Executive Summary
A Minnesota ‘Melt the ICE Week of Action’ (February 25-March 1st) includes a scheduled ‘student walkout and sit-in,’ ‘school patrols,’ and a training session on sanctuary schools facilitated by ‘Rank-and-File members of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators.’ The week of events is facilitated by groups including 50501 MN, Sunrise [Movement] Twin Cities, Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), UNIDOS MN, and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) Twin Cities. Training sessions include a focus on “sanctuary schools” and how Minneapolis Public Schools workers “defend our communities” will be facilitated by Take Action MN and “Rank-and-File members of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators.”
The Program
Sunrise Movement is facilitating multiple “Wide Awake/Noise Demonstrations” throughout the week targeting local hotels and for activists to engage in “remote actions to pressure Hilton and other hotel chains supporting ICE.” Other “remote actions” include reserving rooms and later canceling them at hotels suspected of housing ICE, demanding that Minneapolis City Council “pull hotels liquor license,” and calling for a general boycott of Hilton hotels on social media. The group also includes a list of hotels where community members have submitted tips about suspected ICE agents staying in that specific hotel.
The “Week of Action” is “centered around six demands to protect the people from ICE” which includes “ICE out of Minnesota now and forever,” “release all our abducted neighbors, close all detention camps,” “Statewide eviction moratorium by March 1st,” “drop all charges against ICE resistors,” “amnesty for all immigrants,” and “abolish ICE, DHS, the police, and prisons.”
The session “Introduction to Sanctuary Schools” states that it is “about how to set up a Sanctuary School team,” which includes a “combination of educators and caregivers who do daily protective presence and rapid response around schools, coordinate mutual aid (rides, food relief, rent relief, legal support) and organize together for long term demands like returning Sanctuary status to schools and abolishing ICE.” Facilitated by Take Action MN, the session highlights how these “teams” have grown at “hundreds of schools in districts across the state.”
Another session titled “Schools at the Center: A Conversation on Schools, Mutual Aid, and What Comes Next (Panel)” is hosted by the “Rank-and-File members of the Minneapolis Federation of Educators” and will “discuss the lessons learned about mutual aid, solidarity, and the power of public school workers to defend our communities.”
The “Week of Action” includes multiple days of “School Patrols” training which includes learning “from local patrol teams about how to set up protective presence around your school and support a few of the hardest hit schools to have strong patrols while students when some students are just returning from virtual learning.”
FUNDRAISING
Fundraising for the “Week of Action” is being platformed by Twin Cities DSA through ActBlue. The site also states that “any unused Melt the ICE week of action funds will be used for regular Twin Cities DSA activities” and that “contributions to the Twin Cities DSA are not tax deductible.”
