Trump's Occupying army retreats

 

The occupying army retreats The announcement of ICE’s withdrawal from Minnesota, like that of the British from Boston 250 years ago, marks a victory for people power. Today’s announcement by Trump border czar Tom Homan that the administration was ending its deployment of ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota encountered two distinct but ultimately complementary reactions from Minnesotans. Skepticism: “I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Elliott Payne, president of the Minneapolis City Council. And celebration of Minnesotans’ tenacious resistance: “They thought they could break us, but a love for our neighbors and a resolve to endure can outlast an occupation,” said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. By now, the persistence of Twin City residents to demonstrate against the occupation, to line the city’s sidewalks with people recording ICE’s every move with their phones, to patrol neighborhoods warning of the approach of ICE and Border Patrol thugs, and to bring food to their neighbors who fear to leave their homes, all amid weather that was at times subzero, has earned them a page in history books. I daresay it will become the stuff of American legend, inasmuch as our legends generally celebrate American citizens defending democratic values against autocrats, fascists, and totalitarians. We don’t have a lot of legends about the triumph of such Americans over forces that occupied our cities, however, because we don’t have a lot of cities that have been occupied by such forces. As events would have it, however, the standout example of Americans outlasting and defeating such an occupation is about to have its 250th anniversary. It came in March of 1776, when patriot militias drove British troops out of Boston, who’d occupied that city since 1768 to quell Bostonians’ efforts to establish a modicum of control over their own affairs.

Following the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, patriot militias—in advance of the formation of an American army—besieged British forces within Boston and neighboring Charlestown, both of which connected to the Massachusetts mainland by narrow necks of land that were easily blockaded. As in Minneapolis, the forces hemming in the British were infuriated civilians, the Massachusetts militia having been joined by militia forces from the other New England colonies. (Only after several months did the Continental Congress establish and enroll them in an American army, which George Washington then arrived to command.) In late 1775 and 1776, the patriot forces managed to bring artillery to the hills surrounding the city from faraway Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York, which had the capacity not only to bombard the British forces, but their ships in the harbor as well. With that, the British were compelled to withdraw. It took seven more years, of course, for all British forces to withdraw from the new nation, and it will likely take today’s patriots at least three more years to end the rule of Mad King Donald and his successors, which has thus far been defined not just by its war on immigrants and people whose skin color makes them look like some immigrants, but also on American cities and suburbs, where immigrants and liberals and Democrats reside. But as was the case during our Revolution, interim victories will hasten that day. On the heels of today’s announced Minnesota withdrawal, congressional Democrats appear poised to block funding for the Homeland Security Department, which is set to run out tomorrow. That could be, and surely should be, an interim victory, too, but many more (and more decisive) victories are required to end the rush to authoritarianism that Trump has engineered. Taking Congress in November’s election, of course, is by far the most important looming battle. As the siege of Boston continued through 1775 and 1776, the New England militias were joined by militias even from the Southern colonies. I suspect we’ll see a kindred rise in urban and blue-state solidarity today. Yesterday, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass ordered L.A.’s police to record the actions of ICE and the Border Patrol, since we can’t rely on the feds recording their own savagery. And in the wake of today’s announced retreat of ICE from Minnesota, Minneapolis Mayor Frey and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that they’d be meeting to discuss lessons learned—resistance lessons learned—from the experience of Frey’s city, and how they can be applied to New York. That might be the topic for a conclave of America’s mayors should someone have the smarts and credibility to call one. As Trump is plainly determined to commemorate the 250th anniversary of our Revolution by having an alien force of louts and thugs occupy America’s cities, so those cities should commemorate that anniversary by demonstrating the same kind of patriot resolve that created those American cities—as distinct from subservient colonial cities—250 years ago. Now as then, mad kings and their mercenaries have no place in our democratic republic. Harold Meyerson Editor-at-Large