted for the same protest. The dragnet keeps expanding.
The Sentencing Numbers Are Genuinely Terrifying
Minneapolis is not the only city where this playbook is running. The Guardian lays out the pattern clearly. In Chicago, similar charges were tossed after prosecutors engaged in misconduct. In Spokane, Washington, protesters accused of forming a human wall to block an ICE bus were convicted and now face up to six years in prison. In Prairieland, Texas, eight protesters were convicted of providing 'material support to terrorists.' Part of the evidence of terrorism? Owning a printing press and distributing political zines.
The Prairieland sentences ranged from 30 to 100 years. One person received a sentence that long for, according to the Guardian, simply moving a box of zines. One hundred years. For a box of pamphlets. A federal judge looked at that and signed off on it.
The Minnesota 15 currently face a maximum of six years on the principal conspiracy charge. Two defendants also face a destruction of property charge carrying a ten-year maximum. But the Guardian reports that legal experts see the indictment's language about force, intimidation, and threats as a signal that prosecutors may seek a terrorism enhancement that would push those sentencing guidelines up considerably. The Prairieland ceiling is always visible from here.
The Defendants Are Not Backing Down
'This is naked political repression, part of a nationwide trend,' lead defendant Isaac Sant told the Guardian. He is charged with federal conspiracy and he is still talking to reporters. That takes guts.
'They're trying to stop us and silence us and scare us,' defendant Treasure Thoreson told the Guardian. 'I'm not going to let them scare me.' Monique Cullars-Doty, a defendant in a separate but related Minneapolis case, spoke at a rally for the Minnesota 15 last week and told the crowd: 'While some of us might be a bit out of commission, it's up to you to continue to stand up and hold the line in Minnesota for our immigrant neighbors, our union workers and in solidarity with all those who are oppressed.'
Doyle, for his part, went back to the dive bar and played the protest song. 'That song has been a source of inspiration for me, in finding courage to face this ordeal,' he told the Guardian. He's a carpenter who sings Irish ballads and warns people when federal agents are nearby. The government has 94 pages explaining why that makes him dangerous.
The Dingo Take
Let's be very clear about what the Trump DOJ has built here. This is not a targeted prosecution of violent actors. This is an assembly-line criminalization of community organizing, and the sentencing numbers from Texas are the price tag they want people to imagine every time they think about showing up. A hundred years for moving a box of zines is not a punishment. It's a threat delivered to everyone watching.
The antifa designation is doing exactly the work it was designed to do. It doesn't matter that antifa is not an organization with membership cards and a headquarters. The label exists to function as a legal mechanism, a way to attach terrorism-adjacent language to ordinary people who stood on a sidewalk with a cell phone. One guy in the Minnesota 15 self-identifies as antifa, so now fifteen people are an antifa cell. That's not law enforcement. That's political branding with a badge.
Two people are dead in Minneapolis and no one has been charged. Fifteen people ran a neighborhood watch and they got a federal indictment that could stretch toward a decade in prison. The DOJ has its priorities perfectly sorted. It's just that those priorities have nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with making sure that the next time ICE rolls through a neighborhood, everybody stays inside and keeps their mouth shut.
