Last winter, the world watched as Minneapolis was subject to the largest single-city anti-immigration operation by the federal government in U.S. history. Operation Metro Surge led to the abduction of more than 3,600 people (including more than seventy children), use of tear gas and pepper balls against civilians in their neighborhoods, and the murder of Minnesotans Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Residents responded to the siege with several community support tactics—including tracking the presence of immigration enforcement officers at local schools and immigrant businesses, delivering food to families afraid to leave their homes, and donating to rent funds. One tactic that was foundational to their efforts has been constitutional observer training.
Constitutional observer trainings prepare volunteers to legally document U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or other law enforcement activities by teaching them about constitutional rights, how to recognize different types of warrants, and how to record events for potential use in legal proceedings. One organization at the forefront of training constitutional observers is a grassroots racial and economic justice organization called Unidos MN. Between February 2025 and March 2026, Unidos trained 50,000 Minnesotans in constitutional observation through its Monarca training program.
Now, after Metro Surge, Monarca is shifting to training community members to defend democracy against the tactics of ICE agents. Based on the understanding that we keep ourselves safe, Monarca’s progression into democracy defense work shows how participating in democracy is another way neighbors take care of each other.
Luis Argueta Jr., Unidos’s communications director, explains that Unidos staff identified the need for training on how to protect immigrant families in the immediate aftermath of the November 2024 election. “During Trump 1.0, we started an ICE Watch, which stopped during the Biden Administration,” Argueta says. “But with Project 2025 and Trump’s ramped-up anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout his 2024 campaign, we needed to take it seriously.”
Preparing a proactive response, Argueta says, Unidos tapped into its network, tested messages, confirmed the language with lawyers, and even designed “new, more joyful” branding inspired by the monarch butterfly, a symbol of migration and resilience. Staff had aimed for at least fifty participants at their first Monarca Upstander Training in February 2025 at a church in downtown Minneapolis; the event ended up drawing 1,300 attendees.
As the Trump Administration’s promised immigration crackdown began manifesting in blue cities across the country, neighbors in the Twin Cities began hosting Monarca trainings in their living rooms and church basements, preparing themselves for it’s time in the crosshairs. The network’s first real test of strength came in early June 2025, when several dozen law enforcement officers representing eleven agencies raided a Mexican restaurant on East Lake Street in the heart of Minneapolis’s immigrant community—across the street from Unidos’s office.
Argueta says he used the skills he learned in training to enter the chaotic scene as an observer, positioning himself where he could watch—but not obstruct—the agents’s activities. He sent a message through the rapid-response network, alerting training graduates to show up and document what was happening.
Hundreds of immigrant rights activists and neighbors showed up to confront the agents, some of whom had arrived in armored vehicles, with masks, tactical gear, and weapons. When the activists began shouting and chanting, officers deployed chemical irritants and piercing sirens to disperse the crowd. Several protesters were restrained.
Then, on the morning of November 18, 2025, federal agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted an anti-immigration raid at the Bro-Tex Inc. facility in St. Paul, detaining fourteen employees. News of the raid spread rapidly through immigrant rights networks, bringing neighbors, family members, and advocates to the facility within minutes. They confronted the federal agents, who responded with chemical irritants and aggressive driving, causing several demonstrators to be struck or sprayed.
The Bro-Tex incident marked the beginning of the increased visibility of anti-immigrant activities in the state. “The number of trainings really blew up after that,” says Argueta. What had been more of a threat in faraway Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities was now coming to Minneapolis, St. Paul, and its suburbs. People wanted to learn how to protect their immigrant neighbors, who they saw as integral members of the community.
While Unidos wasn’t the only group providing constitutional observer training, its trainings were the largest, teaching 50,000 people how to legally observe federal anti-immigration agents. As the surge intensified, Monarca graduates were ready to plug into the hyperlocal decentralized neighborhood groups that emerged organically to respond to the needs of neighbors being targeted by federal agents.
The community response in Minneapolis ultimately went far beyond constitutional observation: Minneapolis residents were later awarded with a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and served as inspiration for “neighborism,” a term coined by journalist Adam Serwer to describe commitment to protecting people in one’s proximity.
With Operation Metro Surge’s drawdown, Unidos staff and volunteers saw an opportunity to build on the community strength that emerged from the surge. “ICE is still around, causing detriment to our neighbors,” Sage Caballero, a nonprofit researcher who volunteers as a Monarca trainer, says. “But when we look around to see what else is at risk, we quickly identify elections.”
Unidos’s shift to defending democracy was not a hard one. Trump has long badmouthed Minnesota’s Democratic leaders as “terrible . . . and corrupt people,” and repeatedly falsely declared he won the state three times. His Department of Justice continues to demand Minnesota’s voting rolls and recently charged fifteen Minnesotans with conspiracy for their resistance activities during the surge.
According to Argueta, Unidos leadership felt an urgency from volunteers, staff, and its own mission to start the democracy defense work as quickly as possible. The 2026 elections were fast approaching, and people were clamoring for opportunities to stay connected and involved. Now, Unidos had a new powerful tool: a large community of Monarca-trained people ready to help. Argueta was confident they could design a training program in real time. “We saw how much skill was in the community, and it felt more possible for [the democracy defense training] to be designed with the community.”
Roughly 700 people attended Unidos’s Monarca Democracy Defense Network program launch in early April. As Unidos’s leaders explained to the audience, it was time to build on the groundwork laid through the anti-immigration surge and pivot to building grassroots election defense networks to protect voting rights, get people to the polls, and defend election results if necessary.
Since then, the Monarca Democracy Defense workshops have evolved into a powerful community-building tool with impacts far beyond voting. The connections made during a crisis are being repurposed towards long-term organizing to build the community it desires for itself. Over two-and-a-half hours, attendees reflect, learn, imagine, network, and plan. Monarca’s aim is for everyone across the state to be connected in a Democracy Defense Network that builds community, shares trusted information about elections, and supports getting every eligible voter to cast a ballot in the upcoming elections.
Trainers concede that defending democracy may require more than constitutional observation does. With the Upstander Training, people were given tools to act, says David Brauer, a former journalist and current volunteer trainer. “People left ready to do something . . . . With Democracy Defense, Monarca is giving people an opportunity to organize, [and asking] people to be in relationship with each other.”
Caballero sees that attendees can be uncomfortable with what is being asked of them. Because of Minnesota’s strong tradition of civic engagement, he says, “there are people who think we’ll be fine. But we are challenging people to move beyond fine and think about what happens after the elections.”
Unidos is not alone in ramping up its 2026 election protection work. But what is unique is Unidos’s model, which stems directly out of Minneapolis’s civic infrastructure, built from crises that task residents with keeping themselves and their neighbors safe. This included Operation Metro Surge, but also instances such as the protests following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.
Monarca’s shift to democracy defense is just another component of how neighbors protect each other. It’s not just defending the elections, but a future that is designed by the people. Instead of giving up on their country, those participating in democracy defense workshops and constitutional observation are instead taking inspiration in a vision that the American poet Langston Hughes described as the “land that never has been yet”—and helping the country live up to its promise.
As Argueta puts it, “We’re betting on us.”