(Image: Protesters in Minneapolis, hours after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents on January 24, 2026. Image courtesy of Creative Commons).
I’m more inspired by what’s happening in Minneapolis at the moment than I’ve been by anything for many a month.
Not just because of what’s happening in itself (more in a moment!), but because of its direct relevance to all of us here in the UK.
Let me start with something very few will have heard of.
On January 24th, 86 people were arrested outside HMP Wormwood Scrubs. They were there in support of Umer Khalid, one of the Prisoners for Palestine then on hunger and thirst strike. They got as close as they could to those grim prison walls, using a public entrance access through an open gate. There were no police, no signs, nobody asking them to leave – and prison guards had free access to the secure areas beyond.
There was no formal warning that they had to leave; but then they found themselves “kettled” by a large number of police for 20 minutes. Even as they chanted “let us leave, let us leave”, they were all arrested with wholly unnecessary levels of aggression, with “snatch squads” arbitrarily hauling individuals out to awaiting police vans. The violence was quite shocking.
No one killed. No one hospitalised. But many deeply shocked.
Umer was rushed to hospital on the 26th, with a dangerously slow heart rate.
Since then, of course, the media has moved on. Umer is back in Wormwood Scrubs on remand no longer on hunger strike since his demands regarding his treatment had been met.
Back in Minneapolis, Renee Good was shot dead by ICE agents on January 7th. Alex Pretti suffered the same fate on January 24th. Faced with nationwide outrage, Donald Trump promised to “ de-escalate the situation”. However, ICE personnel (Trump’s private white supremacist militia) are still in Minneapolis in large numbers. The violence, arbitrary arrests, intimidation, constitution-trashing behaviour goes on day after day.
And that’s exactly where the inspiration kicks in. The response to this ‘invasion’ has been extraordinary. Thousands are engaged, on a daily basis (“one giant team”) in active civil resistance, turning up, de-escalating, providing care; 30,000 have had training in how to use their phones in witnessing ICE agents on the ground; community support networks are delivering food and supplies to all those too afraid to leave their homes; hundreds of Signal groups trigger alarms at the presence of ICE agents, alerting whistle-blowing ‘regular citizens’ (“they have guns, we have whistles”) to swarm any attempt to make arrests. All in below-zero temperatures. All against a backdrop of unrelenting right wing media vilification, seeking to portray this civil resistance as “an organised, illegal insurgency”, in which both Renee Goode and Alex Preti are impugned as “domestic terrorists”.
It becomes clearer by the day who the real domestic terrorists are, intent on provoking violent resistance so that Trump can use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military. But it’s just not working.
In 1965, at the height of the Civil Rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King sought to connect with Americans everywhere: “the people of Selma will struggle for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all Americans help to bear the burden”.
And that’s what’s beginning to happen, with more and more pushing back against Trump’s authoritarian and unconstitutional actions.
I’ve been following all this on a daily basis. Let me share one moment. One hundred faith leaders (of all denominations) from across America flew to Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago to bear witness to the significance of what is happening in this small, ICE-bound city. Their actions included a protest at the airport demonstrating against the decision by Delta Airlines to “ship out detainees” to God knows where. The faith leaders were all arrested, but not before hundreds of Minneapolis citizens had surrounded them in solidarity: “let them pray, let them pray”.
Since then, unfortunately, there’s been no let-up in the violence – and therefore no “standing down” by the citizens of Minneapolis. There is now as much focus on “offence” as there has been on “defence”, with particular attention being paid to those businesses that have been assisting ICE in all sorts of ways. Hilton Hotels have been providing accommodation for ICE agents from the start, and are now being subjected to very noisy visitations through the night, to mass bookings which somehow get cancelled at the last minute, to endless appalling reviews on Booking.com, and so on. As one hotel manager put it: “it’s not great being personally threatened by Trump on the one hand and skewered by one’s fellow citizens on the other”.
Home Depot, Enterprise Rentals and Target are all now getting the same treatment.
In other words, a whole city is being mobilised in active resistance, writing a whole new chapter in the long story of civil disobedience in the face of authoritarian and fascist attempts to crush freedom.
Which brings me back to Wormwood Scrubs.
I hate to have to say this, but I think the vast majority of well-meaning, “progressive-leaning” citizens here in the UK remain largely ignorant about growing restrictions on our basic rights — including freedom of speech and the right to protest. They may be vaguely aware that Labour has turned out to be as repressive and authoritarian (in its overall approach to these core freedoms) as the Tories were, but somehow, they just can’t be bothered to engage with the detail.
That’s unwise. We have a lot to learn in terms of what is happening in the USA. Much of this is often wrongly attributed to Donald Trump’s pathological narcissism rather than to a highly effective movement (which has been preparing for this moment for many years) to undermine democracy and the US constitution at every turn.
A frightening direction of travel, replicated here in the UK with the merging of the Tories and Reform, in the authoritarian positioning of the Home Office, in more violent policing tactics, in increased surveillance, and in the normalisation of xenophobic and racist tropes that would have been condemned out of hand even a few years ago.
The cautionary words of Thomas Jefferson are being much quoted in Minneapolis these days: “The failure to resist tyranny is the forerunner of death to public liberty”.
And his answer to that failure? “People must preserve the spirit of resistance”.
3 February 2026
