The people of the Twin Cities of Minnesota were recently honored with a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award “for risking their lives to protect their neighbors and immigrant community members from an unprec-edented federal law enforcement operation, peacefully defending the human rights and values that serve as the foundation of our Constitutional democracy,” according to the website of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
The award follows on the popular resistance here to the ICE invasion, the deployment of some 3,000 federal immigration enforcement officers from an alphabet soup of U.S. police agencies — the invasion was dubbed Operation Metro Surge.
The heavily armed and masked thugs assaulted immigrants and U.S. citizens. They arrested hundreds of people residing in the Twin Cities, including five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was wearing a blue bunny rabbit hat, along with his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias. The father and son were detained by ICE in Columbia Heights, in January, and spent nearly two weeks at an ICE family detention center in Dilley, Texas, before being returned to Minnesota.
And as the world knows, two U.S. citizens were shot to death on the streets of Minneapolis by federal agents in January. Renée Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother, was killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, on Jan. 7, on Portland Avenue near 34th Street. And Alex Pretti, also 37, an ICU nurse at the VA Hospital in Minneapolis, was shot multiple times on Jan. 24 by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers on Nicollet Avenue near 26th Street. Pretti was going to the aid of a woman who had been knocked down by immigration agents when two CBP officers opened fire on him.
In the aftermath of the Good killing, the U.S. Department of Justice quickly announced that there would be no civil rights investigation of the shooting. Instead, prosecutors with the office of the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota were directed to investigate Becca Good, the widow of Renée Good.
Thus began a wave of resignations of prosecutors at the office headed by U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, who was appointed to the post last year by President Trump. At first, six senior prosecutors quit, including Joseph Thompson, the head of fraud investigations, who had been a fixture on the local TV news reports about the Feeding Our Future scandal. The press has reported resignations of eight more lawyers from the office — a total of 14 conscience-struck individuals.
In January, the Star Tribune reported that Thompson’s resignation “was followed by at least five other senior members of the office, including Assistant U.S. Attorney Harry Jacobs, chief of the criminal division and the lead attorney prosecuting Vance at the U.S. Attorney’s office, Daniel Rosen, an Orthodox Jew who wears a small suede yarmulke, convened a press conference on June 16 to announce indictments of 15 local anti-ICE activists, who were charged in U.S. District Court with “conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer.”
No Profile in Courage Award for these local political activists — they won the federal conspiracy legal jackpot.
As the indictment details — and as Rosen explained to the gathered reporters — the defendants conspired “to prevent by force, intimidation, and threats, officers and employees of the United State Department of Homeland Security … from discharging the duties of their officers.”
The indictment alleges that the defendants “were members and associates of Twin Cities Direct Action … which later changed its name to Direct Action Minnesota (“DAMN”), an organization dedicated and committed to direct action against federal law and immigration enforcement.”
On Sept. 25, 2025, President Trump designated “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization,” in an executive order. The June 11 indictment of the local anti-ICE activists also mentions that many “self-proclaimed ‘antifascist’ or ‘Antifa’ groups in the United States exist at the local level, in small units called affinity groups. Antifa groups frequently blend anarchist and communist views.” The indictment continues with a laundry list of “militant class struggle” activities of DAMN sub-groups, including the “Black Cat Worker’s Collective (‘BCWC’)” and the “Ray Rainbolt Memorial Shooting Club.”
At his Jan. 16 press conference, Rosen did not answer reporters’ question about the exact nature of antifa and promised that the government’s evidence would be put forth as the case proceeded.
In reality, there’s no organization called “antifa,” which refers to a movement to combat fascism. The opposite of antifa is fascism. Many people have pointed out in social media posts that their parents, veterans of World War II, were antifa, Americans who fought fascism in Europe and in the Pacific.
What is clear is that the Trump administration, through the Department of Justice, is on a course of political repression. Sadly, Daniel Rosen has shown himself to be a pliable tool in the administration’s schemes. When law enforcement becomes politicized, everyone’s constitutional and legal rights are imperiled. As Jews, we know about tragic outcomes of law enforcement bending to the whims of a tyrant.
An astute analysis of the federal conspiracy case — now known as the “Minnesota 15” case — was provided recently by Scott Tilsen, an old friend who recently retired from his career as a federal public defender in Minnesota and Missouri.
“Tuesday’s indictments join a long tradition of the federal government’s history of attempting to silence dissent through multiple-defendant conspiracy charges,” Tilsen wrote on Facebook.
He continued his historical legal review:
As exemplified by the 1670 trial of Willam Penn and William Mead for ‘conspiring to breach the peace,’ resulting from religious gatherings, the U.S. government has routinely sought to oppress opposition views through criminal trials. Other such cases have followed.
During and after World War I, authorities used the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 to prosecute and imprison war opponents; the 1950s saw intense ‘Red Scare’ conspiracy cases against members of the Communist Party; the 1969 ‘Chicago 7’ trial accused Vietnam War opponents in a conspiracy case stemming from anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
In the 1970s, the government turned its attention to the American Indian Movement, prosecuting AIM leaders after the government siege at Wounded Knee; in 2008, the government turned its focus to cases involving protesters at the Republican National Convention in St Paul.
These examples by no means represent an exhaustive list. The point is that when government suppression is the goal, conspiracy charges are a frequent means to that goal.
I commented on Tilsen’s post and expanded on the prosecution of the “RNC 8,” local political organizers indicted in Ramsey County district court in the aftermath of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul. The initial charge against the local protest organizers was “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.”
As some Jewish World readers might recall, my son Max was one of the defendants.
Susan Gaertner, then the Ramsey County attorney, prosecuted the case for more than two years. When it appeared that a lengthy and costly trial was in the offing, everyone — both prosecutors and defense lawyers — lost interest in the case. Felony charges were dropped, several defendants had all charges removed and none of the defendants was sentenced to additional jail time.
So, readers might see something about the Minnesota 15 case on the TV news or in the newspapers and think that the defendants are malcontents or troublemakers. However, the presumption of innocence applies to defendants in criminal cases — the government has the burden of providing proof of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. And when the weight of the U.S. government is arrayed to crush an individual, it’s serious business.
In the RNC 8 case, I worked with the legal defense committee for more than two years to raise money to pay about 10 defense lawyers. We received thousands of dollars in donations, including generous donations from individuals in the Jewish community. In this country, justice is expensive and as the legal process grinds on, it also takes an emotional and psychological toll on defendants and their friends and family members.
And in the Minnesota 15 conspiracy case, there are ominous signs that the Trump administration could prevail.
In late June, the Justice Department triumphantly announced that “eight North Texas Antifa Cell operatives were sentenced for their roles in rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, obstruction, and the attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer at the Prairieland Detention Center on July 4, 2025.”
The Justice Department press release noted that this is “the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump’s executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025.”
The Justice Department crowed that the “Prairieland terrorists received a combined sentence of 450 years in prison.”
A report on the Prairieland case from Houston Public Media, a service of the University of Houston, mentioned that, as in the RNC 8 case, friends and supporters of the defendants, “dubbed the DFW Support Committee, have coalesced around the case. Throughout the trial, protestors marched and spoke outside the courthouse decrying what they saw as an injustice against the protestors.”
The article quoted a statement provided by one supporter, Ana Marie Thorne with the All People’s Church Unitarian Universalist in Fort Worth. “These defendants are not militant monsters out to kill,” Thorne wrote. “They are everyday people who saw our country literally interning people in concentration camps and decided to show up at Prairieland Detention Center to let those incarcerated there know that they mattered. We leave here today knowing that the outcome of this trial is not the end. It is the beginning.”
The Houston Public Media story also mentioned that similar cases “are being tried across the country. Most recently, Minnesota prosecutors alleged 15 people charged in a conspiracy to injure federal officers earlier this month are tied to antifa groups.”
As the Trump administration tries to vilify its political opponents as “communists” and “antifa,” there is growing resistance across the land to the U.S. government’s benighted policies. We are awaiting justice for Renée Good and Alex Pretti, victims of this government’s dirty and criminal repression.
Daniel Rosen should indict all of us.
Mordecai Specktor
editor [at] ajwnews [dot] com
(American Jewish World, July 2026)
