From where I stood, a few yards back from the scrum last Wednesday afternoon, it looked, at best, to be a savage caricature of our national divide: on one side, militarized men demanded respect at the butt of a gun; on the other, angry protesters screamed for justice.

But behind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as “engineered chaos” produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting. The movement has grown much larger than the core of activists shown on TV newscasts, especially since the killing of Renee Good on January 7. And it lacks the sort of central direction that Vance and other administration officials seem to imagine.

And as with the Arab uprisings, there is profound unease about where it is all leading—especially now that two people have been shot dead in scenes like the one I witnessed—alongside an undertow of hope that Minnesota can provide the rest of the country with a model of democratic resistance.

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I met a couple in their 70s who told me they had never considered joining a political protest until ICE came to town, and they realized that their granddaughter was at risk of witnessing a violent immigration raid just by going to school.

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Dan and Jane resisted the idea that they had become political. A better word, Jane said, was humanist. Their anger was unmistakable as they told me that the Trump administration was violating basic Christian principles. “It became clear very quickly that ICE is the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo boys. They’ve given them uniforms and let them run wild,”