Approximately 3,000 agents have been deployed to the Twin Cities as part of Operation Metro Surge. This immigration enforcement operation has drawn significant backlash, especially following the deaths of residents Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were killed by federal agents. Many of these agents have stayed in privately owned hotels throughout the metropolitan area, embedding federal operations within civilian and commercial spaces.

In response, residents have organized protests, including repeated demonstrations outside hotels believed to be housing federal agents. Often described by organizers as “noise demonstrations,” these actions were intended to disrupt the anonymity, rest, and logistical ease of federal operations. Protesters used whistles, musical instruments, pots and pans, and amplified voices late into the night.

While these demonstrations have largely remained peaceful, a protest on January 25 outside the Home2 Suites by Hilton near the University of Minnesota campus did escalate to property damage. Windows were broken, graffiti was tagged, and objects were thrown at the entrance of the hotel. Local police were present and preparing to respond when federal agents intervened and began clearing the area. The agents secured the entrance, swept the building, and then stood guard while awaiting backup.

Shortly afterward, an armored vehicle carrying additional federal agents arrived. Crowd-control munitions, including tear gas and flashbangs, were deployed indiscriminately, affecting protesters, members of the press, local police officers, and bystanders alike. Gas spread along the sidewalk and into nearby streets, filling the air with a stinging vapor as people fled. Some bystanders remained behind, risking arrest to assist others affected by chemical irritants.

The following night, January 26, demonstrations continued outside the SpringHill Suites by Marriott in Maple Grove, where protesters believed Gregory Bovino was staying. Earlier that day, Bovino had been demoted from his role as Border Patrol commander-at-large. Protesters gathered outside the hotel, making noise and celebrating his demotion. As the demonstration continued, local police declared an unlawful assembly and made arrests.

On January 28, another noise demonstration took place outside the Graduate Hotel near the University of Minnesota campus. Hundreds of protesters again gathered along Washington Avenue SE, using a range of objects and instruments to sustain noise for several hours. After issuing repeated dispersal orders, local police officers moved in, forcing the crowd back from the hotel. Protesters were then ordered to sit on the ground as officers carried out a coordinated mass arrest.

It is important to note that there are tiers of protest. Too often, they are collapsed into a single narrative, blurring the distinctions between peaceful demonstration, civil disobedience, and, in some cases, acts of property damage or violence. These are distinct forms of dissent, with different intentions and consequences. The noise demonstrations have largely remained peaceful, only shifting into civil disobedience when protesters refused to leave after being ordered to disperse.

Even when protests escalate to vandalism, damage to property is not the same as violence. Violence harms people; vandalism damages objects. This distinction does not condone property damage, but clarifies terms often used imprecisely. Conflating the two collapses moral and legal differences and allows the actions of a few to be used to condemn the many who remained peaceful and exercised their rights.

When coverage focuses too narrowly on vandalism, it risks obscuring the conditions that gave rise to these protests. Aggressive immigration enforcement tactics and the deaths of local residents shaped the emotional context in which they emerged. These actions did not arise in isolation, but from sustained conditions of fear, disruption, and loss. When material damage receives greater scrutiny than human loss and community harm, it distorts the broader context.

These demonstrations have placed pressure not only on the agents themselves, but on the businesses that host them and their customers. They force a reckoning with the relationship between private corporations and federal power, and with the ways ordinary commerce can become complicit in state action. Through sustained noise and visibility, demonstrators have transformed otherwise neutral, everyday spaces into sites of public accountability.

On Saturday, March 28th, roughly 8 million Americans took to the streets for the No Kings March. People gathered in all 50 states, in cities, suburbs, and small towns alike. This was likely the largest single-day demonstration in American history. That is no small feat, but it’s also not the finish line.

In 2011, Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth and her colleague Maria Stephan published what would become one of the most cited studies in the field of civil resistance. Analyzing 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns waged between 1900 and 2006, they arrived at a striking conclusion: nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as those based on violence.

More striking still was what determined success within nonviolent movements. Every campaign that succeeded had mobilized at least 3.5 percent of the population in sustained protest. For the United States, that figure is approximately 11.5 million people.¹ Saturday’s turnout fell short of that threshold by more than three million. Still, no single demonstration in recent American history has come this close.

Chenoweth’s research also makes clear that scale alone is not enough. Effective movements depend on disciplined leadership that organizes for the long term; designs adaptable campaigns, applies pressure across multiple fronts, and sustains it over time.² The nature of participation matters as much as its size.

In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime collapsed on the fourth day. In 2003, Georgians ousted their authoritarian leader through the Rose Revolution, a bloodless uprising in which protesters stormed parliament carrying flowers. These were not movements that simply filled streets. They were movements with real organizational infrastructure.

The American civil rights movement tells the same story. The March on Washington in 1963 is the image that lives in our memory. But the movement was built from years of boycotts, legal challenges, voter registration drives, and daily community organizing that came before that march and continued long after the cameras left. The march was the visible surface. The deeper work happened in church basements, law offices, and precinct meetings, in efforts that rarely made the evening news.

No Kings organizers have now staged three major mobilizations in under a year. The turnout has grown at every one: roughly 5 million in June, 7 million in October, and 8 million this past Saturday. That trajectory does not describe a movement burning out. It describes a movement accelerating.

Participation has spread into suburbs, exurbs, and rural communities where this kind of organizing has historically found little traction. According to organizers, roughly two-thirds of rally registrations came from outside major urban centers, including in conservative-leaning states. That geographic reach matters. Movements confined to cities can be politically contained. Movements that take root across a broader landscape are considerably harder to dismiss.

That is significant progress, and it deserves recognition. But persistence is not the same as power. A march is the spectacle of a movement, not the movement itself. Chenoweth cautioned that organizing only to hit participation benchmarks can produce a loud but ultimately ineffective minority, with little chance of lasting victory.³ The machinery of government responds to consequence, not expression.

The greatest threat to this movement is letting the demonstrations become their own reward. Marching with millions feels like progress. It is not the same thing as progress. The energy is real. The anger is justified. But energy without direction dissipates, and anger without strategy loses. A movement that peaks at a march and then disperses is not a sustained movement. It is a very large event.

The momentum that the No Kings movement has built needs to be directed into action that shifts political power: general strikes, coordinated civil disobedience, strategic boycotts, sustained pressure on legislators and institutions, and electoral mobilization that converts marchers into voters. Mutual aid networks that build community resilience from the ground up matter too.

The ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and a growing network of state-level organizations have been filing and winning legal challenges with real consistency. Rapid response networks and mutual aid efforts are underway. Ordinary citizens are showing up daily to disrupt ICE operations and engage in civil disobedience. All of these efforts would benefit from more support from the people who march.

If Saturday’s energy is not quickly organized into specific commitments aimed at specific targets, it will follow a familiar pattern: a peak, a dispersal, a gradual return to private life, and an administration that is counting on exactly that.

The 3.5 percent threshold is no longer a theoretical benchmark. It is a number within reach. Three million people stand between this movement and the organizing milestone that, historically, no government has been able to withstand. But scale alone has never been enough. As the movement grows, it must be matched by strategic action: disciplined, targeted, and sustained long after the march ends.

So if you marched at No Kings, that matters. Don't let it be your last action. Find an organization in your community doing sustained work and show up for it. Join a union. Attend a city council meeting. Canvass for a local candidate. Participate in a coordinated economic action. Call a legislator. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something. Pick one. Start there.

Notes

¹ Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011). For the 3.5 percent threshold applied to the United States, see Erica Chenoweth, “My 25 Years of Studying Nonviolent Resistance Bring Me Hope,” Boston Globe, December 27, 2023.

² For Chenoweth’s taxonomy of tactics and the conditions under which civil resistance campaigns succeed or fail, see Why Civil Resistance Works, chapters 2 and 3. See also the NAVCO Data Project, Harvard Kennedy School.

³ Erica Chenoweth, “Questions, Answers, and Some Cautionary Updates Regarding the 3.5% Rule,” Carr Center Discussion Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, April 2020. See also Erica Chenoweth, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2021), 45–67

Approximately 3,000 agents have been deployed to the Twin Cities as part of Operation Metro Surge. This immigration enforcement operation has drawn significant backlash, especially following the deaths of residents Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were killed by federal agents. Many of these agents have stayed in privately owned hotels throughout the metropolitan area, embedding federal operations within civilian and commercial spaces.

In response, residents have organized protests, including repeated demonstrations outside hotels believed to be housing federal agents. Often described by organizers as “noise demonstrations,” these actions were intended to disrupt the anonymity, rest, and logistical ease of federal operations. Protesters used whistles, musical instruments, pots and pans, and amplified voices late into the night.

While these demonstrations have largely remained peaceful, a protest on January 25 outside the Home2 Suites by Hilton near the University of Minnesota campus did escalate to property damage. Windows were broken, graffiti was tagged, and objects were thrown at the entrance of the hotel. Local police were present and preparing to respond when federal agents intervened and began clearing the area. The agents secured the entrance, swept the building, and then stood guard while awaiting backup.

Shortly afterward, an armored vehicle carrying additional federal agents arrived. Crowd-control munitions, including tear gas and flashbangs, were deployed indiscriminately, affecting protesters, members of the press, local police officers, and bystanders alike. Gas spread along the sidewalk and into nearby streets, filling the air with a stinging vapor as people fled. Some bystanders remained behind, risking arrest to assist others affected by chemical irritants.

The following night, January 26, demonstrations continued outside the SpringHill Suites by Marriott in Maple Grove, where protesters believed Gregory Bovino was staying. Earlier that day, Bovino had been demoted from his role as Border Patrol commander-at-large. Protesters gathered outside the hotel, making noise and celebrating his demotion. As the demonstration continued, local police declared an unlawful assembly and made arrests.

On January 28, another noise demonstration took place outside the Graduate Hotel near the University of Minnesota campus. Hundreds of protesters again gathered along Washington Avenue SE, using a range of objects and instruments to sustain noise for several hours. After issuing repeated dispersal orders, local police officers moved in, forcing the crowd back from the hotel. Protesters were then ordered to sit on the ground as officers carried out a coordinated mass arrest.

It is important to note that there are tiers of protest. Too often, they are collapsed into a single narrative, blurring the distinctions between peaceful demonstration, civil disobedience, and, in some cases, acts of property damage or violence. These are distinct forms of dissent, with different intentions and consequences. The noise demonstrations have largely remained peaceful, only shifting into civil disobedience when protesters refused to leave after being ordered to disperse.

Even when protests escalate to vandalism, damage to property is not the same as violence. Violence harms people; vandalism damages objects. This distinction does not condone property damage, but clarifies terms often used imprecisely. Conflating the two collapses moral and legal differences and allows the actions of a few to be used to condemn the many who remained peaceful and exercised their rights.

When coverage focuses too narrowly on vandalism, it risks obscuring the conditions that gave rise to these protests. Aggressive immigration enforcement tactics and the deaths of local residents shaped the emotional context in which they emerged. These actions did not arise in isolation, but from sustained conditions of fear, disruption, and loss. When material damage receives greater scrutiny than human loss and community harm, it distorts the broader context.

These demonstrations have placed pressure not only on the agents themselves, but on the businesses that host them and their customers. They force a reckoning with the relationship between private corporations and federal power, and with the ways ordinary commerce can become complicit in state action. Through sustained noise and visibility, demonstrators have transformed otherwise neutral, everyday spaces into sites of public accountability.

The Trump administration claims its immigration enforcement operations are solely intended to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. As they say, “the worst of the worst.” This mandate makes Minneapolis, Minnesota an unusual place to concentrate its operations. According to the Pew Research Center, only 2.2% of the state’s population is undocumented. This is a small share when compared to states like Texas and Florida. Despite this fact, 3,000 federal agents have been deployed as part of Operation Metro Surge, the largest such operation ever carried out.

This operation has brought with it a flurry of brutal tactics. ICE detained five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and, according to school officials and witnesses, used him as bait to lure adults out of his family’s home. In another incident, federal agents detained a two-year-old girl, Chloe Renata Tipan, and her father during a traffic stop. Federal agents also forcibly entered the home of Chongly Thao without a judicial warrant. Suspecting Thao was undocumented, they detained him at gunpoint and led him outside in his underwear in freezing conditions. He was later released once they determined he was a U.S. citizen.

These tactics have also collided with protesters, observers, and uninvolved residents. Federal agents have tackled and detained observers and sprayed tactical mace at point-blank range into the faces of protesters who were already restrained. Agents have used tear gas excessively in residential areas, including an incident in which it flooded a family’s SUV and a six-month-old infant required CPR. Renée Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by Jonathan Ross, becoming a flashpoint that ignited widespread demonstrations across the city.

These are just a few examples of a growing record of incidents. In response to multiple lawsuits, a federal judge issued an order restricting immigration agents from using excessive force and from detaining individuals who were not suspected of criminal activity. The court found that the tactics raised serious constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments. The Trump administration appealed the ruling, arguing that the restrictions interfered with its enforcement authority, temporarily allowing the tactics to resume.

Meanwhile, rhetoric from the Trump administration has escalated. Vice President J.D. Vance described resistance to immigration enforcement as the work of “a group of left-wing radicals” who, he said, have “been working tirelessly, sometimes using domestic terror techniques.” The administration has framed the 2026 midterms as a high-stakes fight for political survival. Trump told House Republicans at their January 6, 2026 retreat, “You gotta win the midterms ’cause, if we don’t win the midterms… they’ll find a reason to impeach me… I’ll get impeached.” Stephen Miller has gone further, saying the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus.

Looming over all of this, President Trump has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to protests and clashes with federal agents. This act is a rarely used federal law that allows the president to deploy the U.S. military, including active-duty troops and federalized National Guard units. It allows the president to suppress civil disorder. The ACLU warns that doing so would be dangerous and represents a major escalation of federal power on domestic soil. The Pentagon has already placed 1,500 soldiers on prepare-to-deploy orders to Minnesota.

Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Minneapolis has become inseparable from images of militarized police, mass protest, and sustained confrontation between the public and state power. The Black Lives Matter protests spread far beyond Minnesota, erupting in over 140 cities across the U.S. This context matters. In a city where distrust of authority runs deep and the memory of state violence still shapes public life, backlash was not only foreseeable; it was predictable. That predictability raises an unsettling question: was civil unrest the objective?

Operation Metro Surge reveals a familiar pattern. The federal government targets a left-leaning urban center and deploys exceptional force. That force provokes public backlash, which is then framed as disorder and cited as justification for expanded federal authority. In effect, the crisis is manufactured to authorize the response. Seen through this lens, the scenes unfolding in Minneapolis make sense, not as an immigration enforcement priority, but as a strategic political ploy.

The escalation unfolding in Minneapolis and elsewhere can be interpreted as part of a broader effort to destabilize the upcoming midterm election cycle while expanding federal authority. If this pattern continues, it has the potential to reshape the conditions under which electoral participation occurs. Suppressing a fair election does not require the formal suspension of elections. It requires only enough fear, disruption, and uncertainty to keep people home. If the Insurrection Act were invoked, the result would be a militarized occupation marked by curfews, checkpoints, and armed troops in public spaces. This would exist alongside our current condition of masked federal agents operating with impunity.

History shows that when public space feels threatening, civic life contracts. Democratic engagement does not vanish all at once; it slowly erodes as fear, surveillance, and state power reshape who feels safe enough to participate. Seen in this light, it is not the dissent expressed by the people of Minneapolis that threatens our national safety. What warrants concern is the deployment of federal force, how it is tested, expanded, and gradually normalized during moments of political tension. Our greatest risk is not disorder, but how far our government is willing to go in pursuit of what it defines as order.