Emilia González Avalos: Collective Refusal to Surrender Humanity

Emilia González Avalos addresses the crowd at the Target Center, where Unidos MN provided respite from the cold at the end of the January 23 rally. Photo by Laura Santiago Ahdunko

In a widely discussed conversation about political messaging, Anat Shenker-Osorio, host of the “Words to Win By” podcast, offered a clear warning about how racial division operates in the United States. The purpose of dog whistling, she explained, is not simply to produce resentment toward communities of color. The deeper objective is to convince people that a shared public life is impossible. 

After voters accept that there is a “them,” they begin to doubt the existence of an “us.” Universal programs become suspect. Public goods appear undeserved. Government itself is reframed as a transfer from the worthy to the unworthy. Division becomes a governing strategy.

This is the division that the federal government attempted to test with Operation Metro Surge. The historic mass deployment of federal immigration officers that separated families, eroded constitutional rights, and destabilized neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and our public places.. 

Yet alongside the fear, another story is unfolding. Communities have not only objected to enforcement practices, but they are asserting that collective responsibility is still possible and that ordinary residents can act together in defense of one another.

In the days after the election, despair was tangible. Many people felt that decisions made far away had sealed their future. Isolation would have been understandable. Instead, tens of thousands moved toward one another. Project Monarca was built through a coalition of workers, students, people of faith, parents, clergy, business owners, teachers, caregivers, and young people. 

Together, Undos MN’s Monarca has trained more than 40,000 everyday Minnesotans as neighborhood protectors and constitutional observers — showcasing how to be upstanders. Today there are more than 7,000 committed leaders holding roles as non-violent responders, leading mutual aid networks, supporting immigrants at the workplace and in schools, taking part in systems change committees, or updating training to reflect the most recent learnings from the ground. From this group, Monarca now has a deep bench of 50 trainers. 

In February 2025, at Central Lutheran Church, more than 2,000 residents crowded into pews and hallways for the first mass constitutional observer training. The idea is straightforward: When the state exercises authority in public, the public has the right to watch. Observers learn to record interactions, reduce escalation, and insist on transparency. 

What appears modest on paper proves extraordinary in practice. People who once believed politics was reserved for professionals discover that embodying the First Amendment is a form of leadership.A person who might never have imagined facing federal agents finds that they can hold a camera and blow a whistle. A neighbor who arrives alone leaves with ten phone numbers of new allies. Courage becomes social rather than individual. And because other organizations have adopted the model, the capacity has spread far beyond a single network.

I write this during African American Heritage Month. It is impossible to miss where this moral imagination comes from. The immigration justice movement stands within traditions forged by Black freedom struggles that insist dignity is inherent and cannot be granted or withdrawn by government. 

When immigrant communities declare that no human being is illegal and that families belong together, they are extending arguments that have shaped American democracy for generations. Nonviolence in this lineage is not passivity. It is the refusal to surrender humanity even when institutions fail to recognize it. It is faith expressed as public discipline.

Minnesota also carries the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement. The mobilizations after the murder of George Floyd left us networks, skills, and expectations about participation. Then as now, Minnesotans learned how quickly strangers can become partners and how rapidly civic life can reorganize itself when conscience or a pandemic demands it. The muscle built in those years is flexing and growing again, now directed toward the defense of immigrants and the preservation of constitutional norms.

For many organizers, academic research on civil resistance has reinforced the belief that participation matters. Studies associated with Erica Chenoweth are read widely in community meetings and strategy sessions. The conclusion that relatively small but committed portions of a population can destabilize entrenched authority helps people overcome paralysis. It suggests that ordinary residents possess more influence than they are usually encouraged to imagine.

The same scholarship also implies something more complicated. Numbers matter most when they extend across institutions and when they create fractures among those who administer power. Participation must be durable. It must reach workplaces, congregations, professional associations, and civic leadership. It must alter calculations about what will happen tomorrow, not simply express outrage today.

Immigrant families understand this distinction with painful clarity. Immediate solidarity offers relief, but long-term safety depends on decisions from those who have power. Who will refuse cooperation? Which officials will intervene? Will careers suffer for enabling harm? Will ballots translate memory into accountability? These questions are practical, and they point toward leverage.

Authoritarian politics can often withstand protest. What it cannot easily withstand, however, is loss: Loss of legitimacy, of alliances, of economic partnership, lof electoral security. When those risks become real, conditions can be changed. The central challenge for Minnesotans today is to transform moral energy into consequences that institutions cannot ignore.

That work requires organizing beyond those who are already convinced. It involves neighbors who feel uncertain, workers who fear instability, residents who have been taught that someone else’s exclusion guarantees their own safety. Organizing in this environment demands patience and rigor. It asks movements to widen the circle without abandoning principle.

One achievement of the current alliance is profound. Participation is beginning to feel normal. The decision to act is no longer exceptional, because thousands are doing it together. The collective becomes visible in schools, hospitals, and workplaces. When the public can see itself, repression grows more difficult.

Still, movements can be caricatured or dismissed. They can be praised for passion while being denied authority. If the present wave of organizing is to do more than repeat earlier cycles of emergency and exhaustion, it must continue its evolution toward majority power. Durable organizations must grow. Leaders must continue to emerge. Electoral capacity must develop alongside rapid response. Targets must be clear. Outcomes must be measurable.

What is being defended in Minnesota is larger than any policy. The question is whether a multiracial democracy can imagine itself as a shared project. The answer offered by dog whistle politics is no. The answer offered by organizing is that people are building an “us” anyway — patiently, visibly, and with increasing strength. Demonstrations declare conviction. Majorities determine what happens next.

Minnesotans successfully expose the bargain offered to them: surrender someone else’s rights in exchange for the illusion of personal security. Increasingly, that trade is being rejected. Trading a neighbor’s liberty for the appearance of order does not produce safety. It corrodes the constitutional ground everyone stands on. What begins as an exception inevitably becomes a precedent.

As participation widens, safety no longer depends on individual courage. It becomes collective. It lowers the cost of public engagement and normalizes democratic defense. When enough people see themselves inside the “we,” repression becomes politically costly.

Normalization, however, is only the beginning. The next step is the deliberate creation of consequences. Electoral party structures must answer to working families rather than corporate interests. If institutions, including the DFL, expect loyalty from voters, they must be willing to reject the corporate elites that have enabled centuries of racial and economic inequality to persist. Addressing these inequalities is essential for a high-functioning democracy.

Leaders must demonstrate that their loyalty lies with the citizens who sustain and defend our democracy, not with the interests that profit from division or exploitation. 

Minnesota can lead the way in enacting, at last, the deep, structural reforms we need — in immigration, healthcare, education, housing, and more— while redirecting resources away from billions of dollars spent on punitive ICE enforcement. Only by ensuring that the rights, dignity, and security of every community member is protected  can democracy fulfill its promise. If working families don’t experience the improvement of their material conditions, history will demand a harsher reckoning, and the next wave of authoritarian power will strike with even greater force.