I found out about Chairman Paul Birdsong and the new Black Panther Party the same way everyone else did—very suddenly, and via Instagram reel. Just days after Renee Good was shot dead by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Birdsong and his group of organizers went viral at a protest in Philadelphia—dressed in all black, toting semiautomatic weapons, and daring federal agents to try them.
“Won’t no ICE agent ever run up on me. I guarantee you they won’t, I’ll put a hole in their chest the size of a fucking window,” Birdsong said. “An unarmed woman was killed by ICE. If you think you about to come and brutalize people while we’re standing here? Fuck around and find out. We patrol the community, and we hold [ICE] accountable.
“We’re the same Panther Party from back in the day,” he continues. “But we’re a little more aggressive now, ya dig? Carry bigger guns and we don’t take no shit.… Places where there’s immigrants at, I think that the community around them needs to … start escorting them everywhere to make sure they’re safe. Because them ICE agents ain’t gon’ act like that if there’s a bunch of people standing outside with assault rifles and shotguns.”
The clip triggered a good week of heated online intra-left discourse. Who did this Paul Birdsong guy think he was, trying to take up the sacred mantle of the Black Panther Party? He had to be some kind of COINTELPRO psyop, right? Or at the very least a grifter who only showed face in tense times to generate clicks and sow discord. And even if he was genuine, why should Black people invite danger upon themselves to protect immigrants? More importantly, why did he say he had songs with Snoop Dogg and Gucci Mane coming out? And was it true that he infiltrated the Piru Bloodz in Compton?
These are mostly all sensible questions to ask, especially given the Black Panther Party’s unexpected return to the zeitgeist, along with its many aesthetic choices—the gaudy AI event flyers, the tactical garb, the bravado that accompanies every Instagram video announcement. The group has already elicited both positive and negative reactions from former original Black Panthers. All of which led them to make a hasty rebranding shortly after Birdsong’s clip went viral: That’s right, the New Black Panther Party is actually now the “Black Lion Party for International Solidarity.”
Look, maybe those who find this all a bit suspicious now will be vindicated in a year or so when they find Birdsong guilty of embezzling mutual aid funds or something. But right now, to their neighbors—especially those who are poor, homeless, and most at risk of deportation—the Black Lion Party is stepping into the breach at a time of need. And they are just one of many examples of the kind of direct action and community organizing that can arise when the inadequacy of traditional politicking becomes something that people feel viscerally. What may look extreme viewed through the lens of viral social media can feel vital to those closest to the conflict between the Trump administration’s masked goons and their neighbors and families.
“I definitely felt like there was actual work being done. There was food for the drives all over the place.… And there was a charity food organization that was helping. They seemed genuinely connected to their neighbors. People were walking up, not just for the food drive, but just to offer help, just to talk,” said Temple University student journalist Connor Pugh, who spent a day with Birdsong and the Lions directly. “It definitely felt like an authentic, real thing that was happening, even if there’s not a direct connection to the original Black Panther Party from the sixties.”
Nonelectoral action is nothing new, and the Black Lion Party is really just one more organization of note performing this kind of activism, from Occupy Wall Street to the Iraq War protest movement, to Black Lives Matter. And while they—and their guns—have generated real attention toward nonelectoralism, it’s the residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul that have spun up the blueprint for this current version of neighbor-to-neighbor, permitless, confrontational activism.
I spoke to Southeast Minneapolis resident and Popular Democracy organizer Greg Basta on February 12, the same day Tom Homan announced that ICE would be ending Operation Metro Surge—a drawdown that has yet to materialize.
“These last couple of weeks in particular, I think there’s this frustration that’s set in with a lot of the national media and, frankly, with a lot of national progressive organizations,” Basta told me. “There’s this sentiment of ‘alright, things are starting to settle down in the Twin Cities, and we gotta start looking where [ICE and BPD] are gonna go next.’ But they’re still abducting people left and right. It feels like a pretty low bar—like yeah, they haven’t murdered somebody in the last two weeks. The abductions and detentions are still happening at a fairly large scale. Day to day, it hasn’t felt much different here than it did three weeks ago.”
This frustration—with the media, with local and federal government—was voiced by everyone I spoke to from Minneapolis, particularly those participating in these ICE-watch Signal chat groups. The way they see it, federal agents shot and killed two people in their city, and Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have responded by asking these marauders to wear bodycams, while handwringing about the long-term implications of abolishing ICE. For some reason, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz trusts that the alleged bribe-taking Homan “knows right from wrong,” despite all the evidence to the contrary. And while Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has received standing ovations from crowds at three separate events for his leadership in a time of crisis, even that feeling of ballyhoo has started to fade.
“In the moment when things first started to escalate, with [Mayor] Frey in particular, there was a ‘wow,’” Basta recalls. “His first statement where he was like, ‘Get the fuck out of our city’? We’d never seen that side of him.
“From there, it was just a gradual downward slope of disappointment,” Basta said, referring to Frey’s requests for protesters not to give federal agents any “fodder,” after they shot a man in the leg in the majority-Black area of North Minneapolis.
“With Democratic leadership, there’s just been this undercurrent of like, ‘We’re not going to wait for you all to do something about this.’ We’re not looking to you for leadership right now,” Basta continued. “In the last several years of the [Walz] administration, resistance from Democratic leadership has been disappointing, and it’s reflected in this moment of organizing. People are [realizing] we’re not gonna solve this with elections. We’re not gonna solve this with lobbying a politician to do better. We just have to go out and do this.”
If you truly believe that ICE really is done terrorizing Minneapolis with its Operation Metro Surge (many residents don’t), it wasn’t the Freys or Walzes who forced them to respond. There was no vote, no referendum. ICE’s problems arose simply because normal people, having watched their friends and neighbors kidnapped and shot in the street by masked men, decided to act of their own accord—from parents organizing school safety group chats to businesses that closed for the general shutdown, to the thousands of people who woke up every day to observe, film, and prevent abductions. Without these citizens, their smartphones, and the videos documenting their relentless pursuit of federal agents, we might not have the footage directly contradicting the government’s nauseating claims that Good and Pretti were “domestic terrorists.” Absent the evidence that ordinary people collected, sometimes at great risk, what pressure would there really be on Trump to even make a withdrawal announcement?
The vast majority of these ICE watchers, or “commuters,” are not activists at all. They’re just people Trump tried, and failed, to break.
“Everybody is involved, whole communities. It’s like my neighbors, you know, they’re not activists. They’re doing communal work, and they’re trying their best. It’s not perfect, but whether they’re doing know-your-rights training, whether they’re being observers, everybody in my area is engaged with that, and I wouldn’t say they’re activists at all,” Aminah Sheikh, a member of the Twin Cities Democratic Socialists of America steering committee, told me. “I think people are pulled in this moment because we are living through a stage of fascism.… It’s on ordinary people. And I think Alex Pretti and Renee Good are a symbol of ordinary people. They were just regular people trying to defend their neighbors and their community.”
Sheikh, Basta, and thousands of Minneapolis residents have been involved in these observer, or commuter, networks. They are the mostly Signal-based network of neighbors who do the grueling work of trailing and reporting federal agents.
“You have a patrol route that’s near your neighborhood … so the idea is you’re not going into some other neighborhood where no one knows you. This is all with your neighbors. If you observe and say, ‘OK, this vehicle looks suspicious,’ text that to the chat, and say that. And you’ll kind of have this, like, back and forth with the other patrollers and dispatchers out being like, ‘Does this seem like a threat?’” said Ky, another Twin Cities DSA steering committee member. “[Federal agents] drive really aggressively. We live here every day. We know what our neighbors look like and what our neighbors drive like, and what their tendencies are. When a foreign occupier comes into your city, you really do recognize minute differences.” They also noted that while some agents were obvious—with blacked-out SUVs and face coverings—others were plainclothes and trickier to spot.
The bulk of this organizing is ad hoc and unofficial. Still, I’ve been struck by how many on the right are convinced that these Minnesota Signal chats are evidence of some well-funded, Soros-backed, left-wing insurrectionist network. It seems that it’s impossible for those with MAGA predilections to even imagine this all might simply be a natural, organic reaction to tyranny by a community of ordinary people—that neighbors would look after one another without their palms being greased.
“This is just not Minneapolis—this is an organized, well-thought-through effort to invade the country,” MAGA operative Steve Bannon said last month. “They wanna put the people that defend the American republic on trial. Double down, triple down. Sending Homan there is a good first effort. This is a Marxist—this is the red-green alliance coming together to try to take down the American republic.”
Fellow right-winger Jack Posobeic echoed Bannon’s warped version of reality, stating that leftist insurgents were flooding into Minneapolis on “Soros buses.”
“We’ve got evidence of people coming from Boston, people coming from New England who are now flooding into Minneapolis,” he said, a claim that has not been corroborated. “If you blink now in Minneapolis, they’re gonna send the insurgents to Maine.… If you blink in Minneapolis, you’ll never make it to Detroit, to Chicago, to Philadelphia, to Los Angeles, to New York. Take the fight here.… Put the insurgency down immediately.”
The far right has given the left a lot of credit here, so much so that it almost feels like reverence. But it’s telling that they just can’t comprehend the notion of ordinary Americans being united around—and inspired to defend—some simple civic ideals.
“You can tell where someone’s morals and values are if they cannot even fathom what a community coming together looks like. That has to be funded from outside resources, right?” Sheikh told me regarding the Soros accusations. “It just shows how alienated you are from your own community and your own kind of humanist identity, even.”
The Bannon crowd is right about one thing, though. By forcing the people of Minneapolis to come together, the Trump administration has inadvertently helped create a blueprint for community resistance that will almost surely meet them wherever their next immigration operation is.
“There isn’t any sort of centralization, there’s no shadow committee that’s running these chats,” said Sheikh. “It really is like neighbors next door doing this work because they have some rough idea of a framework, but they understand the mission, right? They understand the goal. The purpose is to observe, document, and prevent abductions, and it’s shown to be really effective.”
I don’t think any of the parties involved in the defense of their neighbors are going to completely give up on electoralism. They might be giving up on the Democratic establishment, however. From the gun-toting Black Lions in Philly to soccer moms in Minneapolis staking out at elementary schools, Americans are realizing that a midterm election won’t protect them or their neighbors, and they are acting accordingly.
Minneapolis is still occupied, and it will be some time before they finish picking up the pieces. As the Trump administration grows more bellicose, and bent on causing more suffering—which it surely will in these next three years—these various nonelectoral strategies will become more prominent, and more necessary. It’s important that we pay attention, share notes, and expand our communities’ ability to defend themselves. Your neighborhood could be next.
