Resistance Is Essential!

The Editors

Posted February 18, 2026

Detroit: Peoples Assembly volunteers put together whistle kits designed to alert community members when ICE is nearby. (Jim West)

THE FIRST LESSON of recent horrors is that an imperialist government claiming the “right” to blow up boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific — with no evidence that they’re engaging in “criminal activity,” let alone posing any kind of “threat” — will also commit street executions of its own population.

Not only that: Government will proclaim “absolute immunity” for these murders, the regime will repeat them even after the first one is caught on video and watched frame-by-frame by tens of millions of horrified viewers.  That’s exactly how the murder of boats at sea continue — and it’s how Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, pinned on the ground, was gunned down so soon after agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good to death in her car.

The second lesson is that popular resistance matters — even though state terror is deployed precisely to convince society that “resistance is futile.”

That’s what Minneapolis/St. Paul and surrounding communities have reminded us, along with Chicago and so many other powerful sites — providing mutual aid, protection of neighbors targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and defiant activism of the kind that the late civil rights giant John Lewis memorably called “good trouble.”

The reign of terror in cities and immigrant communities, with the spread of mass detention centers with rising death counts and horrific accounts of rotten food, medical neglect and conditions amounting to torture, is a particularly obscene expression of the Trump regime.

But it’s not the only front in his war against the people and our basic rights. Among the others is Trump’s open intention to steal the November 2026 midterm congressional elections, which the Republican-MAGA cult is poised to lose heavily.

Under the surface of Trump’s demand to “nationalize the election,” in violation of every Constitutional provision, stand threats of massive voter suppression and intimidation, deployment of ICE squads to polling places, seizure of voting machines, and massive disinformation about “fraud” to discredit results he doesn’t like.

It’s amazing how many of Trump and his cult’s daily crimes are out in the open, and how far the extreme right wing is prepared to go. Because the fightback against the ultra-racist anti-immigrant terror has become the center of popular mobilization, its success and staying power are likely the key to the overall struggle.

The strength of the coming March 28 “No Kings” mobilizations and preparations for May Day will indicate the movement’s breadth and, critically, the extent of the labor movement’s participation. Hopeful aspirations for a “General Strike” hardly reflect an imminent prospect — but the very fact that such things are discussed represents a step forward in consciousness.

As these lines are drafted, Congress continues to debate-and-dither over funding for the Department of Homeland Security. A DHS shutdown will not cut off money for the ICE detention, deportation and terror machinery which is secure well into the future.

The craven politics of the top Democratic leadership ensures an eventual sellout “compromise” (for body cameras and symbolic reforms that mean little or nothing). But there are voices in Congress, like Ilhan Omar and Jasmine Crockett, along with some Democratic mayors and other local and state elected officials, demanding “Abolish ICE.” This reflects not only their own outrage but also, surely, the impetus of the activist movement.

In contrast to the pathetic Senate minority Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, even the neoconservative William Kristol is calling for Abolish ICE.

In Awe of Minneapolis

If Minneapolis is not alone in the struggle to stop ICE and Border Protection atrocities, it’s still appropriate to stand in awe of what people there have done.

The city has been in Trump’s crosshairs for multiple reasons, including his racist hatred of the city’s vibrant Somali community and Congressional representative Ilhan Omar, its proud record of the uprising over the police murder of George Floyd, and of course its elected Democratic (although far from radical) city and Minnesota state leadership.

Did Trump, his neofascist adviser Stephen Miller and sadistic Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem pick the wrong target? Day after day and night after night in well-below-zero temperatures Fahrenheit (that’s -18 C. and colder for our non-USA readers), people have come onto the streets in the face of ICE pepper spray, toxic gas projectiles and brutal assaults on nonviolent observers who risk being the next Pretti or Good.

These actions have been not only incredibly brave and resilient, but remarkably disciplined, focused and with few exceptions nonviolent. (Some vandalism has targeted a hotel reputedly housing the ICE goons, but there’s no destruction of personal property.)

As our correspondent in Minneapolis wrote for us:

“What Donald Trump has done is turn regular people — workers, students, shop owners — into protesters. In the old days we would have called it mass ‘radicalization’… and the folks who are in the streets in Minneapolis are not terrorists by any stretch of the imagination, despite what reactionary autocrats like Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have said.

“The role of labor is a seismic shift. Labor groups are not just endorsing the protests, they are playing a big role in organizing them.” (Randy Furst, “Twin Cities Outrage and Resistance,” January 28, 2026.)

American and Global Turmoil

The terror and resistance in Minneapolis, the present center of the turmoil in U.S. politics, arises in the context of everything else that Trump and his regime of sycophants, cult followers and militarists have perpetrated in just the recent few months. These include, in the international arena alone:

• Having kidnapped Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores in the deadly bombing and raid in Caracas, on the pretext of stopping a “narco-terrorist dictatorship,” Trump rapidly pivoted to striking up cordial relations with the existing Venezuelan regime and its police-state machine to control the population. He also proclaimed himself “interim president of Venezuela,” taking over its oil to sell on the global market, and pocketed the Nobel Peace Prize medal that he’s long coveted, which its unexpected winner Marina Machado gifted to him.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio makes no secret that his ultimate target is to overthrow Cuba’s government, although there appears to be no plan of how to “manage” the chaos likely to ensue from such a “success.” (On this rapidly spiraling crisis, see “Cuba’s Precarious Situation” by Samuel Farber, posted February 12 on the ATC website.)

• Trump convened a “Board of Peace,” which the United Nations Security Council had gullibly authorized to oversee “Phase 2” of the Gaza ceasefire agreement and beginning reconstruction, crowning himself as plenipotentiary president in perpetuity. The Board is stocked with an appropriate amalgam of oil monarchs, presidents for life, genocidists and indicted war criminals. Its charter now makes no mention of Gaza. Trump also peremptorily withdrew from dozens of UN bodies, undermining everything from global health monitoring to essential climate research.

• Speaking of which, son-in-law Jared Kushner unveiled the artist rendering of his design for the “new Gaza.” This pictures a grotesque seaside luxury resort complex, with purported housing for some portion of the existing population — which right now subsists in freezing and flooded tents with a bare fraction of desperately needed nutrition, medical and infrastructure aid. Israel, which has barred aid organizations and bombs homes and journalist vehicles in Gaza on a daily basis, has recognized the breakaway Somaliland state — as a base for Israeli military assets and, in the fantasies of prime minister Netanyahu and his far-right allies, as a site for dumping Palestinians to be forced out of Gaza.

• Trump’s repeated intention to seize Greenland from Denmark, “either the easy way or the hard way,” provoked (none too soon) a response from European allies to stage symbolic exercises in defense of the strategic island and Denmark. Confronted with a unified refusal to sell or sell out his coveted piece of real estate, Trump announced a deal with the NATO secretary general for “everything we want,” the specifics of which remain unknown. (His advisers appear unwilling or unable to inform Trump of the difference between Greenland and Iceland.)

• Just when we thought that his annexationist insanities no longer included making Canada “the 51st state,” Trump threatens that country with “100% tariffs” over a nonexistent Canada-China “free trade deal,” threatens to prohibit opening the new Detroit-Windsor Gordie Howe Bridge, and deploys his stooge Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to encourage a far-right secessionist movement in the Canadian province of Alberta.

• From the bottomless well of his treachery, Trump continues his all-too-evident intention to sacrifice Ukraine on the altar of geopolitics and potential lucrative business opportunities in Russia (twelve trillion dollars, says one Kremlin spokesperson). Suffice it here to say that this filthy scheme remains blocked by Ukraine’s continued will to survive, and by Putin’s refusal to end the war and terror-bombing of Ukraine cities unless Russia receives, at minimum, all of eastern Ukraine and the crippling of Ukraine’s military capacity.

With the threat of new military action against Iran and murderous state repression in that country, we refer our readers to a statement by the Ukraine Solidarity Network, “Solidarity with the Iranian Uprising,”.

And let’s not forget how it is children who suffer the most — whether it’s in Gaza, in all the other wars, or in the terrorized immigrant families and communities in the United States.

Chaos on Home Front

Returning to the U.S. scene, there is increasing popular revulsion — against not only Trump’s policies and failures to fulfill his promises for prosperity, but also his uncontrollable greed, coverup of whatever’s in the Epstein Files, and desire to name everything after himself. The sense of spreading chaos is well-founded.

Although the schemes to hijack the midterm elections are widely discussed, it is unclear to what extent state governments or court orders will block them – or even whether court orders can be enforced, in view of the defiance by ICE and DHS of explicit injunctions against peremptory deportations, illegal barring of Congressional representatives from detention facilities, and this administration’s overall contempt for law and Constitutional rights and processes.

As we’ve previously emphasized, among other critical tests will be the Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump’s blatant attempt to strip the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The only way to safeguard birthright citizenship from being stripped under the far-right Court majority is a threat that such a ruling would de-legitimize the Court itself as well as meeting massive rejection.

Meanwhile, the criminal negligence of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services and the gutting of vaccine programs has led to regional measles outbreaks, including preventable deaths of children, and the menace of deadly epidemics in years to come as vaccination rates drop below herd-immunity requirements.

Among other calamities, as communities and states struggle to recover from the late January devastating winter storms, they’re liable to find the Federal Emergency Management Agency missing in action after the crippling budget and staffing cuts that FEMA sustained under Elon Musk’s DOGE and the Republican big barf-bag budget bill.

We are living in a country where fewer people feel secure for themselves, their families and their communities. There are multiple potential outcomes, many frightening and others more promising for a better future for ourselves and the world. As we head toward March 28, May Day and beyond, while the forces of oppression seek to terrify and divide us, Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte and Lewiston, Maine are showing us the way.

March-April 2026, ATC 241

Go to article on the ATC website.