MINNEAPOLIS — Cameron Kennedy heard his neighbors blowing whistles Tuesday morning, then banging on his apartment door.
He said he knew, even before peeking out his front window — partially blocked by a sign that reads “Ice out of Minneapolis” — that federal agents were on the other side. Kennedy recalled seeing a dozen homeland security officers in tactical gear, guns drawn. They lined the stairs leading to his welcome mat that says “Come back with a warrant.”
They had one — and a battering ram.
“There was no way to keep them out,” said Kennedy, a 36-year-old sales rep.
So he opened the door, arms raised, as officers seized his phone and computer. He said he feared for his life.
“With the history they have, it’s in the back of your mind,” he said a day later from his porch in the progressive Powderhorn neighborhood on the city’s south side, blocks from where George Floyd and Renée Good were killed years apart in separate incidents by law enforcement, sparking protests by Kennedy and thousands of others.
Kennedy is one of 15 people charged this week with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer as part of what Justice Department officials called a left-wing antifa plot to harm federal agents during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation that began last winter. Several face additional charges, including felony assault, solicitation to commit a crime of violence and interstate threats. The conspiracy charge alone carries a potential sentence of up to six years in prison.
Daniel N. Rosen, U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, said Tuesday that the 15 have ties to groups associated with the antifa movement. Direct Action Minnesota and what prosecutors described as its subgroups, such as the Black Cat Worker’s Collective, were described in the indictment as being “committed to direct action against federal law and immigration enforcement.”
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche said the groups “engaged in an unrelenting campaign of harassment and violence targeting federal and local law enforcement,” using shields, barricades and a car.
“Their actions created a dangerous environment that threatened not only their intended targets, but the community as a whole,” Blanche said in a statement after the indictment. “These arrests demonstrate the department’s commitment to law and order and stopping organized political violence in Minneapolis and beyond.”
Rosen said the investigation was launched under the auspices of “National Security Presidential Memorandum-7,” which President Donald Trump issued after the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September. The memorandum defined antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization” and directed the Justice Department to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities and organizations that foment political violence.”
Short for “anti-fascists,” antifa is a loosely knit movement of far-left activists. They are often anti-capitalist or anti-state, and oppose fascism and right-wing ideologies, which has made them a target of the Trump administration.
But some of the defendants and their attorneys said they did not all belong to those groups, that the groups were mischaracterized and that the prosecutions are politically motivated. They said the indictment is designed to intimidate those who resisted the federal operation and to appease Trump.
And instead of dampening dissent, they already see signs that the indictment has reawakened activist networks that had gone dormant in the months after federal officials drew down the immigration operation.
Those charged include a religious studies professor, a teacher, an electrician, a carpenter and health care workers. The Washington Post interviewed three of them, each of whom described their activities during the crackdown as part of long-standing political activism. The defendants said they believe they were charged because they and activist groups they worked with were outspoken and radical, making them easy targets.
Attorney Jordan Kushner, who represents Erik Davis, the professor charged with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, said the term antifa is being misused to criminalize anyone “opposed to what the president stands for.”
“Antifa is just another buzz word they use to single people out and persecute them,” Kushner said, adding, “It is really frightening.”
Prosecutors have released few details about how agents accessed the defendants’ alleged communications.
Messages from Signal, an encrypted app, were quoted at length in the indictment, some attributed to an “un-indicted co-conspirator.” The indictment also detailed alleged “commuter” activities, how volunteers tailed suspected U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles, sharing and tracking license plate information with remote “dispatchers.”
The defendants The Post spoke to said they were not told how investigators had obtained their alleged communications.
Trump administration officials had vowed to investigate anyone who attempted to block the immigration operation. Officials described this week’s indictment as a result of those months-long investigations.
“You cannot create a scenario that illegally entraps and puts law enforcement in harm’s way,” FBI Director Kash Patel said during a January podcast, noting that the bureau had launched a probe into Signal group text chains that demonstrators were using to track ICE agents in the city.
Natasha Rakotz, 45, a home health aide who is among those charged, said she didn’t belong to any of the organizations listed in the indictment.
“My whole life has been taking care of people. No way I would be violent,” she said outside her home, near a parked car with a bumper sticker that read “Fart on fascists.” “Antifa does not exist as an organization. It’s an ideology they’re trying to use to pigeonhole people as terrorists.”
Like Kennedy, Rakotz said she heard neighbors blowing whistles to alert her when federal agents arrived at her home early Tuesday. She said she refused to let them in, unsure whether the warrant they slipped under the door was valid. Neighbors told her they saw agents return several times later in the day posing as deliverymen, Rakotz said.
She contacted attorneys, whom she said advised her to stay put, then helped her turn herself in on Wednesday. She was released on her own recognizance after agreeing not to have contact with the other defendants, all but one of whom was also released.
Rakotz is facing some of the most serious charges in the indictment: conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer and assault on a federal officer in connection with using her Honda Civic to allegedly sideswipe agents during an anti-ICE protest outside their base of operations at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building on May 18.
“I’ve never harmed any agents. They’re saying I used my vehicle as a weapon, which I did not. There was a collision, but there was no intent to harm,” she said. “What I’ve done and what others are doing is trying to organize to make our communities safer.”
Agents had been monitoring at least one of the defendants since January, according to court filings in a separate case. Kyle Wagner, a self-described antifa member who frequently posted anti-ICE videos to social media, was charged in February with threatening a conservative influencer who had traveled from Michigan to Minneapolis during the surge. Charging documents in that case, filed in federal court in Detroit, mostly detail Wagner’s impassioned social media posts and videos calling on residents to resist the federal deployment — many of the same messages cited in Tuesday’s indictment.
Wagner, 38, has pleaded not guilty to the charges in Michigan and was in federal custody there when officials announced the additional charges he faces in Minneapolis. His attorney, Jean Pierre Nogues III, did not respond to requests for comment on those charges, including conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, solicitation to commit a crime of violence and interstate threats.
In a recent court filing in the Michigan case, Nogues maintained that Wagner’s online postings “do not establish a danger to the community.”
“The danger to the community exists because of the government activities Mr. Wagner is protesting,” he wrote.
Paul Hetznecker, a Philadelphia-based civil rights attorney who has represented members of several protest movements facing federal charges, said much of what is described in the indictment is “a conspiracy to exercise the defendants’ First Amendment rights and their rights to resist.”
Hetznecker noted that Trump’s attorneys frequently cited those protections in defense of his remarks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, including a 1969 Supreme Court ruling that protects even speech calling for violence or illegal activity if it is unlikely to incite an imminent threat.
“The indictment is built on allegations about what people thought and felt rather than what they did,” said Bruce Nestor, an attorney representing Treasure Cay Thoreson, 39, of Minneapolis, charged with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer.
Isaac “Ike” Sant said he is an anarchist “dues-paying member” of one of the alleged antifa-affiliated groups named in the indictment, the Black Cat Worker’s Collective, but described it as an anarchist union group.
“They’re criminalizing our beliefs,” he said as he sat in a cafe in Powderhorn.
Strangers who recognized Sant from a viral video that a neighbor filmed with their phone as he and his roommate were detained Tuesday approached to thank and encourage him.
The 36-year-old health care worker who lives in St. Paul was charged Tuesday with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer and interstate stalking in connection with organizing protests and barricading streets near a federal building where ICE agents staged earlier this year. Sant denies any wrongdoing.
“This is about coming after the whole movement that stood up to ICE,” Sant said, adding, “This is part of a national trend of thinly veiled repression of activists.”
He cited the prosecution of nine Texas activists convicted of terrorism- and antifa-related charges earlier this year in connection with a shooting outside an ICE detention center in 2025 that wounded a police officer.
Megan Newcomb, a leader with the Sunrise Movement Twin Cities, a youth-led group mentioned in this week’s indictment that has organized anti-ICE protests, said she thinks the charges have reinvigorated residents.
“We see this indictment as a tactic to isolate, divide and scare neighbors,” she said, but also “as a sign that the Trump administration is scared of what we have been organizing.”
When Kennedy appeared in court on Tuesday, he said he was “deeply moved” to hear that protesters had congregated outside the courthouse.
“They managed to kick-start the movement again,” he said. “We won’t be intimidated.”
Roebuck reported from Washington. Razzan Nakhlawi and Aaron Schaffer in Washington contributed to this report.
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