Minnesota Coalition Calls on Corporations to Take a Stand Against Federal Surveillance

 

A coalition of Minnesota labor leaders, faith leaders, educators, and community supporters gathered outside Target’s downtown Minneapolis headquarters Tuesday to call on Minnesota-based corporations to publicly oppose federal surveillance, intimidation, and retaliation against people and organizations that resisted immigration enforcement efforts in Minnesota this winter.

The demonstrators urged Target to sign a “Business for Democracy” pledge and meet with the coalition before Minnesota’s early voting begins September 15.

Court filings released August 13 revealed a federal surveillance operation that monitored meetings held at churches and other spaces, collected license plate information, sought union financial records, and placed 18 Minnesota organizations on a chart alleging a conspiracy.

Coalition leaders called the investigation a politically motivated fishing expedition intended to intimidate Minnesotans who organized peacefully to protect their neighbors.

 

Emilia González Avalos, executive director of Unidos MN opened up the media conference reminding people that federal agents entered a Target store in Richfield without a warrant and detained two workers. “Target said nothing about it,” Avalos said. She said the silence of Target, and other local corporations, can still move toward a response in protection of its employees and customers. “We live in every zip code where Target has a store, and many of us wear that shirt to work.”

“Target’s workers, customers, and neighbors were among the hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans who held this state together,” she added. “They shared food, walked children to school, kept businesses open, and stood in subzero weather with a phone and a copy of the Constitution. Target calls itself a good neighbor, and this is a moment to prove it. No company can protect its workers, its customers, or its bottom line without a functioning democracy. We are asking Target to sign the Business for Democracy Pledge, meet with this coalition, and use its influence to stand with Minnesotans.”

Speakers repeatedly characterized the federal investigations as an attempt to intimidate organizations that supported immigrants and participated in protests or mutual-aid efforts.

Bernie Burnham, president of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, said the federation and several affiliated unions had learned last week that they were included in a federal investigation that she described as politically motivated. “The Trump administration continues to weaponize our federal government to intimidate our unions, our communities, and anyone who peacefully opposes their radical authoritarian agenda,” Burnham said.

She said the labor movement stood with immigrant workers and neighbors during the winter and accused federal authorities of attempting to portray unions, community organizations, and faith groups as threats. “They’re trying to bring back McCarthyism,” Burnham said. “The labor movement was instrumental in creating America’s middle class, and we continue to advocate for all workers every single day.”

Faith leaders frame the issue as a moral obligation to protect neighbors

Minister JaNae Bates Amari, co-executive director of ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota, invoked the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who refused to obey a king’s order to worship an idol. “What we witnessed in Minnesota over January and February were Minnesotans saying that you can come after us, but what we are going to do is follow a much higher calling,” Bates Amari said. She noted that the federal government is investigating “people who are loving each other instead of those who are harming each other.”

Bates Amari said that calling means protecting neighbors, welcoming strangers, and refusing to remain silent when people are detained or taken from their homes and workplaces. “Every single Minnesotan is beholden to one another,” she said. “That is why we’re here.”

The Rev. Jen Crow, senior minister of First Universalist Church of Minneapolis, said her congregation was among the organizations that the federal government had surveilled for hosting a meeting of peaceful protestors. She described the investigations as “acts of retribution and intimidation” and said taxpayer money should be used to support communities rather than monitor them.

This federal surveillance is “the work of a bully, not a builder,” Crow said. “We are builders as people of faith and as Minnesotans. This unconstitutional abuse of power, this waste of taxpayer dollars — we will not stand for it. Our taxpayer dollars need to be used to build us up, not to surveil us. In times like this, silence is not an option.”

Labor leaders describe mutual-aid efforts

Kieran Knutson, president of the Communications Workers of America, said union members participated in rapid-response networks, contributed to mutual-aid funds and joined demonstrations against federal immigration enforcement. He said the surveillance revelations would not deter the labor movement. “We are more determined than ever to stand in solidarity with all working-class people,” Knutson said. “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

He also defended the people charged in the Minnesota 15 case, calling them “some of the finest people I know”  indicating that they include teachers, carpenters, electricians, nursing-home workers, and service workers.

Knutson said Greg Bovino, when he was in charge of the ICE agents in Minnesota, said “his goal was to ‘pacify’ this place. He wasn’t just talking about 15 people. He wasn’t just talking about my union or any other union. He was talking about the entire working class in this community. And I just want to let him know, to let these corporations know, to let all of Minnesota know that we are not pacified.”

Phillip Cryan, executive vice president of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa, recalled hearing from health care workers who struggled to reach patients during the winter enforcement campaign. He described one hospice nurse who had difficulty reaching a dying patient because of obstruction from ICE agents, and another health care worker who was trying to reconcile her professional responsibilities with her concern for people targeted by federal agents.

“Countless Minnesotans rose to the occasion and stood strong in the face of what the Trump administration tried to do to our communities,” Cryan said. “If the government comes after 15 of us or 1,500 of us, the hundreds of thousands who kept our communities safe will stand with them.”

Young community advocates resolve to stand strong together

Lacey Tooker-Kirkevold, a member of Sunrise Twin Cities — generally consisting of students focused on climate change — said the group’s meetings had been infiltrated and its financial records examined. “Our meetings were infiltrated and financial records were subpoenaed, yet they found no conspiracy because we are a nonviolent movement,” she said.

“The fact that a nonviolent group of young people is being treated as a threat to the government shows just how much power we hold when we stand together,” Tooker-Kirkevold added. “They are threatened by the work we do, by our ability to bring people together and by our courage to take truth and power as we build the world we all deserve.”

She said that when the Minnesota 15 was taken in by federal agents, she “experienced a moment of terror when I questioned whether I was truly cut out for this work. Working at a summer day camp with children, I contemplated what would happen if law enforcement showed up there. Later that night, my team came together to process what had happened. We named something important. Fear is a normal part of fighting back, but we also named that misbehavior by the government cannot be normalized. We cannot allow it to intimidation deprive the limits of our movement, and we are not afraid, even when fear is present. We are resolute.”

Minnesota 15 Voices

Gabe Van de Water Davis, a member of the Minnesota 15, said: “The response to peaceful resistance consisted of tear gas, physical assault, and unlawful arrests, and the characterization of Minnesotans as violent opportunists and terrorists by higher-level officials who can’t wrap their heads around caring about anyone other than themselves. The agents who murdered Renée Good and Alex Pretti have been hidden away and protected, while DHS turns its attention towards spying on union members, civil rights organizations, churches, and individuals who stood up for their community in whatever ways they were able.

He added, “ICE has been awarded $240 billion dollars in taxpayer money to kidnap someone’s mom or dad on their way to work and stalk you while you’re at the grocery store. Human Rights Watch referred to the occupation as a manufactured crisis; this administration has chosen to follow up that crisis with a manufactured conspiracy. We’ve seen them try to single out different groups, whether it’s immigrants, trans people, and now the specter of Antifa, in an effort to erode essential rights and protections for all of us, and advance an authoritarian agenda. The Minnesota 15 case and others like it must be understood as an attempt to criminalize dissent, to make an example out of some of us, so that all of us hesitate to exercise our rights to protect one another. We will not allow this to happen.”

Van de Water Davis was taken by federal agents on June 16 from a gas station by agents while enroute to work. She said in a conversation, “Despite how disruptive the arrests and trial have been for us, this experience has been made easier due to the support I feel from my codefendants and our broader network as well as from close friends and family.”

Alec Stewart, one of many union members of the Minnesota 15, said the revelations about “Operation Puppet Master” showed that federal authorities have targeted Minnesota’s labor movement as well as immigrant communities. “They are attempting to disrupt and dismantle one of the facets of Minnesota that makes us so unique, and that is our strong and unified labor movement,” Stewart said.

Treasure Thoreson, a Minneapolis special education teacher and member of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, said educators spent the winter organizing food drives, raising money for rent, delivering groceries, and walking students home while continuing to work. “These nonviolent acts of resistance are legally protected,” Thoreson said. “We did nothing wrong.”

She said her own phone records going back to last summer, and a donation to a GoFundMe campaign, were surveilled and cited as allegedly suspicious activity in the investigation. “How many folks here participated in a GoFundMe for a loved one, a colleague, a neighbor?” Thoreson asked. [We have a feature story with Thoreson in our forthcoming September magazine.]

“Local businesses like Target, Cargill, Best Buy 3M, please take note: your silence is complicity,” Thoreson added. “This bald-faced attempt to break our unity as Minnesotans cannot move us.”

The experience of being taken by federal agents

Callum Robinet did not speak at the news conference, but described later the experience of waking up on June 16 to hear the sound of smashing glass, loud voices, and finding at the home six guys with machine guns, two helicopters, and half a dozen SUVs. They had no warning that an arrest was coming, and was asked to crawl through the broken glass while in their underwear — which they refused to do.

They indicated the agents displayed “disgusting behavior” going through the house, opening every door, and terrorizing at gunpoint the young people who lived at this house of trans refuge — even going through lingerie. Federal agents smashed into a firearms-safe storage closet “and threw everything on the floor.” Robinet, a member of the Ray Rainbolt Memorial Shooting Club — a local labor and LGBTQ+-focused firearms club — believes this was intended to intimidate.

A film crew was embedded with the federal agents at the house and the jail, zooming in; Robinet believes they wanted to capture images of fear. Charged with obstruction, Robinet saw at the jail someone he knew. At fingerprinting, he saw another. Then he heard Irish folk songs coming from another voice he recognized. Though they were divided into a cell for men, a cell for women, and a cell for visibly trans individuals in another, the Minnesota 15 — as they would come to be dubbed — were able to connect through voice, song, and joke-telling.

What is telling, Robinet said, is that “Eleven of 15 of us are former or current union organizers.”

Robinet indicates that this speaks to the fact that federal agents are not actually aiming at criminals with immigrant roots, or even the two percent of undocumented immigrants in Minnesota. They are afraid of solidarity.

Calling Out Minnesota Corporations on Silence

The event concluded with a forceful appeal from Marcia Howard, president of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators Local 59. Howard said the investigation had brought together organizations that might otherwise have remained separate and argued that the surveillance had strengthened, rather than weakened, their solidarity.

“Welcome to the land of 10,000 lakes and 100,000 un-indicted co-conspirators, because we all stand together,” said Howard. “We are proud to stand in solidarity.”

She noted, “Churches were infiltrated. Union meetings were infiltrated. And they did this under the guise of what? Homeland security. They came to our rallies and wrote down our license plate numbers. We were there, our masks off [with nothing to hide]. We’re proud to stand against authoritarianism.”

Howard also noted that in many cases they have taken people because “their hair is dyed or they’re wearing a septum ring or that person is trans. Don’t think we don’t notice the pattern of who they chose to pluck. Don’t think we don’t notice whose houses they destroyed in arresting them and who they allowed to get dressed before they took them out of their home.”

Howard also directed her remarks at Minnesota corporations like Target, saying businesses that describe themselves as community partners must demonstrate that commitment. “Target touts itself in its vision of being a good neighbor, do they not?” she said. “Every single corporation that claims to be here for the right reason are going to have to show it.”

“Make good, Target,” Howard said. “Make good for Alex Pretti, for Renée Good, for all of us who have been in these streets for the students, for our neighbors, for each other.”

The coalition’s message to Target was ultimately framed as a test of whether Minnesota’s largest corporations would stand alongside the communities and workers they say they serve.

“One signature. One meeting,” Avalos said. “Venimos en paz y somos organizados. Somos vecinos, somos trabajadores y somos muchos.” [“We come in peace and we are organized. We are neighbors, we are workers, and there are many of us.”]

 

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