TLDR: Valarie Kaur, founder of the Revolutionary Love Project, travels to Minneapolis to bear witness to the scale of immigration enforcement and community devastation unfolding across the United States. She describes Los Angeles as the government's first target—where faith leaders met militarized raids with flowers and their bodies—and frames Minneapolis as the new epicenter of state brutality against immigrants and people of color. Rather than collapse into despair, Kaur highlights the underground civil society Minnesotans have built: networks of care delivering groceries, teaching children in hidden classrooms, providing midwifery, and extending love even to ICE agents. She redefines revolutionary love not as sentiment but as a deliberate practice—refusing to see anyone as a stranger, risking oneself for others, and building the world you wish to see in the spaces between people. This love, she argues, is a force the state cannot defeat.
What Is Revolutionary Love, and How Does It Function as Political Resistance?
Kaur opens her address by situating herself and her work. She leads the Revolutionary Love Project, a national movement that reclaims love as a force for justice. Love, in her framing, is not sentiment or passive acceptance; it is an active, risky, collective choice. She defines it explicitly: "Revolutionary love is the choice to see no stranger, to leave no one outside of our circle of care, to risk ourselves for one another, to show up with whistles when they have guns."
This definition rejects the idea that love is apolitical. Instead, Kaur positions love as a deliberate strategy of resistance that the state cannot easily neutralize. When faith leaders place their bodies between protesters and machine guns, holding flowers, they embody this revolutionary love. When communities hide families from ICE, deliver groceries at night, teach children in underground classrooms, and provide midwifery services because hospitals are unsafe—they are practicing revolutionary love as a material, organized response to state violence.
Kaur emphasizes that this movement is not primarily about resistance to the government, though resistance is necessary. Rather, it is about "practicing the world we want in the space between us." Communities are not waiting for permission or policy change to build a more just world; they are living it now, in relationship with one another. This reframes activism from a reactive stance against something bad to a proactive stance toward something good—what she calls "the dream of a world that is green and whole, safe and free."
Why Has Minneapolis Become Ground Zero for Immigration Enforcement?
Kaur positions her visit to Minneapolis within a national geography of escalating state violence. She begins in Los Angeles, her home city, which she describes as the first location the federal government targeted with militarized immigration enforcement. The scale is staggering: the budget for this enforcement operation "exceeds that of the militaries of most nations on Earth." These are not immigration officers; they are "masked men" sent to "abduct our neighbors, rip apart our families, and terrorize our children."
When faith leaders organized peaceful protest, "we put our bodies between protesters and machine guns, flowers in our arms." Rather than de-escalate, "our protests were met with astonishing military force." Kaur witnessed directly "my neighbors maimed, beaten, and trampled by cavalry." This is not metaphorical language; it describes actual state violence against people defending the right to exist and organize.
Yet LA, Kaur insists, was only the beginning. "All across this country, from Chicago to Portland, we have seen an escalation in cruelty and lawlessness. But what is happening here in Minneapolis, in the state of Minnesota, is a new ground zero for the scale of brutality this administration is willing to inflict on immigrants, on people of color, and on the neighbors who stand up to protect them."
She invokes Renee Good's murder—a death that appears connected to this enforcement climate. Renee's wife shares that Renee was a Christian who believed "all religions teach the same essential truth. We are here to love each other, to care for each other, to keep each other safe and whole." The murder becomes a pivot point: if faith teaches love and mutual care, then faith leaders have a moral obligation to show up physically, to bear witness, and to organize resistance.
What Networks of Care Have Emerged in Minneapolis, and How Do They Function?
The most striking portion of Kaur's talk catalogs the infrastructure of care that ordinary Minnesotans have built in response to the crisis. She addresses the state directly: "Minnesota, you have created an underground civil society, a web of people who care, and it looks like all of us, queer and straight, religious and secular, people of all colors and backgrounds."
These networks are not theoretical. Kaur lists concrete examples:
- Education: "Teaching children in hybrid underground classrooms because schools are not safe."
- Food and clothing: "Delivering groceries and clothes for families and hiding because stores are not safe."
- Healthcare: "Providing midwifery to mamas and babies because hospitals are not safe." She notes that one attendee at her talk was late because they were "delivering breast milk to a three-month-old whose mother was abducted."
What astonishes Kaur is not just the existence of these networks, but their sophistication and speed. She describes "a display of humanity that I have never witnessed before. Everyday people creating networks of care block by block, heart by heart, with a speed, proficiency, and creativity unlike anything I have seen in my life."
Kaur attributes this capacity to relationships forged over years of struggle. "You could do it because your relationships were already deep," she says. She traces these relationships to specific historical moments and ongoing struggles: "Forged in the wake of the murders of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile and George Floyd. Forged in the fight for queer rights and equality. Forged in protecting our earth and climate. Forged in solidarity with the Dakota peoples who survive genocide on this soil and show us how to carry each other through the impossible."
This is crucial: Minnesota's capacity to organize and care is not new or spontaneous. It emerges from years of multiracial, multi-issue organizing and relationship-building. The underground networks are extensions of existing movements and solidarities. Indigenous leadership—the Dakota peoples' survival and wisdom—is explicitly centered, not added as an afterthought.
How Can Faith and Spirituality Inform Activist Work Without Becoming Complicit?
Kaur speaks as both a faith leader and an organizer, and she uses spiritual language without divorcing it from material struggle. She invokes the image of being "part of a song of love that began long ago with our ancestors and will only get louder." This connects present activism to ancestral lineages of resistance and care, situating the current moment within longer histories of struggle.
She also extends a powerful message to ICE agents: "Revolutionary love means blocking your actions with one hand and extending the other with a hope that you will one day take it or your children will take it." This is not naive; it is strategic. She acknowledges that ICE agents have a choice, that they are not inevitably trapped in the machinery of enforcement. The hope is not that they will suddenly become good, but that the example of love and community will be visible to them or to their children—that another way is possible, even if not chosen now.
Her final statement to agents is withering: "For the brief high of domination is nothing compared to the infinite love and joy of true community." She is not appealing to guilt or shame, but to a vision of what is actually desirable—the deep satisfaction of belonging to a community of care. Domination, by contrast, is temporary and hollow.
What Is the Relationship Between This Movement and Broader Social Change?
Kaur emphasizes that resistance alone is insufficient and even dangerous as a sole focus. "Because this movement IS ABOUT MORE THAN RESISTANCE. We are practicing the world we want in the space between us. We are living into the dream of a world that is green and whole, safe and free."
This is a critical distinction. Many activist movements define themselves primarily by what they oppose. Kaur instead insists on the importance of prefigurative politics—the idea that the means and the relationships you build in organizing are themselves the practice of the world you want to create. If you want a world of care, you practice care now. If you want a world where people see each other as family ("I see your child as mine and you see mine as yours"), you live that relationship now.
She also asserts numerical strength: "We are the majority. The more you come after us, the more we will grow." This is both a statement of fact and an incitement to courage. The state's violence is not evidence of its strength but of its desperation and illegitimacy. A true majority does not need to militarize against its own people.
To immigrant families across the country, Kaur offers both witness and warning: "What is happening in Minneapolis, yes, will come to your community if it hasn't already. And so, Minnesota, we will follow your lead. We will take your blueprint of love back to our people." The implication is clear: this is not a local crisis but a national one, and the strategies being tested in Minneapolis will spread unless resisted. But so, too, will the models of care and resistance.
Where to Go From Here
Kaur's talk is not a call to despair or moral hand-wringing, but to concrete action organized around the principle of revolutionary love. For faith communities, it is a challenge: Are your beliefs about love and justice visible in your actions and presence? Are you willing to put your body at risk, to bear witness, to help build underground networks of care?
For organizers and community members more broadly, it is a reminder that infrastructure matters. The reason Minnesota could respond so quickly and effectively is that relationships were already deep. This suggests that in periods of relative peace, the work of building trust, learning one another's struggles, and creating shared analysis is essential—not as virtue but as practical preparation for crisis.
Finally, for anyone concerned with justice, Kaur insists that you are not alone and that you are part of something larger and older than yourself. The song of love began long ago with ancestors and will continue. Your work is to add your voice and show up with your people, to practice the world you want, and to extend love—even strategically, even dangerously—as an invitation to those still trapped in systems of harm.
