Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol’s terror campaign in Minnesota has taken the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti and led to the abduction of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, among countless others. Minneapolis has answered with an astonishing surge of courage. Neighborhood Signal chats and daily community-watch patrols have turned sidewalks into lines of mutual aid and defense, while the January 23 statewide general strike proved a willingness on the part of residents to stop business as usual in defiance of ICE’s violent repression.

The Twin Cities Sunrise Movement has pushed the resistance onto offense, targeting the Hilton hotels that quietly house ICE agents. This campaign has led to an impressive string of local victories, including getting a local Hilton to refuse service to ICE, sparking outrage from the Department of Homeland Security and the subsequent capitulation of Hilton nationally to the administration.

Jacobin’s Eric Blanc spoke with Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise Movement’s executive director and a lifelong Minneapolis resident, about Minneapolis’s organizing pushback and how ICE’s opponents can go on the offensive nationwide by pressuring companies like Hilton, Enterprise, and Home Depot to stop collaborating with the agency.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory is a breakthrough moment for the socialist movement in the United States. But the contradictions we face are sharp, and the limits of executive office are real: hostile state government, pressure from capital, the political and economic challenges of raising revenue to fund essential programs.

In this issue, we examine the history of municipal socialism, from “Red Vienna” to French and Italian Communist mayors after World War II to Milwaukee’s sewer socialists, La Guardia’s New Deal metropolis, and Ken Livingstone in London. How has the Left used local power to expand housing, welfare, and cultural institutions? And why did it so often run aground on fiscal constraints and central state hostility?

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While European labor movements established foundations for their welfare states in the late 19th century, it was not until the New Deal that the US began instituting policies like unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. But although working-class struggle was also key to this success, several unique factors in American history proved an impediment to more egalitarian policies.

In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber and Melissa Naschek continue their deep dive into the history of social democracy. Together they look at the impacts of craft unionism, mass immigration, racial tensions, and employer violence in explaining American exceptionalism.

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