Dear Community,
You may have seen this morning’s news that the Trump administration has stated it is planning to draw down the ICE surge in Minnesota over the coming days. The announcement that Operation Metro Surge will end soon is a huge concession won by the working class residents of Minneapolis who showed incredible compassion, courage, discipline, and strength in the face of state-sanctioned terror. The way residents stood alongside each other has shown the nation how to combat a fascist federal government. Ordinary people armed with whistles and cellphones made it untenable for the Trump administration to continue the occupation.
While it is important to celebrate wins, the reality is that today’s announcement does not mean that our communities are safe from ICE yet. Please keep doing what you are doing to protect your neighbors: grocery runs, school patrols, and all forms of mutual aid are just as crucial as ever. We also must continue to organize to demand that every single DHS agent is withdrawn from Minnesota and ICE is abolished. All communities in cities across the country deserve to live safe from the fear of being abducted or killed by federal agents.
Operation Metro Surge has left our city with huge amounts of trauma and hundreds of millions of dollars of economic damage. City leaders and experts in the community are talking about this in terms of generational impacts on our city. There are also comparisons to impacts at the scale of the covid pandemic, but unlike the pandemic, we won’t be receiving $300 million in federal aid.
In the coming days and months, Minneapolis will be faced with hard choices about the economic recovery from Operation Metro Surge. The status quo approach will be to absorb the costs of the occupation by massively raising property taxes while cutting programs and services that vulnerable people rely on. Working class people cannot afford this approach.
Instead, I and some of my colleagues are dedicated to advancing an equitable recovery– one that invests in marginalized communities and doesn’t make working class people foot the bill for this campaign of terror. Residents have already given everything to protect their neighbors– their money, their time, and in some cases even their lives.
The City of Minneapolis must invest in an equitable recovery for all residents. Inaction will result in devastating long-term damage to the liveability of our city and push the burden of the cost of recovery to working residents’ property taxes.
More specifically, robust recovery efforts will most immediately be needed to stabilize housing for impacted residents, and to support our small businesses.
Last week, Council approved my proposal to invest $1 million into rental assistance to prevent evictions for families who have been impacted by Operation Metro Surge. Next week, Council will vote on the ordinance I’m authoring to slow down the eviction process to give families more time to gather resources and prevent eviction. These are both crucial for an equitable recovery because they help prevent a wave of evictions that will have long-term impacts on thousands of vulnerable families and housing equity in our city.
Next week, Council will also have the opportunity to invest $5 million into small business resiliency. Small businesses are the backbone of our communities and are critical to vibrant and safe neighborhood corridors. This is an absolutely crucial way to protect our small businesses and support an equitable recovery in our cultural corridors and citywide.
An equitable recovery will require us to explore new sources of progressive revenue for the City. I look forward to leading that work in partnership with leaders at the state legislature, the City’s Board of Estimates and Taxation, my colleagues on the City Council, and of course, with the community. I am eager to share more specific proposals around this in the upcoming weeks.
Choosing an equitable recovery instead of making working class people foot the bill is part of resisting the Trump administration’s cruelty. If ICE agents leave Minneapolis, but thousands of vulnerable families get evicted and hundreds of immigrant-owned small businesses close, then we failed to protect our communities from Operation Metro Surge. On the other hand, if City leaders choose to invest in an equitable recovery, we have the opportunity to heal from the traumas and economic damages of the occupation by creating a more equitable, vibrant, and diverse city. This is the work that lies before us for the coming weeks, months and years.
The response to this post by council member Wonsley seems scarcely worthy of reply, but I note that Wonsley is not, and never has been, responsible in any way for immigration policy. The snide reference to undefined “fellow comrades” is vague and essentially meaningless. More substantively, the 15 million immigrants, if that is the right number, have been providing essential services which our US-born population has been unable and/or unwilling to provide, particularly in science, agriculture, medicine and small business. They have also contributed immeasurably to the richness of our culture. With regard to Wonsley’s analysis, it describes the situation quite well, I think. The issue, which she mentions but does not resolve, is to find the resources for the needed recovery. In fact, it seems to me that those resources will have to come, as they have in the ongoing battle with ICE, from rhe really heroic work of the people of Minneapolis as a whole, mainly volunteering to help their neighbors with protection, resources and assistance with rebuilding. City officials can help organize that effort but it cannot be funded by big property tax increases. Unlike California or New York we do not have a substantial class of uber-rich oligarchs and a city tax on huge incomes might be symbolically satisfying but is unlikely to yield income sufficient to meet the need. However a more detailed analysis of that possibility would be welcome.
Woods Halley
If you know of somebody who would be interested in doing that type of analysis, please send them our way. And thanks for your insightful thoughts on this post.
“City officials can help organize that effort but it cannot be funded by big property tax increases. Unlike California or New York we do not have a substantial class of uber-rich oligarchs and a city tax on huge incomes might be symbolically satisfying but is unlikely to yield income sufficient to meet the need. However a more detailed analysis of that possibility would be welcome.”
Wonsley,
Had you and your fellow comrades not allowed 15 million unvetted illegal aliens into our country we would not need ICE to gather them up and ship them out. At some point in your life you should try to get some real life experience such as working in the private sector where your performance is measured on your abilities and achievements not your DEI classification. You would be in for a very rude awaking. For the record a community organizer is not a real job.