Standing with Minnesota: Abolish ICE and the Carceral State

January 27, 2026

Alex Pretti. Renee Good. Keith Porter. Those are the names you know of people who have been killed at the hands of ICE so far in 2026. Heber Sanchaz Dominguez, Victor Manuel Diaz, Parady La, Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz, Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos.Those are the names you may not know. So far this year, ICE has killed nine people. And 2025 ended as the deadliest year for ICE detentions in two decades. (SOURCE: The Guardian) Once again, as in 2020 during the George Floyd uprisings, Minnesota is the site of mass protests. As calls for justice and for an end to ICE occupation ignite a growing mass movement, The Abolitionist Law Center is committed to being a partner and resource in the ongoing fight against state violence. 

ALC’s mission is to protect the human rights and wellbeing of people and communities targeted by state violence, including policing, criminal prosecution, jails and prisons, and other forms of U.S.-sponsored detention and surveillance domestically and overseas. The dangerous and lethal uptick in ICE kidnappings and detentions requires an urgent response. We are actively working with our institutional partners to create as many roadblocks to ICE implementation as possible. ALC is in community and coalition with immigrant justice groups and will continue to amplify their demands to end the racist immigration crackdown, protect our communities, and abolish ICE. 

Over the next few weeks we will be providing Know Your Rights (KYR) trainings  for the public specific to ICE operations. In Philadelphia, we are working with our partners at the Amistad Law Project for a training on February 5. In Pittsburgh, we partnered with 1Hood, and Casa San Jose for a KYR training in early January. And we will be collaborating on an upcoming series of trainings focused on civic engagement and rights education.  

In Allegheny County, we are leveraging our relationships and experience to ensure the local jail isn’t used as a proxy ICE holding pen and that incarcerated people have access to interpreters. 

We will continue to use strategic communications to grow cross-movement solidarity by exposing the inextricable link between mass incarceration and other forms of state violence, including immigration enforcement. Policing and prisons provide a foundational logic and system of rationalizations as well as material infrastructure that is enabling the current war on immigrant communities. Criminalization of communities of color is the sinister thread linking police and ICE forces together in a continuum of racist state violence that is a lynchpin of the vastly unequal system of wealth and power in this country. We know that the police, prisons, and deportations are designed to fracture the unity and political power of communities that are shut out of power, and we know just as well that the antidote to that strategy is radical multi-racial, cross-movement solidarity. 

The violence in Minnesota is yet another example proving that this system cannot be reformed and the terrorist agency ICE must be abolished. There must be lasting consequences for the people responsible for employing and aiding the terroristic state violence in our communities. We are committed to meeting this moment while actively assessing volatile and fast-moving conditions. As circumstances evolve, our actions may as well. 

In the meantime, our guiding principle will remain the same: to wield our experience and leverage relationships to work in solidarity with those committed to the ongoing and evolving fight against state violence.

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