Welcome to Palestine, Minnesota: Life Under Occupation |
Photograph Source: Chad Davis – CC BY 4.0
Israel has come home to roost in Minnesota. The people of Minneapolis and St. Paul have become the Palestinians of Minnesota. The residents of the Twin Cities are experiencing the loss of sovereignty and civil rights that Palestinians have suffered for over eight decades.
The L’Etoile du Nord (the Star of the North) state has been besieged by thousands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents. The Twin Cities are now occupied communities, surveilled and under attack from their own government.
The militarism, violence and terrorism Israel has rehearsed on Palestinians in occupied Gaza and the West Bank have reached into America’s heartland and bled into the nation’s political system.
The tactical and ideological similarities between ICE and the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) are easily recognizable. These similarities are rooted in decades of joint training programs, shared technology and surveillance. Thousands of federal agents have participated in Israeli “security” training programs.
Simulating the reality of occupation in Palestine, militarized federal agents patrol American neighborhoods, abducting residents. Without warrants, unidentified men armed with assault rifles, conduct raids, drag people from their homes, pull them from vehicles, detain and even kill them, as evidenced this month in the deaths of U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Masked agents treat protestors as threats, using chemical and sublethal weapons against them.
Thousands have been forcibly detained and held in ICE detention centers without due process. Since the beginning of 2026, six deaths have been recorded. And in 2025, ICE’s deadliest year in two decades, 32 people died.
As of January 2026, over 9,350 Palestinians are being held, most without charges, in Israeli prisons and detention centers; approximately 350 are children. And since 7 October 2023, at least 98 Palestinians (with the toll likely higher) have died in Israeli........