At the crack of dawn, a cohort of 20 volunteers gathered in the North Lot of former military base turned immigration enforcement headquarters Fort Snelling, on March 10. The Sunrise Movement Twin Cities chapter, a nationwide youth movement focused on resisting authoritarianism, coined it a “Punk Rock Caravan.” 

The group’s efforts were highly calculated. Some protesters volunteered their cars in the procession, while others rode along and assumed duties such as police liaison and medical personnel. 

At the caboose of the caravan, a pickup truck trailer held 4 local musicians jamming “Nazi ICE F*** Off”, an adaptation of the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks F*** Off,” orbiting Whipple’s chain-link fenced perimeter. Sunrise Movement member Lina Godinez said the idea of a caravan came from having to adapt to ever-changing law enforcement behavior.

“I think the reason we have to get so creative with disruptive actions is that they’re constantly changing the rules of what we can and can’t do,” Godinez said. “First, the line is non-violent, and then you put up a tent of non-violent people, and then the rules change.”

Godinez served as a member of the group’s content team, tasked with the responsibility of documentation. In lieu of mainstream coverage, the Sunrise Movement Twin Cities chapter has taken matters into their own hands.

“The media has not been covering everything in the way that we would hope they were, so it’s up to us to make sure that we get content out there and raise awareness,” Godinez said. “This is really important. They’re still here and we’re still here.” 

However, the Sunrise Movement doesn’t need to capture the media’s short attention span to keep doing its work. Volunteer leader Megan Newcomb said a disaster-driven news cycle has a tunnel vision effect on how the world sees Minnesota.

“I also think that the media was centered around deaths. It was the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti that drew a lot of media attention here. And the kidnapping of Luis, the small child,” Newcomb said. “But we continue to fight regardless of whether there are eyes on us or not.” 

The United States has mostly seen the morbid, shocking moments of Operation Metro Surge through media coverage. Instead of focusing on the deaths, Newcomb suggests honing in on targeted demographics.

“I think that the community needs to keep centering the stories of the people who are impacted. I think that’s a big thing that drives us,” Newcomb said. “Knowing that people are afraid that the people we love and the people we know are afraid and being persecuted and being attacked.”

Lacy Tooker-Kirkevold is a police liaison for the Sunrise Movement Twin Cities chapter, which means she represents the group in communications with law enforcement.

“My goal is that no one has to talk to the cops but me, and my goal is to use my persuasive and critical thinking skills,” Tooker-Kirkevold said. “My privilege that I hold is a white, fem-presenting person, so I make sure that everyone else stays safe in the action. I’m the only one that talks to cops.”

A Hennepin County Sheriff Deputy vehicle did eventually impede the convoy. The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office planted stakes at Whipple back in January, when masses packed the streets in front of Whipple.

Before all the anti-protest architecture, deputy vehicles formed an automotive brigade, segregating protesters on the sidewalk from the street. Now, protest activity levels do not prompt the same response, but sheriff cars still circle the block. 

Tooker-Kirkevold said she received a verbal warning when a deputy vehicle pulled up to budge the line, but it was not enough to stop them from plowing ahead.

“The sheriff was getting a little annoyed with us. ICE agents are definitely coming out and getting agitated and annoyed and starting to record us, and when they get escalated, that’s when we see that what we’re doing is working,” Tooker-Kirkevold said. “They essentially just wanted us to speed up, otherwise they’d keep stopping us, and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll communicate that,’ and we sped up a little bit. We followed orders, but only moderately.”

Historically, the Sunrise Movement stood for climate justice. More recently, Newcomb said the movement has shifted gears to focus on advocacy for the working class. 

“The general focus of Sunrise right now is to resist authoritarianism, but also resist the corporate and the billionaire interests who are really running our country right now and who are making life harder for everybody else,” Newcomb said. “We are anti-billionaire, anti-corporation, anti-fascism. And we are trying to gather mass power to engage in acts of mass non-cooperation, like strikes.”

Operation Metro Surge has brought group recruitment to an all-time high, according to Newcomb. But it was not unprecedented. Newcomb said the Twin Cities Hub had a plan in place long before Trump deployed hundreds of agents to Minnesota. 

“It’s been a very intense but powerful time. We have really ramped up our activity,” Newcomb said. “And interestingly, we were actually prepared for this ICE surge in advance. We had been preparing plans because we thought it was possible and even likely that ICE would do a surge in the Twin Cities.”

One of Sunrise Movement Twin Cities Hub’s biggest successes has been locating and driving ICE agents out of hotel chains. Both the DoubleTree St. Paul Downtown Hotel and the Intercontinental St. Paul Riverfront Hotel — where the Sunrise Movement occupied — temporarily shut down in January due to what were described as safety concerns. 

The process was not rooted in speculation. Newcomb said it takes a good amount of data to mark a hotel as confirmed. If no tips are submitted within the last month, hotels are taken off the list.

“Early on, we had teams of people who were going to the hotels to scout for license plates. As these protests picked up steam, we actually started to get information directly from community members and from hotel employees,” Newcomb said. “We had many times where hotel employees had said, ‘Hey, I have ICE here. I have this many agents staying until this day. Come do a protest here because I need to get them out. I want them to leave. I need a reason to kick them out.’”

To Newcomb, this was a paramount act of solidarity on the part of hotel workers.

“I think that’s incredibly powerful because that is incredibly risky for those employees. You know, they’re supposed to maintain confidentiality. They’re afraid for their livelihoods. They’re also afraid to lose their jobs and they’re taking a huge risk in sharing that information with us,” Newcomb said. “To me, that really just highlights the desperation and the fear that the hotel workers and their families are going through.”

At its roots, the Sunrise Movement serves to support the working class. Without the organized labor of the proletariat, Newcomb says, higher powers named as ICE hold no ground.

“It is us, everyday people, it is us workers who run the hotels and wash the sheets at the hotels and run the restaurants where agents eat, run the gas stations where they fuel their cars and run the rental car agencies where they rent those cars,” Newcomb said. “We run everything.”