Since Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were murdered in Minneapolis by the very ICE officers they were protesting against, life in the city has been drastically altered. Inevitably, swathes of the country’s far right have attempted to blame the new surges of violence and chaos on residents and not the federal agents terrorising them. But behind that flimsily constructed facade is a truer version of the city – one that is hopeful and united even in the face of true horror. 

In the past few weeks, stories have emerged of tattoo artists offering resistance ink, chefs delivering food supplies to their neighbours sheltering in place, and mothers donating breastmilk or transforming PTA groups into ICE patrol squads. Meanwhile, local musicians have traded the city’s historic venues for its freezing streets with a simple objective: keeping ICE agents awake.

‘No Sleep’ or ‘Wide Awake’ protests began to crop up in Minneapolis in December, after the Trump administration launched “Operation Metro Surge”, sending more than 2,700 ICE agents to Minnesota in the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out. Their heightened presence across the state has abolished normality, halting business and education and stoking fear among residents.

So, when students of the University of Minnesota found out that ICE agents were allegedly staying at the Hilton Graduate – a hotel just a short walk from their campus – many were outraged. “This is something that is not acceptable to us on a personal and moral level. But also something that students really deserve to know about,” 24-year-old Sasmit, member of University of Minnesota Students for a Democratic Society (UMNSDS), tells Dazed.

To get the message out, UMNSDS began organising a series of noise protests, encouraging locals to gather outside The Graduate, and a handful of other hotels they claimed were housing agents, in the middle of the night to “make as much noise as possible”, Sasmit says.

Musicians across the city were quick to respond, trudging electric guitars, amps, saxophones, trumpets, drums and even accordions into the streets after dark. For the less musically inclined, the demos also feature hundreds of whistles, the small but shrill instrument that has become a ubiquitous symbol and tool in the fight against ICE, their distinct blare a warning sign that an agent is nearby.

22-year-old bassist Daisy Forester has attended similar noise protests organised by activist group Sunrise Twin Cities, where she and a handful of other local artists have performed mini concerts at night to disturb sleeping ICE officers. “The draw is that they’re keeping us up, they’re keeping us on the streets. We’re not going to let them sleep peacefully in our city,” she explains. 

At the demos, Forester recalls playing until her fingers froze in sub-zero temperatures, as, one by one, the rooms lit up, blinds crept open and furious faces began to peer down on the street below – signs that their plan was working. But as well as disturbing ICE, the protests also aimed to make other hotel guests aware of who else was staying down the halls in a bid to disrupt business.

“The true impact of these protests is that they encourage the businesses in our city to stand with the community and to take a decisive stance on who they serve,” Forester explains, and, indeed, Sasmit tells us that The Graduate has been boarded up in recent weeks, no doubt deterring any potential customers.

Noise demos, protestors say, also help to exorcise a collective frustration towards the occupation of their city. “They’re very cathartic,” Sasmit adds. “It’s so easy to fall into this idea of, ‘well, this is the federal government. There’s nothing that an individual can do’. But at these noise demos, you are directly in front of your target. ICE is sleeping right in that building.”

However, the action isn’t without risk. At one demo on January 28, 67 protestors were arrested. After that, UMNSDS questioned whether they should continue, and called multiple emergency meetings to debate the issue. “We came to the conclusion that they are being so aggressive with us because our tactics are working, and that we can’t back down now,” Sasmit says.

“They are being so aggressive with us because our tactics are working” – Sasmit, UMNSDS

Sadly, Minnesota isn’t the only state facing an increased ICE presence, with Trump’s administration increasing the budget of the law enforcement agency to $85billion (10 years ago, the annual budget for ICE was less than $6billion), and deploying extra agents in major cities across the country.

In Colorado, musicians are responding to the growing threat by taking notes from those in Minneapolis. When news of Trump’s plans to ramp up the ICE budget first emerged, the Notes of Dissent Protest Marching Band sprang up in the state in response.

Composed of former “Marching band geeks”, as band percussionist Colm puts it, they harness an integral aspect of US High School culture – the musical ensembles that entertain during sports games and parades – for good. “It’s definitely not the most popular kids in school, that’s for sure,” Colm jokes about the patriotic tradition.

The group began on Reddit, where former band members keen to make noise at anti-ICE protests started connecting. Soon, over 300 musicians began dusting off their instruments to head to marches or stage demos outside the state Capitol building. Some hadn’t played for decades “Our founder and current president was saying that she hadn’t picked up her flute since 2006,” singer in the group, Emily, tells Dazed. 

They endeavoured to play short sets together, rather than simply make noise, and began meeting regularly, squinting at sheet music again and steadily building a repertoire of modern protest songs. Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ and ‘Killing In The Name’ by Rage Against the Machine – also staples for the ‘no sleep’ demos in Minneapolis – are strong crowd pleasers, as well as Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ and even ‘Bella ciao’, an anti-Nazi Italian folk song.

Like Forester and Sasmit, Colm says that the presence of live music at protests helps to instil those attending with a sense of hope during what is an incredibly bleak circumstance. “It unites everyone, brings that energy, keeps people synchronised,” he explains.

Watching as events in Minneapolis unfold, though, they’ve realised that they’ll likely soon need to ramp up their action to match the dangers that come with what they see as an inevitable further deployment of ICE agents in the state. Now, they’re discussing staging their own no-sleep protests, while some members of the group have begun training as street medics after hearing of violence against protestors in Minnesota. “We realised we need to be able to assist our community in ways that maybe none of us really imagined before,” Emily says.

For many, the diverse array of ways Minneapolis’s people have shown up to protect each other has helped to encourage even those who were previously not politically engaged to use their own unique skills in the fight against ICE. “It’s really terrible that this is what’s causing people to band together so strongly, but there’s something very beautiful about the fact that I’m seeing people in organising spaces that I have never seen before,” Sasmit says. “People are seeing that the immigrant struggle is a struggle that pertains to everyone, and an attack on one is an attack on all.”