Minneapolis Activists Used Encrypted Group Chats To Outmaneuver ICE. Now the Feds Want To Prosecute Them.

On the morning federal immigration agents shot Alex Pretti in the back, Emmanuel Mauleón, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, was standing on a ladder outside his house, pulling down holiday decorations. That’s when his phone started buzzing.

Pretti’s death would quickly become a national news story. Coming soon after the killing of Renée Good, this was the second time in less than a month that the federal agents swarming Minneapolis had gunned down an American citizen in the street. The outcry forced the Trump administration to reassess its aggressive deportation tactics, prompted a reshuffling of officials overseeing those efforts, and led to congressional hearings and investigations that are ongoing.

Before footage of Pretti’s death spread across social media and news outlets around the world, many residents of the Twin Cities learned what happened the same way Mauleón did: via urgent pings on their phones.

For weeks, a sprawling, informal network of group chats—largely using the encrypted messaging app Signal—had been a vital part of the public response to what the Trump administration called “Operation Metro Surge.” The operation deployed thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials and other federal law enforcement personnel, tasked with apprehending and deporting undocumented immigrants. Their tactics were blunt and aggressive, as they disregarded warrant requirements and drew allegations of racial profiling and unlawful arrests.

In response, those decentralized Signal chats turned ordinary Minnesotans into modern-day Paul Reveres. Participants shared information about ICE activity, warned businesses of potential raids, helped track agents and vehicles across the city, and organized legal assistance for detainees.

On January 24, those networks lit up with footage of federal agents pepper spraying, tackling, and shooting Pretti multiple times. “My phone started blowing up with videos from Signal and then finally the news,” says Mauleón. “I remember being stunned and standing on the top [of the ladder] for too long, worried about my footing.”

It’s been more than seven months since Pretti was killed and nearly that long since Operation Metro Surge came to an end.

Across Minneapolis, however, it can feel as though little time has passed. Many bars, restaurants, and coffee shops have signs on the door telling ICE agents they are unwelcome. Some signs explicitly tell the feds to come back with a warrant. Anti-ICE messages adorn front lawns and sidewalks. Mauleón calls it “the residue of resistance.”

The chats are part of that residue too. A friend flips open Signal and scrolls through several still-active chats while we watch a soccer game at a bar on Nicollet Mall in late June. The federal occupation is still discussed in the present tense.

Those same chats now sit at the center of another story. In a 94-page indictment filed in June, the Department of Justice (DOJ) accused 15 protesters of participating in a conspiracy to interrupt federal immigration enforcement and law enforcement operations. That alleged conspiracy was coordinated via “social media, text messaging, and encrypted messaging applications, such as Signal,” the indictment explains, “with the goal of preventing, hindering, delaying, and impeding the enforcement of federal immigration law.” The defendants have pleaded not guilty.

Has the Trump administration finally brought antifa to justice? In a statement, the White House called the indictment “a crushing blow” to the “domestic terrorist organization.”

Those who participated in or cheered on the protests against immigration enforcement during Operation Metro Surge are calling it something else: a worrying crackdown on Americans’ First Amendment rights to talk and organize with their neighbors, friends, and co-workers against the federal government’s violent behavior.

More Than a Few ‘Far-Left Agitators’

The week before Pretti was killed, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino was asked about the response he’d seen to ICE’s operations in the Twin Cities.

Operation Metro Surge was the latest in a series of similar efforts that had played out across various American cities during President Donald Trump’s first year back in office. Bovino had played a major role in planning and executing them. He’d clearly relished his role as the public face of the operations. Bovino strutted through snowy Minneapolis in a leather trench coat and clashed with protesters—in one video that made the rounds on social media, he lobs a canister of tear gas into a jeering crowd.

“We’ve been in many cities, as you know. We’ve been in Los Angeles and Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, and now, obviously, Minneapolis,” Bovino told reporters. “What we’ve seen that’s a bit different here is the organization of some of the groups. The groups are a bit better organized.”

Months later, Luis Argueta, communications director for Unidos MN, a nonprofit that played a critical role in organizing the protests and resistance efforts in Minnesota, remembers feeling proud when he heard that line.

“It was the height of compliments,” he says.

Starting last year, Unidos MN and a sister organization, Monarca, began offering what they call “legal observer trainings.” The trainings focused on informing people of their rights and the rights of anyone targeted by immigration enforcement, as well as what law enforcement is and isn’t allowed to do.

By the time Operation Metro Surge began in December, the groups had already held about 40 official events at schools, churches, and other community centers, explains Mike Urbanski, who helps lead Monarca’s legal observer trainings. Attendance ranged from dozens to hundreds of people.

Interest surged after the federal crackdown began. Urbanski says the group held about 90 additional training sessions between December and March, reaching 15,000 people. One event in Roseville, a small city directly adjacent to Minneapolis, drew more than 1,300 people. Throughout the trainings, he adds, Monarca has emphasized “the nonviolent nature of this work and our right to do it.”

Those trainings were also where many of the Signal groups and other chats took shape.

“As the surge began and the incredible local organizing went into overdrive, we realized that we were getting a lot of people at our events who were trying to figure out how and where to plug in,” explains Urbanski. “So we also added more information about other ways to be involved, and how to get connected” to local group chats.

These networks were messy, informal, decentralized—and effective.

“There were a bunch of broad chats, and then there were heavily localized chats for each neighborhood in South Minneapolis,” says Jack Nobles, a stage manager who lives near Powderhorn Park, not far from where Pretti and Good were gunned down.

“It’s been the only way we can communicate,” Nobles says. Social media platforms such as Facebook and X, he adds, have become “worthless” for organizing protests because of changes made in recent years.

When Good was shot—in the face, at point-blank range—the neighborhood chat lit up. Nobles was on the scene within minutes. Thousands of others turned up too.

But the protests were effective because they were more than just reactions to the killings and other outrages perpetrated by the federal immigration agents. Unlike the June 2020 protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, they did not descend into mob violence. Networks created in the wake of those protests were reactivated and bolstered.

“People mobilized school safety patrols; grocery delivery; ridesharing and accompaniment to work, school, and healthcare appointments; and rent and other financial support to people who lost income,” explains a Human Rights Watch report published in June. The report also highlights more spontaneous efforts: “a church opening its doors to pepper sprayed neighbors to flush their eyes; a trauma therapist offering a home visit to a neighbor whose car window was smashed by federal agents; a bar owner encouraging her patrons to visit the neighboring cafe whose sales dropped after Operation Metro Surge began.”

Residents took on different roles. Some actively tracked ICE agents and other feds, sharing information about license plates of unmarked cars and sounding the alarm when agents gathered for a raid. Others showed up for mass protests in downtown Minneapolis and at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, a stout cinder block of a structure near the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport where detainees were held during Operation Metro Surge.

“I think people’s understanding of and willingness to trust government narratives were certainly out the window,” says Mauleón. “I think even people who might have been more critical of local policing understood that this was a different type of force, more indiscriminate.”

Without this level of organization—no “observer” trainings, no Signal chats, no neighborhood networks—the killings of Good and Pretti may not have been immediately broadcast to the world. In that reality, the administration’s lies about those incidents may have gone unchallenged.

The Trump administration had previously rolled through Chicago, Los Angeles, and other American cities, but Bovino wasn’t the only one to acknowledge that something was different in Minneapolis. When Vice President J.D. Vance visited the city on January 22, two days before Pretti was killed, he commented on the “very unique, very Minneapolis-specific reaction to our enforcement of federal immigration laws.”

Vance blamed “a few very far-left agitators” for that and committed to staying the course.

In the next few weeks, the effectiveness of Minnesota’s anti-ICE protests became clearer. Bovino was reassigned, while Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who had championed the tactics used in Minnesota and elsewhere during the first year of Trump’s second term, was sidelined. Shortly after taking over for Bovino, Trump administration “border czar” Tom Homan ended Operation Metro Surge. The Department of Homeland Security claimed to have made 4,000 arrests (three-quarters of whom had no criminal records). Two people were killed. The cost was high, but the feds retreated.

Where Is the Puppet Master?

There is a romantic version of this story in which the group chats were spontaneous creations of a community under siege—the result of neighbors and friends and some special magic that exists only in the Twin Cities, where the cold weather or Nordic-derived culture or cheese curds spawned a network capable of getting thousands of people into the streets to peacefully protest against an immigration crackdown.

Argueta is amused by that narrative, which has popped up in some national coverage of the protests. But that’s not the truth. This took work. “We worked in coalition with faith groups, with unions, with other community groups,” he says of Unidos MN and Monarca’s efforts. Without that coalition building, his staff of 20 couldn’t have been so effective.

That underdog story is somewhat more complicated than it may initially look. According to its most recent tax filings, which date to 2024, Unidos MN is funded primarily by Tending the Soil, a lefty grantmaking organization that funds various economic and social justice programs. The New York Post has accused it of taking money from “left-wing billionaire donors” determined to undermine Trump. At least some of the organization’s funding has come from the state of Minnesota: Tending the Soil and Unidos MN received $9 million via a state grant approved in 2024.

Asked about that, Argueta stresses that Unidos MN is not funded with federal dollars—something that is strategically important, no doubt, in an era when many leftist organizations have suddenly lost federal funds. “We have a sustainable membership model, where we have regular people donating, and we’re able to fund ourselves through the contributions of regular Minnesotans,” he says.

Certainly, there are some political motivations at play. The Twin Cities are a deep-blue, highly educated, and heavily unionized place with a significant immigrant community. It’s not a crime for like-minded people to organize themselves.

But the Trump administration has been determined for months to turn it into one.

In January, federal law enforcement launched “Operation Puppet Master,” a sprawling investigation into the groups—mostly unions and lefty nonprofits, including Monarca—trying to organize Minnesotans in response to the federal crackdown. Defense attorneys for the so-called Minnesota 15 obtained information (and quickly filed briefs in court) showing that “undercover agents posing as protesters surveilled community meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools and union halls.” They infiltrated Signal group chats and built a database of Minnesotans who had committed no crimes. In one incident detailed in court documents, “agents captured license plate information of attendees during a meeting of anti-ICE protesters and activists,” then used that information to obtain names, social media accounts, and other personal information—all of which is now “memorialized in a [Department of Homeland Security] dossier.” (The meeting, held at a church in Roseville, may have been the Monarca training that drew 1,300 people, though it is impossible to tell for sure based on the information made public so far.)

Much of this appears to have been done on orders that came from the top.

Mauleón recalls how the Trump administration labeled Good and Pretti “domestic terrorists” within minutes of their deaths, before any investigation could occur. He also remembers FBI Director Kash Patel telling conservative podcaster Benny Johnson in January that the agency would be investigating the group chats and community organization efforts based in Minneapolis—publicly identifying them as investigative targets before any wrongdoing had been established.

In a memo first reported on by The New York Times in March, senior Department of Justice officials were told to “go big and go loud” in investigating protesters in Minnesota. Prosecutors were advised to make use of National Security Presidential Memo 7, the document signed by Trump in September 2025 that authorizes federal law enforcement to target groups engaged in “domestic terrorism and organized political violence”—and, specifically, antifa.

In other words, multiple agencies and departments of the federal government were pulled together to secretly surveil Americans, at the behest of senior administration officials, in response to those Americans exercising their constitutional right to protest. If the feds are looking for a conspiracy, they might be aiming in the wrong direction.

‘Indicted for Holding Meetings’

That investigation seems to have led directly to the charges filed in June. However, despite how the Trump administration has framed it, the 94-page indictment does not pull back the curtain on a terrifying domestic terrorist operation—antifa or otherwise.

In fact, the indictment contains scant examples of anything that might be properly called violence. Two of the 15 named individuals are charged with assaulting a federal officer. One of them, William Morgan, is also charged with “destruction of government property”—for kicking and denting a pick-up truck.

Other targets of the indictment are charged with making threats against federal officers (based on copious content drawn from Signal chats and other electronic communications), stalking, and participating in a “conspiracy” to disrupt federal immigration operations. Eleven of the 15 individuals face nothing more serious than the conspiracy charges. Together, federal prosecutors allege that these 15 individuals engaged in “coordinated violence targeting federal law enforcement officers in an effort to cause chaos and impede law enforcement operations,” mostly around the Whipple building.

The indictment contains few examples of actual violence. The protesters coordinated “anti-law enforcement action,” practiced operational security techniques, and engaged in “counter-surveillance tactics” by identifying and following vehicles used by ICE agents and other immigration enforcement personnel. It’s worth noting, in light of the “Operation Puppet Master” disclosures, that officers who spied on protesters—to say nothing of those who shot and killed Good and Pretti—have faced no accountability for their actions.

Even the assault charges seem questionable. During the press conference announcing the charges, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen was asked if any federal officers were injured during the alleged assaults. He declined to answer. He also struggled to explain how prosecutors were connecting the protesters to antifa.

“I seem to be indicted for holding meetings,” one defendant told the judge during a pretrial hearing, according to The New York Times. As The Verge summarized the indictment, “the DOJ is trying to punish people for trailing ICE officers—and if it succeeds, other activists could be next.”

The charges carry the risk of serious punishment. Those convicted of the conspiracy charges could face six years in prison. The two protesters charged with assault could face more than 10 years behind bars.

The Trump administration has used a similar playbook in other cities where protesters clashed with immigration enforcement agents, with mixed results. In Chicago, felony conspiracy charges were brought against six protesters before a judge tossed the case for prosecutorial misconduct. Elsewhere, protesters have been convicted and sentenced to years, in some cases decades, in prison.

In Minnesota, Rosen’s office has drawn criticism for its rush to indict protesters and its unwillingness to hold immigration agents accountable. In January, for example, Rosen quickly brought charges against Julio Sosa-Celis, who was accused of assaulting an ICE officer before being shot by that same officer. Noem called it “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement.”

When video of the incident surfaced, it contradicted every part of the official story. Rosen dropped the charges against Sosa-Celis but initially declined to charge the ICE officer who had pulled the trigger and misled investigators. (The agent, Christian Castro, was charged with assault and falsely reporting a crime by Minnesota prosecutors. He was arrested in Texas in May and released in August after Texan authorities refused to extradite him to Minnesota.)

Acts of violence deserve to be punished in the criminal justice system, of course. But allegations of violence also deserve plenty of skepticism. The Trump administration is determined to charge protesters while turning a blind eye—or even giving an approving wink—to violence perpetrated by immigration officials. Are the feds interested in upholding the law, or merely in silencing dissent?

‘That’s How They Get You’

There are two ways to think about the indictments, Mauleón tells me. We’re sitting outside Wildflyer Coffee, another Minneapolis establishment whose front door still prominently bears the detritus of the anti-ICE protests.

As a criminal matter, the indictment seems “incredibly padded,” he says. As with any conspiracy case, the prosecutors have to do a lot of “narrative work….You have to suggest that there’s this broad conspiracy against the government and you rely on the chats and the communication and coordinated planning. And then it results in some sort of action, or it’s supposed to result in some action.”

“The most generous way I can put it is that [the indictment] has the appearance of political motivation,” Mauleón says.

Nobles is more direct. “That’s how they get you,” he says. “Conspiracy charges are hard to beat.”

Then there’s the political angle. The indictment is “the latest attempt by the Trump administration to criminalize its opponents,” wrote Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg in The Appeal, a news organization that covers criminal justice and civil liberties issues. “The case tests how far prosecutors can go to manufacture a criminal conspiracy based on group chats, social media posts, discussions of protest tactics, and anti-surveillance precautions.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has pointed out that even aggressive forms of speech—”like crowds telling ICE agents to kill themselves in the heat of a protest”—are constitutionally protected.

The Trump administration “really wanted to make it clear to everyone that these 15 people essentially represented some kind of worst of the worst. But the reality is that these people don’t define the tens of thousands who acted peacefully,” says Argueta. The Constitution is clear, he adds. “We have the right to peaceful and nonviolent protest. We have the right to observe and organize.”

Indeed, the idea of training everyday people to know their rights and resist an authoritarian federal government would have been, until quite recently, perfectly at home on the political right.

In some ways, what Unidos MN and Monarca have done in Minnesota is not all that dissimilar from the Tea Party protests during the Obama era. Both were grassroots efforts backed by politically motivated donors and nonprofits. Both were decentralized efforts rooted in Americans embracing their constitutional rights in response to perceived executive overreach. Both faced allegations of being motivated by political animus and a desire for anti-government violence. (Neither group may like the comparison, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.)

A federal crackdown can accomplish only so much. There were “tens of thousands of people involved in mutual aid networks and Signal chats, and tens of thousands of people in the Twin Cities trained as constitutional observers,” says Mauleón. What exactly do the feds plan to do? Indict 10 percent of Minneapolis’ population for being part of a conspiracy?

“I think courts are going to be very suspicious of how broad this is,” he says.

Talking with your friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers is not a crime. Neither is organizing with them to observe the government, exercise constitutional rights, and keep one another safe. Those traditions stretch back to the nation’s founding. They were, and remain, a vital check on governments that abuse their power.

“I believe the only solution is to organize more,” says Urbanski. “We have seen how there is strength in numbers and in solidarity—not strength to resist with violence, but strength to resist with peace, and with witnesses that provide the evidence of the government’s lies.”