February 11 2026, 08:15 
The streets of Minneapolis are eerily quiet.
Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke (D) describes a palpable absence of people out and about. Restaurants are closed (some indefinitely), and shops are devoid of both employees and customers. Some residents won’t even take their garbage to the alley, let alone venture beyond their property lines.
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The trucks, on the other hand, are out.
“You’ll be driving down 280 and a very large pickup truck will be going 75 miles per hour, bobbing and weaving through the cars, and you just know that’s someone who’s headed to detain someone,” Finke tells LGBTQ Nation.
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The city, known for its vibrancy through even the coldest of winters, is aching. Even after the relentless, ongoing anti-ICE protests drove the Trump administration to demote former border patrol commander Greg Bovino and (slightly) reduce the massive number of ICE agents in the area, Finke says the situation on the ground has not improved.
“They’re still taking people,” says Finke. “My constituents, our communities, our neighbors are still in hiding, and the story is really becoming that people aren’t accessing healthcare now for 2 months. People aren’t paying their rent… The long-term effects of having people being in hiding, unable to care for their families, unable to receive therapy, go to the doctor, take your children to the doctor, the impacts of that are going to be generational.”
Finke – who made history in 2022 as the state’s first out trans lawmaker – has been relentlessly speaking out against the administration’s Operation Metro Surge since ICE first began flooding the streets of Minneapolis about three months ago, fresh from terrorizing Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles.
Republicans have called her “unhinged” and accused her of encouraging “domestic terrorism” for supporting peaceful protestors. They have purposefully misgendered her and lobbed hateful attacks because she introduced legislation to rein in ICE. One colleague, state Rep. Mary Franson (R), blasted Finke’s bill mandating ICE agents remove their masks by calling her “a man who attempts wearing women face each and even [sic] day.”
But Finke has not let the insults distract her from the fight. She is also determined not to let her Republican colleagues distract the American people from the government-sponsored cruelty they are standing behind.
“Yes, Rep. Everyone knows I’m trans,” she replied to Franson. “Now what about the policy? Are we going to work together to bring accountability to those empowered to use force on our neighbors, or not?”
What Minnesotans are made of
Despite the ongoing ICE occupation, Finke acknowledges that for a president incapable of admitting even a modicum of defeat, Bovino’s firing, and the reduction in agents are not nothing. Even if it’s all grandstanding, a concern with image at all means the protestors have struck a nerve.
“I hesitate to call it a victory because this is still happening,” she says, “like it’ll be a victory if people can come back to their lives, and I don’t know when that’s going to happen. But it is a shift. It is a recognition on the part of the federal government, the actors of state violence, that they cannot just enforce their will upon the people as they, I think, expected to.”
But it’s far from over, she emphasizes, and the rest of the country must keep its eyes on the city, even as the administration continues its firehose strategy to flood the news cycles.
There is one change Finke does feel, though. While data is hard to come by, she says it feels like there’s been a reduction in clashes between ICE agents and legal observers (folks who film encounters between agents and the people they target).
But those observers are still out there, Finke said, and just because there aren’t as many viral videos doesn’t mean their determination has waned. “What’s happening in the streets, what’s happening in our communities, the mutual aid work, that’s where the real support effort is taking place.”
Finke praised the “unparalleled” community infrastructure that enabled such a strong, decentralized protest network to form so quickly. She believes a “knowledge memory” existed within the city due to the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd, which occurred only a few blocks from where ICE agents killed queer wife and mother Renee Nicole Good in January.
It is that infrastructure and that spirit that allows many on the left – including Finke – to keep fighting.
Finke said Minnesota has a reputation for being mostly white flyover country, but it actually has the highest percentage of resettled refugees in the country and also the highest number of out trans adults. Of course, that diversity is one of the main reasons the federal government has targeted Minneapolis in the first place, but Finke says it’s a superpower.
“People have no idea what Minnesotans are made of,” she said, though she acknowledged that at this point, maybe folks are starting to understand.
Collateral damage
Finke is careful when she speaks about the outsized danger queer and trans people face at the hands of ICE. While it’s absolutely true that being visibly queer makes people bigger targets, she doesn’t want to take away from the fact that the most vulnerable right now are Black and brown people, regardless of gender or sexual identity.
But queer folks, she explains, have become collateral damage in a system that empowers white supremacy. “One of the things that sort of underlies the people who are enforcing this is that they are adherents of a certain kind of structure of power which puts targets on women and queer people, and you saw that with the murder of Renee Good, right? Renee and [her wife] Becca were a visibly queer couple. The people who were there knew who they were, and you also knew it because they executed her point-blank and then immediately called her a f**king b**ch.”
Finke says she has been contacted by multiple constituents about their trans loved ones being targeted and/or arrested by ICE.
“There’s just this gender-based element to the enforcement of law that has always been there, and it’s not the point, it’s not the purpose. The purpose is to get rid of Black and brown people because the project is white supremacist, but one of the enforcement tactics is, we’re going to punish people who are outside of what we think of as normativity, right? You could see this going back throughout authoritarian movements in history.”
“The point of the Nazi Party was not to destroy trans people, but they destroyed trans people on their way to meeting their objective.”
She said it’s not hard to observe that queer people are more vulnerable because queer folks in the city are “active resistors.”
“We are on the front lines,” she said. “For better or worse, trans people are out there f**king fighting every day.”
Evil & awful
On January 19th, Martin Luther King Day, Finke posted a message of praise for the protestors who disrupted services at St. Paul’s Cities Church, where the pastor is also involved with ICE. The protest caused national outrage among right-wingers – who claimed the actors violated the churchgoers’ freedom to worship – and also led to the arrest of gay journalist Don Lemon.
On social media, Finke compared the action to the famed die-in at a cathedral staged by ACT UP and WHAM in 1989. “Actions like this—nonviolent resistance in the face of government inaction or oppression—are essential,” she wrote. “And they must continue until I.C.E. is out of our state, the administration is out of the White House, and dignity and humanity for all of our neighbors is achieved.”
Republicans were enraged.
State Sen. Michael Holmstrom (R) called the post “despicable and unhinged.” Misgendering Finke, he said she was “advocating for… (D)omestic terrorism,” an ironic statement considering the violence being perpetrated by ICE on the streets.
“In our Country, America, people are free to worship!” state Rep. Pam Altendorf (R) wrote on X. “We’re in a dangerous place when elected Dems are encouraging illegal activities.”
Finke shrugged it off, saying that Republicans find some reason to come after her about once a quarter. “It was spun as me demanding more protests in churches, which is stupid,” she said. “I’m an easy target for Republicans. They have said every single thing that is evil and awful about me.”
While she doesn’t enjoy being a punching bag, she points out that it’s not really about her, that it’s “symptomatic of something else, which is that they don’t have a moral vision of social progress.”
“The ability for change is really absent from the current MAGA Republican structure. It hasn’t always been true, but at this moment, the idea that the sort of populist Republican project is going to reflect upon what’s happening outside of their doors – it’s not happening.”
She lamented that Republicans in the state have shown very little inclination to break from Trump on immigration. Even state House Speaker Lisa Demuth (R), who Finke describes as having once been a more reasonable Republican, has remained devoted to the president now that she is running for governor.
After Demuth appeared on Minnesota Public Radio to defend the administration’s actions, Finke said on Instagram that the party is “incapable of speaking on behalf of the people of Minnesota.”
The triage administration
ICE’s rampage hasn’t slowed the Trump administration from its attacks on transgender people. Through it all, Finke has been devoting as much energy as possible to advocating for trans rights, too, including speaking up for gender-affirming care, as even in the sanctuary state of Minnesota, trans kids are losing health care access due to federal threats.
But it’s a lot to play defense for at once. Finke said the goal of authoritarian leaders is to flood the people with so much chaos that they become too overwhelmed to fight back. Like all of us, Finke is doing her best, but it isn’t easy.
“You can’t have an emergency in every part of your life every single day and just give all of the attention to all of it,” she said. “I take very seriously the idea that we promised to protect transgender people and kids and to provide them healthcare access, and the difficulty is that we need to not forget everything else [as ICE continues its occupation].”
What it has unfortunately come down to, she said, is figuring out who is the most vulnerable group at each moment, and right now, that’s Black and brown people who are hiding in their homes.
“The things that are right in front of us, the life and death moments that the community faces or the family destructions, that has to be where we put our minds right now, and I’m not gonna forget about or do any less work to protect trans people. We are committed to that. The attorney general is committed to that, our governor [is, too], but it’s just like trying to stack a five-alarm fire on top of another one on top of another one, and you have to try to just triage.”
We will win
Despite the immense challenges the city faces, Finke hasn’t lost her optimism that ultimately, the protestors will come out on top.
“The idea that the resistance movement is going to stop is just impossible to believe, and I think that the administration is starting to understand that.”
But winning, she emphasized, doesn’t mean driving ICE out of their city and into another. It means stopping the agency for good.
“I don’t think that we are almost out of the muck… but I totally believe fully that this authoritarian moment will pass. This is my place, but many people in many places will have the same resolve, and the only outcome I can imagine is that this hateful effort is defeated. Now, that may take a few years or more, and when they’re gone, it’s going to take several more years to rebuild what has been broken. But 100%, I believe that we will win.”
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