We’re hitting a breaking point. We’ve been hitting breaking points. But ICE’s violence against citizens quickly escalating in Minneapolis — which resulted yesterday in the shooting of a woman in her car, unobstructively monitoring ICE activity — has created a fever pitch of rage and grief at the fascist crackdown on American communities. And people are fighting back. We’ve got progressive candidate Graham Platner on to think with us about this decisive moment unmasking the craven and unbounded violence that sustains the far right currently in power. And the way that America’s reign of violence abroad is causing catastrophic blowback at home.

Following the murder of Renee Good by ICE agents mere blocks from where George Floyd was murdered only a few years ago, residents of Minneapolis have seen truly how far Trump’s government is willing to go to create a reign of terror over working class people and peaceful dissidents. Good’s wife was forced to witness her killing, covered in her blood. It’s an unthinkable image of cruelty that has ignited communal resistance against ICE’s violent rule, premised upon hatred of immigrants and revealing its sadistic targeting of women, too. The people of Minneapolis have, for years now, lived at the eye of the storm of fascism, and they’ve come together in solidarity to keep each other safe and call attention to the brutality.

It won’t surprise anyone that officials like Frey and Walz are offering empty words as their constituents are slaughtered. Even local hotels have refused to host ICE, and were later disciplined by their parent company, Hilton. It makes you wonder how much bloodshed it will take for the so-called opposition party to form material, not just rhetorical, opposition. That moment may never come. But whether or not they’re abandoned by their local government and persecuted and terrorized at the federal level, Minneapolis residents won’t stand for this and many are ready to collectively organize.

In this episode we discuss what that organization could look like, what is already happening, and why the abolition of ICE is, as it’s been for nonwhite immigrant communities for so long, a matter of life or death. We’re grateful to Graham for joining us for this truly heartbreaking and sobering episode that makes us confront this decisive moment in our country’s history.