It Could Happen Here - Anti-ICE Protesters in Minnesota Charged with Conspiracy

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

James is joined by Olive, Margaret, Mo, to discuss the indictment of 15 anti ice protesters in Minnesota and what it means for the first amendment. Sources: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/everyone-vs-ice-on-the-ground-in-minnesota-319435576 https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/outlaw-criminalization-of-ice-watch-in-minneapolis-326372276  https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.234418/gov.uscourts.mnd.234418.1.0_1.pdf  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ0hYCF60og See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm going to ask them all to introduce themselves. So if we start off with you, Mo, that would be wonderful. Sure, good afternoon. I'm Maura Meltzer Cohen. I'm an attorney, abolitionist, and educator. I primarily represent people arrested in the course of justice struggles, and I do a lot of popular legal education. I also teach at CUNY School of Law. Wonderful. Thank you.

Olive, if you'd like to go next. Hi, I'm Olive. I'm a legal worker, a movement legal worker based in Minneapolis, and I also make outlaw, so you might have heard my voice on here before. Thank you. Mike, bye. Hi, I'm Margaret. I am sometimes on this show. you probably hear me on Sundays with Closso Media Book Club.

And like you all, I woke up to a lot of messages this morning being like, oh, fuck, things are happening in Minneapolis. People are being raided. As always, we started off with some false information or some like early rumors. But right away, people were like, there's a bunch of people who are getting arrested. And people started sharing that we were about to see a press conference by the federal government. And they were going to be like, we've caught. those terrible Antifa terrorists. And I thought, that's the kind of thing I like paying attention to. So I woke up, well, I'd been awake for a minute. And then I watched a press conference. And then I read

a very long indictment. And I think I'm not the one who's supposed to do the very short version of it all. But that's how I, that's my narrative version of what happened. Yeah, I think that's a, that's a good narrative. We are going to get on to talking about the indictment, talking about what it does and doesn't do and what it means and doesn't mean. But Mo, I know you wanted to begin with some really important context about the physical locations where the alleged actions took place. Yeah, I wanted to ground this whole discussion in the historical reality of the United States federal government's violent colonial history. in this specific place.

So one of the places that is mentioned a number of times in the indictment is Fort Snelling. And Fort Snelling is a U.S. military installation that was built on a sacred site at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers. I think it's really critical that we understand that not only is the United States federal government continuing to perpetuate its. violent occupation in the same places that it has historically done so in ways that are intended to either include or exclude certain groups of people, depending on what's expedient for the federal government, but that they're doing it in the exact same place as, I think,

the largest mass execution in U.S. history, which was a mass execution of Dakota people, that after it was carried out was determined to have been totally unlawful and to have involved totally insufficient legal process on the part of the United States government and to have involved actions that far exceeded the lawful legitimate authority of the U.S. government. And of course, that's exactly what we're seeing here again is the United States federal government taking actions that far exceed its lawful authority and punishing people who resist those excesses. Yeah, I think that's really important. One thing I just want to add, I'm not sure if you said this clearly, but Fort Snelling is also the area where Whipple is located,

so you're going to probably hear us talk about the Whipple building, and that is the ICE headquarters for the Midwest. It's where people detained by ICE in all of Minnesota are processed through and protesters arrested by ICE as well. Thank you, Olive. I don't think I did make that clear. Yeah, that's very important context. If people are looking for a little bit more context on Whipple Building, Olive made a wonderful podcast for us that they can listen to about that.

And Margaret and I did some reporting when we were in the Twin Cities as well. We were linked to all of those in the show notes. Subsequently to this, like Margaret, right, I began to receive messages that we would be seeing people have been detained. We'd be seeing oppressor and an indictment. So what's the presser? And then they actually really see indictment, like 15 minutes before the presser, I believe. Yeah, and they weren't like mad at people for having not already read a like 94 page indictment. Yeah, they kept saying read.

Well, this is a thing, right? That allows them when they're answering questions to say, well, read the indictment. But then for people not to ask questions about things that are covered or not covered in the indictment. Yeah, it was a shit show. They told people to read the indictment. The indictment did not say what they claimed to said. Yeah. It was a press conference.

It was exactly squarely what I would expect from a press conference. And people ask questions which are good and they got answers, which were useless. Yeah. I was impressed with how quick the press was to point out, to identify, even without having read the indictment, to identify the gaping holes in the government's claims. Yeah. And there's been a lot of really excellent local reporting in the 20th century. for a long time, actually.

It's one of the places where local journalism has not been gutted just yet, which is a good thing. The indictment that I have in front of me here indicts, I believe, 15 individuals. From what we know, one of those people was already detained. Another 12 have been detained, and I believe two are yet to be detained. As of recording. I think we're down to one is yet. to be detained. Okay, we're down to one, yeah. And that they suggested in the, in the presser that those people are maybe negotiating surrender. Yeah, and at the time

we are recording, there is a big gathering outside the federal court, which is being attacked by eight feds of some description. I'm not quite sure. Maybe FPS. Pepper spraying people. We saw them throwing some kind of less lethal grenades, but like something that people who live in the Twin Cities will have become very familiar with at this point, right, which is this kind of state violence. Yes, as Mel has pointed out in the chat, these people are being pepper sprayed for attending court proceedings, which are public. In the indictment, the district attorney, I guess, outlines that these people were members of a group called Dam Direct Action, Minnesota, previously known as Twin Cities Direct Action. There are a number of other groups in acronyms here that I

don't think it's hugely important that they are alleging that they were part of a group that conspired to, among other things, disrupt and obstruct federal agents to, I'm going to quote here, the purpose of the conspiracy include the following, preventing the enforcement of federal immigration law by force, intimidation and threats, opposing the authority of the United States government, preventing hindering or delaying by force the execution of the laws governing the identification, detention, and removal of non-citizens to include the Immigration and Nationality Act and preventing, impeding and interfering federal law enforcement from discharging their duties, including enforcement of federal immigration law by force intimidation and threats.

They then go on to detail a great number of messages from a number of signal chats. They specifically identify them as signal chats, and a large number of the messages pertain to a protest held at the Whipple Federal Building on the 23rd of January. That's a protest that Margaret and I covered, and you will have heard our coverage of it before, or you can go back and listen to it. The specific allegations here are that the accused people conspired to create a soft, quote unquote and hard quote unquote barricade. The soft barricade took the form of a shield wall that Margaret and I reported on the time. The hard barricade they're alleging was a number of trailers that they're alleging. The accused people attempted to flip over in order to prevent feds accessing Whipple.

From my skim read of the indictment so far, it looks like the actual actions at the conspiracy charge focuses on, largely about the planning and carrying out of two blockade actions at the Whipple Building on January 23rd and March 1st, and then the participation in the coordination of commuting or ice watching by car and general ice watch activities after the occupation drawdown from March to June. And the conspiracy charge and the evidence that goes to those two things takes up most of the 94-page indictment. Yeah. And then as we get to the very, very end, somebody is accused of kicking a government vehicle and somebody else is accused of getting in a road traffic accident with a government vehicle, which, Margaret, I know you'd read that before,

but it's being alleged they were deliberately using their vehicle as a weapon, right? Yeah, the indictment doesn't say that it was a car accident. The indictment implies that it caused physical contact, and we don't know whether that was physical contact with a vehicle or the officer themselves. In the entire indictment, there are very few things that the average. person reading this indictment would be like, oh, that sounds like a crime. And one of those is kicking a police car. And one of those is this using a vehicle as a dangerous weapon to make, quote, physical contact and inflict bodily injury. And that is number 276 out of 276, not counts,

but like claims made in this document. So they are clearly spending the overwhelming majority talking about other things. Gives it claims, Moe. Is that a reasonable way to refer to them? They said allegations. Allegations, there you go. Ah, yes. So there's 276 allegations,

and the vast majority are the kind of things that the average person reading a thing would say that sounds like the most free speech thing I've ever read. Not just one of the allegations is that one defendant made a video calling for people to come armed. During the press conference,

they actually did a good job. The reporters were like, cool, is there any evidence that that person or anyone who that they spoke to actually came armed? And they were like, we're not answering that. Which is more or less what they said to everything. But overall, we are talking about a document that describes how to organize any protest. Yeah. How to organize any protest.

It talks about how do we organize our signal groups so that we can communicate more clearly with each other. How do we know that the people in our group are who they say they are? And it's the kind of thing that protest organizers have been doing in this country for at least several decades. That's just what I can speak to personally. And it is being framed not in a different way. They've done this kind of thing before. But it is in this current real bad context where everything gets real intense. The point that you're making, Margaret, is very important because a lot of people will look at this and be like, this is standard First Amendment shit.

and I don't want people to think that standard First Amendment shit is illegal now, because that is what these prosecutions do. They have a chilling effect on protective First Amendment activity. Close your eyes, and you can hear the entire world come alive. 2026 FIFA World Cup is on, and you can stream it all live on on TSN radio From the opening kickoff to the final celebration. Every match, every moment. Listen to FIFA World Cup on TSN Radio.

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Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you saw it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle. Each week, we dive head first into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately

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I'll even say this. At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So, Mo, I know you enjoy the First Amendment. Would you like to explain to us exactly what conspiracy is and what's going on here with these charges of conspiracy? I do. I am a First Amendment enjoyer. So if you look through this indictment, almost all of the allegations that are made about the, overt acts, the actions that were taken in support of the conspiracy are, as you said, really, First Amendment protected conduct. So in order to understand how First Amendment protected

conduct can be evidence of criminality, we have. to look at what is a conspiracy. And a conspiracy is a fascinating legal animal because what it is is a claim that a group of people made an agreement to do something illegal and then took steps, overt acts, engaged in these, quote, overt acts in the service of carrying out their illegal agreement or their agreement to do something unlawful, right? So all of these things, know, there's so many things in here that are clearly constitutionally protected. They're very preoccupied with people being members of different groups, identifying themselves as anarchists, wearing t-shirts or sweatshirts that are, at one point, I think they say they're

Antifa branded. I didn't know we had a brand. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I could send you some merch. Sorry. I don't know if I should make that joke. That's a joke. You know, there are all these things, you know, people having conversations, people using rhetoric, and all of these things are clearly First Amendment protected. And then there are people talking about the Second Amendment, which, of course, is also a constitutional amendment. And, you know, all kinds of, you know, interesting evidence where they talk about people following or identifying ICE agents or vehicles driven by ICE agents. Well, we have a First Amendment right to observe law enforcement in the public discharge of their duties. Looking at an ICE agent or taking notes on what they're doing is actually,

it's not only not unlawful, it's clearly First Amendment protected conduct, right? These people are doing legal observation. And so what is the thing that's allegedly removing the First Amendment protection from these behaviors is this claim that all of these things are being done in the service of this larger agreement to do something illegal. What is the illegal thing interfering with the discharge of ICE, you know, I guess I'll say duties for a given value of duties. There's a lot of air quotes happening for people who can't see. Sorry, I remember that this is not actually a visual medium. Yeah, thank God. I will verbalize this for the record. So the thing about conspiracy that makes it so attractive is that it makes it possible for prosecutors to criminalize

garden variety, lawful and even constitutionally protected behavior, and whole communities of people who are engaged in those behaviors by making the claim that all of those things and all of those associations and all of those beliefs and all of those otherwise protected activities are in the service of a larger agreement to do something illegal. Now, of course, they're not addressing the fact that people are organizing themselves

to prevent ICE from doing things that we know are very much not lawful, right? like detaining people who are citizens, detaining, among others, indigenous people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Punching through people's windshields and pulling them out of vehicles. Like, I don't know, murdering to people. And that's not being dealt with in this at all, right? The idea that Minneapolis is organizing itself to prevent this massive,

you know, unlawful occupation that true to form exceeds the lawful authority of these agencies. To your point on Minneapolis organizing itself, it's worth noting that every single one of these indicted people is from the Twin Cities. And they repeatedly said in the press conference and the indictment that these people tried to hijack peaceful or First Amendment protests. But as they admitted in the press, that every single one of these people was from that community. I would actually like to point something out about that specifically. One of the things that's happening in this indictment is that the prosecutors have framed it as these bad protesters are trying to use as cover the actions of legitimate peaceful protesters. So what they're doing is they're setting up this idea that there are good protesters and bad protesters, which first of all is a way to divide and conquer social movements. But the other thing that they're doing, and I really want people to be alert to this, is that they're making it possible by associating the two, they're making it possible to later come back and go after

even those people that they are currently defining as good protesters. So there's a point in this indictment where they make a claim that an organization, I think it's the, it might have been the 50501 organization. We need to check that. They are mentioned in the indictment. They are mentioned as a DSA. And the DSA is and a union is. There's a point at which an organization asks Twin Cities DA for assistance with a rally.

And even though in this situation, I believe the prosecutors are setting it up like, oh, well, this legitimate group is working with this, the bad guy group. What they've done is created a discourse that will allow them, if they want to, that will allow the government to come back and say, look at this group purporting to be a union and doing legitimate peaceful protests, but they're actually enlisting the assistance of, you know, the direct action group. So on the one hand, you know, I think the indictment is playing right into this good protest or bad protester narrative, which, to be clear, it doesn't matter if you are protesting in the air quotes right way, you will still be subject to police violence, right?

The function of this sort of nonviolent protest is that it exposes how unwarranted police violence is, not that police are not violent toward you if you are protesting the quote, right? way. Yeah, Margaret and I were there very clearly identified as press on the 23rd of January at the Whipple building, and that did not stop us being exposed to police violence. We saw people approaching the cops to ask what they were supposed to do and get arrested. Yeah. Yeah, we saw a cameraman from Italy get pepper sprayed in face. Yeah, that was what I was thinking of. Yeah, and actually, Mo, I really like this point, because I actually don't think that the good, protest or bad protesters split is going to work in the popular conversation in this particular case as effectively as it

usually does. And that's part of why ICE is so scared as relates to Minneapolis is because there is such a, I mean, obviously I'm sure there's divisions, right? But overall, there's such a unity around like the thing that is happening is far more important than our differences that, like, I think they're not going to successfully split people in the general discourse. They'll do it a little bit, right, but they're not going to have nearly the traction they usually do. So I actually think that this point that you bring up is so vital, except, of course, for the fact that there's no time in history when anyone has ever come for one person in the morning and then a different person at night.

I can't think of any examples of that. Right. That's sarcasm for, yeah. That's my concern, and that's really the thing I want to highlight here is that even though they're sort of claiming, oh, this group is legitimate, this group is not legitimate, they've done this in a manner that's certainly setting them up to come for DSA later, to come for the, you know, the extreme liberal groups and behave as though those liberal groups who are, of course, protesting in the quote right way, are actually engaged in violent, militant,

revolutionary action. Right. I think the veil on this has already kind of dropped here in Twin Cities, just how people have been charged with the church protesters facing these face act charges, super serious federal charges, and so many people facing federal. 18 U.S.C. 111 charges, most of which have already been dropped with those cases closed. And the way that we've seen people show up in solidarity has been so cool. Just like your average liberal mom is like drop all the charges. There does feel like this sense of solidarity among people for being brave and trying to get out there and support their neighbors that feels unique and makes it feel like it would be pretty hard for them to be really successful in pushing this

narrative here. I don't think you get to do, like, Anarchus bought the violence to this otherwise peaceful protest when you murdered a mother in the street and then you murdered someone else a few days later. And I think this is part of the thing that I'm finding interesting about this indictment is, on the one hand, they're making these factual allegations where they're saying things like paragraph 70 says that ice was totally boxed in for half an hour and inconvenienced all morning. It's like, okay, but then on the following page, it's very clear they're talking about, you know, how violent ice is being.

And it's very clear that the stakes are actually life or death and that all of the people who are in the streets inconveniencing ice. are doing so in defense of others. And when I say defense of others, I mean in a legal sense, right, a self-defense or defense of others. And they're not coming there and shooting ice agents. They are inconveniencing them. And so even the indictment itself, even from the government's own narration, you can see

that what is at stake for the community in the community. Minneapolis is true life or death stakes. And what is at stake for the ice agents is that they are inconvenienced all morning. Yeah. Close your eyes. And you can hear the entire world come alive. 2026 FIFA World Cup is on. And you can stream it all live on TSN radio.

From the opening kickoff to the final celebration. Every match, every moment. Listen to FIFA World Cup on TSN Radio. It's Canada to the Lift Off. Available on I Heart Radio. All right, listen up. The Jonas Brothers here. Our podcast is called Hey Jonas.

We've here, since everyone has a podcast, we want it to as well. And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend, Nile Horn, is joining the show. How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It was the same thing with Slow Hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, or taste so good can't be about food.

You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done. You too, Joe. Drop what you're doing and listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you saw it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring the 14th season of Family Secrets.

And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air, so much so that you were. The bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle. Each week, we dive headfirst into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything, and me pretending like everything was fine.

He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off, and that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta,

you already know there's a lot to break down. Gorsha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man. They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues. I like the bougie style of Housewives' show. I think it looks like it's going to be interesting. On the podcast, With the King, I, Carlos King,

recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, M&T, everybody's talking about. As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it, I understand the game. As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this. At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.

To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. One of the things that they spend a great deal of time talking about its indictment is Opsic, operational security for those who are not familiar, and how that is evidence that they were bad people conspiring to do bad things. And very obviously, this group's operational security has some kind of breach. And we should talk about the time and place to discuss that breach. So if anyone would like to take a swing at either of those things, it would be lovely.

I mean, I would say that obviously, if you're reading someone's signal messages in an indictment, clearly the security did not fully succeed. But I would just say that actually a lot of the indictment seems to be people being frustrated at the success of the operational security. A lot of the indictment is like, and then they kept vetting and therefore, the implication is like, and therefore we didn't get to the next stage with our attempts. Yeah. I do think it's important to understand that operational security is not evidence of guilt. And playing who's the cop in the group chat is a game that everybody loses.

And also, not everything needs to be said on the internet. I'm going to say it again. If you missed it the first time I said it, not everything needs to be said. said on the internet. But what if I want to just explain to everyone that I'm really cool and radical? Isn't the best way to do it to just say that on the internet? If you have an Instagram account. Hey, remember that Tracy Chapman song where she says,

talking about a revolution sounds like a whisper? Yeah, but also had a really fast car. Yeah, great. Sorry, I just really like Tracy Chapman. Yeah, no, that's a good point. And standing in the welfare line might be a better place to do it than online. Maybe. And we also are just seeing that the bulk of the evidence is extensive records of some supposedly vetted signal chat messages

and highly detailed reports from supposedly vetted in-person meetings, both gathered over the course of nearly half a year since January. And there's a lot of ways they could have gotten this information. Some of these events were public events. There's transcripts of a tour that some people did a speaking tour about resistance in Minneapolis. Those were open events to the public. Of course, there's going to be feds there. But as wiser people than me have always said your signal messages, if you can see them on your phone and someone else gets your phone,

they can also see them on your phone. So a lot of people were arrested here and had their phones seized as evidence. There's lots of ways that these messages, could have been obtained. And what Mo is saying, I just think it's worth elaborating on that it won't help anyone. What did you say about looking for the cop in the chat? We'll never. Don't play who's the cop in the group chat.

Yeah. Yeah, everybody loses is a good way to describe that. Yeah. And just to make it explicit, I think it's because you could read this and be like, oh my God, somebody snitched or there's an infiltrator. And I just think that's not clear. Yeah, we don't know. Yeah.

We just don't know. And I think the other thing that I would like to say is I'm looking at a lot of these text messages, and they're not particularly evidence of unlawful conduct. No, they're really not. Right. And so I don't think the solution to that is to never talk to your friends or to never organize. I do think that it's important to remember that basically anything you say can and will be used against you. When I say to my clients, look, even when you're saying you're protesting your innocence, you know, and you're telling people publicly, I didn't do anything, that can be used against you. You don't know what police and prosecutors are going to understand as evidence or what they're going to understand it as evidence of. That doesn't mean we don't talk to each other. It doesn't mean we self-censor. It means we have the courage of our convictions.

and it means that we're thoughtful and circumspect about what we say. Yeah, I think that's just like the most important point to all of this. We have the courage of our convictions and that doesn't mean we should be fools. Right. Like the indictment is much more concerned with that they built shields than it is about their conspiracy to kick police cars or whatever it is that they're accused of their overt acts. Yeah. You know, and a lot of it is around the ideology of these people. And interestingly, it mentions anarchism or anarchists substantially more than it mentions.

Antifa, with emphasis on the wrong syllable, of course. And that's actually not new. That's actually really old in American history. But like, it's interesting to me that one of the cases that it looks like they're trying to build with these allegations is that all of these people identify as anarchists. And they're obviously not being accused of being an anarchist because that's not a crime, but it certainly seems like they're attempting to say like this person identifies an anarchist, therefore they are more likely to have committed these other crimes or whatever. And I just think that's worth pointing out that that is a thing that the state is heavily focused on. But for me, as an anarchist, this is about the kind of thing where you're like, well, the courage of my convictions.

It's not a crime to believe that we should organize society and a bottom-up horizontal structure. And to add to that, the reason they're doing that is that they're relying on a popular misunderstanding of anarchism to mean a predilection for chaos and violence. Right. Totally. And the more that we can explain that anarchists mostly just want to make tea for you and be nice to you, then the further we can go to dispelling. Yeah. Like I like to define anarchism as building ways to take care of people that don't reinforce ways to control people. Which includes guarding kindergartens, right?

Yeah, yeah. There are many ways that we can do that. But the fewer people who have that misunderstanding, the harder it becomes to make that argument. Yeah. I think the point in this indictment that perfectly, illustrates the fundamental misapprehension that the government has about what an anarchist is and what we're up to is the phrase the aggressive use of shields. Yeah, that was one I was going to clip out as well.

Because as you say, we're not food and bombs. Right? It's food, not bombs. We're feeding each other. We're protecting kindergarten's where, you know, we're providing security for meetings. We're mostly, frankly, feeding each other. Yeah. Yeah. Not always very well, right? Yeah, a little over-emphasis on badly cooked eggplant.

Too many human beans, possibly. But, you know, but we're doing our best out here. And maybe I actually think that the idea that anarchists are people who engage in the aggressive use of shields is actually, in some respect, It's really precise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

If these people will walk, it would be a great album title for someone. There has been a lot of reaction to several federal cases in the last 12 months, right? Maybe 16, 18, God knows how long we've entered this. But this is not that. This is not Prairie Land. As we spoke about before, more than half the 18 USC cases in Minnesota have already been dropped. can you maybe help situate this in a place that helps people who are struggling with the sky's falling feeling right now?

Well, I think one really nice thing is the arraiments are, I believe, still ongoing as we are speaking of the people who were raided and arrested this morning. And last I heard all five whose cases had been called or ordered released with conditions of not talking to each other with one exception for people who are roommates. but that's interesting and probably a whole other conversation. But that's a big deal that people were facing conspiracy charges, which are very serious federal charges and were released today at their arraignments. I think it shows it's an indication of where the courts are at. And also just these cases are taking place in these cities where the whole world watched the federal government do absolute terror.

and people do beautiful human loving each other in all the ways that they could to try and keep people alive while federal agents killed people. So it's just the context that it is in. It's super different than rural Texas, you know, and even the facts that we are dealing with in this are just less hard. You know, there's not allegations that someone shot a cop, which is a harder narrative to overcome in the Court of Public Opinion. And the allegations generally also seem even less serious than the recent indictment that came out in Michigan for the Palestine protesters. So I just think that's an interesting grounding thing. And on the other hand, we did recently see that with the Spokane three people convicted of conspiracy, which was, that's the second one after Prairieland. So while a lot of these cases around the country have been dropped, not all of them have. But it's hard to imagine this being super successful, given where it's taking place. And I think that when we look at Minneapolis and we're like, okay, Minneapolis was the or the Twin Cities, I'm sorry, St. Paul. I'm so sorry. I keep accidentally doing that. St. Paul, you're also wonderful. And people have done so much work and they have been this like guiding light for a huge chunk of people living in the United States of America in this past year, right? Like looking how people have come together to defend their neighbors and themselves. And like, I think that it's important that we say that unity, has to continue. And so it's like the reason that I am optimistic is because of the actions that I

saw in Minneapolis. Sorry, I didn't go to St. Paul. But, you know, the actions I saw in Minnesota, but that has to continue, like, during court support, during, you know, so it's not like just a, oh, we've got this, right? But instead, by continuing to say, we are looking, this does matter to us. This matters to everybody. I'm hoping that that kind of continues to influence things. And I think we saw that today, the arraignment, the courtroom was packed. It was overflowing. So people were outside chanting. And that's when tear gas was deployed. And there was unprecedented. I mean, it just was unprecedented here at the federal courthouse to see that kind of force used. But there's tons of people outside. You know this happened this morning. And the community is not having it.

So, yeah, even though they're car kicking anarchists. Cars are living in fear. We need to remember to that no action is over until the last person accused is home and free. Yeah. We have to keep doing court support. We have to do prisoner support. I am so relieved, I guess, to know that Minneapolis and St. Ball have such well-developed legal infrastructure, including not only lawyers who have, you know, decades of

experience fighting against the politically motivated abuse of state power against people, you know, on the basis of their First Amendment protected beliefs, but also legal workers and jail support and people who have really learned over the course of not just this last winter, but, you know, through the course of many decades of movement struggles, how to deal with this kind of stuff. And I know that this particular group is in really good hands. It's not that this isn't a terrible situation, and it's not that it isn't going to be potentially devastating

for the individuals who've been indicted. But the kind of solidarity that we have seen and that we saw this morning at the courthouse is really heartening to me. Yeah. I guess I'll just say, like, I had the misfortune of having to listen to Gregory Bovino's interviews at the Remigration Conference in Portugal as part of my job. And one of the things he said was that they surrendered to Minneapolis and St. Paul, right? And they felt like they were defeated there. And I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening right after they got their funding bill passed. Right. But very clearly, the people of the Twin Cities stood up to ICE and CBP. And what? and ICE and CBP know that they are very upset about it, but that means you can do it again. And like this takes a different form when it comes in a form of court support, right?

It's this different kind of struggle, but the way we confront it is the same, which is to say together. We saw people hold each other so close in the Twin Cities and it was really beautiful amidst horrible, horrible shit. And I think that people can continue to do that and continue to like be this light that the rest of the country looks up to. As a wise mentor, Mo has said many times before the punishment is the process for anyone going through this.

I hope you don't feel that however hard this is is being undermined. It's incredibly difficult to go through this process, but staying grounded in the reality of where you are, the cases that have been dropped. And the fact that there's not yet a conviction to minimize fear is a way of taking back power from the state, which they get to wield over us by doing things like. this to freak us out and make us really scared. And we don't know if this will hold up in court yet. So let's keep our feet on the ground and hold each other close and try not to let them get us down more than more than they have to. Yeah. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it. could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. All right, listen up. The Jonas Brothers here. Our podcast is called, Hey Jonas. We've here, since everyone has a podcast, we wanted to as well. And we've had some incredible guests so far. And now our good friend, Nile Horn, is joining the show. How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It was the same thing with Slow Hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else, really, is it? You know, or taste so good can't be about food. You do the same, Nick, with some of the stuff that you've done. You too, Joe.

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