This month, a group of Minnesota hobbyists — upset and agitated by the ongoing immigration crackdown by the Trump administration — gathered in a Minneapolis suburb and did the one thing they knew they could.
They knit.
Now, the red tasseled hats they made are at the center of a growing “craftivist” movement using the handmade beanies to galvanize opposition to Immigration and Custom Enforcement, and to mourn the two Minnesotans, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were fatally shot by federal agents.
Known as “Melt the ICE” caps, the pattern for the knitted hat — selling at $5 — has been ordered more than 85,000 times since being offered online in mid-January, according to the Minneapolis-area shop behind its creation.
The beanies have begun cropping up in the streets in Minnesota and elsewhere, as the design has been shared across knitting websites and in video tutorials on social media.
Some shops around Minnesota have run short — or run out — of red yarn, according to local owners, prompting some crafty souls to make their own.
Knitters in other states are organizing knit-and-crochet-ins to support Minnesotans. With a general strike underway on Friday, some are closing shop and making “Melt the ICE” hats in all-day sit-and-stitch sessions.
“It’s been really hard for people to sit back and watch this, and people have kind of despaired as to what can we do,” said Gilah Mashaal, the owner of Needle & Skein, the storefront yarn shop in Saint Louis Park, Minn., that spawned the hats’ design.
“I think this gave people a purpose and a way to channel — honestly — their rage and anxiety into something that they could actually create,” she said.
The shop is funneling all proceeds — some $250,000 so far — to groups that are assisting local immigrant communities, she said. And the effort by Ms. Mashaal and her employees has earned the praise of others in the city’s robust crafting community, as well as from civic leaders.
Last week, Nadia Mohamed, the mayor of Saint Louis Park, just west of downtown Minneapolis, posted an Instagram Reel showing a packed room of knitters at a “Melt the ICE” event last week at Needle & Skein.
“When ICE comes to SLP, we say….” Ms. Mohamed said, smiling.
“ICE out!” the crowd, assembled behind her, responded, some waving balls of yarns.
The “Melt the ICE” hats also carry echoes of another knitting movement nearly a decade ago, when handmade “pussy hats” and other pink headgear became symbols of feminine opposition to President Trump’s first term.
But Paul Neary, who designed the knit version of the “Melt the Ice” hat (his friend Sarah Sward did the crochet version), said that his inspiration went further back, to traditional hats, known as “nisselue,” worn in the 1940s by Norwegians fighting the Nazi occupiers. (Red-capped gnomes or elves, sometimes known for their mischief, are found in Scandinavian folklore, and called “nisse” in Norway.)
Those Santa-esque hats were eventually forbidden by the Nazis, but their message of opposition and solidarity resonated with Mr. Neary, who said “it truly does feel like we are surrounded, and everyone is at risk.”
As of Friday, the sales of the pattern and other donations were running at about $50,000 a day, according to Gabrielle Mashaal-Timm, Ms. Mashaal’s daughter, who posted word of the pattern on Instagram on Jan. 15. Earlier this week, the shop said it gave two $125,000 checks to two groups that are assisting local immigrants.
Some shop owners in Minnesota said they were shipping red yarn to other states, including cities where ICE agents have a presence. Others, like Lara Valente of the Dandelion Fiber Company, have sold out of red yarn. And as of Thursday, she added, “we are now sold out of even the knitting needles used to make the hat.”
Megan Boesen, the owner of Knit & Bolt, a Minneapolis craft store, said locating red yarn had become so difficult in Minneapolis it was like “finding toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic.”
Some online commentators have suggested that the hats are an empty gesture, and that activism against the immigration crackdown should be more aggressive. The pink hats of Mr. Trump’s first term faced similar criticism at the time, and after he again won the presidency in 2024, some on the left suggested they would be taking a different approach to protest.
But “people aren’t just stitching a few words on an embroidered tea towel and thinking that they are done with the work,” Ms. Boesen argued.
And the hats and other craft projects, she said, had a practical use.
“These works can bring comfort to children sheltering inside homes, because they and their parents are too scared to step outside,” she wrote in an email, noting that some had also been making quilts with anti-ICE messages as well as their own variations on the “Melt the ICE” hat. “It can keep a fellow protester warm in -10 degrees.”
“It’s not the only thing to do,” she added. “But it is worth doing.”
The craft-arts community in Minnesota has deep roots, something that practitioners say can be attributed, in part, to the region’s harsh winters and its many Nordic immigrants.
Kate Bispala, a former high school civics teacher who now owns Harriet & Alice, another local yarn store, said the hats were a way of showing support for the protests against the federal agents in Minneapolis, as well as for “the small businesses that are speaking out,” noting that many yarn shops would honor the strike on Friday.
On Thursday, a steady stream of customers came to Ms. Mashaal’s store, many of whom were hunting for red yarn or looking for the knitting pattern. A small display with the hat’s designs and a few remaining skeins of burgundy yarn were up front, near a collection of pro-peace, anti-ICE friendship bracelets made by Ms. Mashaal-Timm.
“I hear this is the home of the resistance,” said Cindy Heinemann, 69, a retiree who had heard about the hats through a walking group. She said she needed “something to bring down my cortisol level” and hoped knitting would help, both herself and her community.
“Just a sense of we’re all in this together and I’m a neighbor and I want to help you,” she said. “Whether it’s to stay warm or to let you know that you know someone’s in your camp here.”
Mr. Neary said that the red of the hat carried extra significance considering the way that the president — as well as the Republican Party and the Make America Great Again movement — has been associated with the color.
For her part, Ms. Mashaal conceded that the hat might not win over every fashion editor, but she defended its design. “If I thought it was ugly, we would have never produced it,” she joked.
But she was more serious when asked how long she and her fellow knitters might be making hats. “I really wish that we didn’t have to do it at all,” she said, adding, “but I think this will be a long time.”
Jesse McKinley is a Times reporter covering politics, pop culture, lifestyle and the confluence of all three.
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