This video report was collaboratively produced and is being co-published by Workday Magazine and The Real News Network 

On the morning of June 16, 2026, 15 people were indicted by the federal government for their involvement in community organizing efforts to oppose Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota this past winter. This group of defendants have become known as the “Minnesota 15,” and over half of them are rank-and-file union members or former union members.

In this special report, collaboratively produced by Workday Magazine and The Real News Network, we speak with three of the “Minnesota 15” defendants about the charges against them and the Trump administration’s attacks on dissent and the labor movement today. Interviewees include: Treasure Thoreson (Minneapolis Federation of Educators, Local 59), Alec Stewart (Minnesota Association of Professional Employees), and Emmett Doyle (Northern Midwest Regional Council of Carpenters).

Credits (Workday Magazine):

• Reporting and editorial support: Isabela Escalona, Sarah Lazare, Amy Livingston, and Amie Stager
• Videography: Isabela Escalona and Amie Stager
• Additional photos and videos: Amie Stager and Riley Bruce
• Video editing: Isabela Escalona

Credits (TRNN):

• Post-production: Maximillian Alvarez, Jocelyn Dombroski, David Hebden, Kayla Rivara

Music:

• Emmett Doyle, “1934 Strike/Cooleys Reel/Congress Reel”
• Adobe Stock
• FineTuneMusic

Special thanks to East Side Freedom Library, Minneapolis Central Library, Hosmer Library, and Minneapolis Federation of Educators.

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Treasure Thoreson:

Tuesday morning, June 16th, I had just woken up. I was in my pajamas. I hear a knock on the door at seven in the morning, and it’s a woman standing there in business clothes with a tactical vest on top that said Homeland Security.

Alec Stewart:

I was in my car backing out of my garage to go to work, coffee in hand. As soon as I backed out of my parking pad, several squads rolled up. A bunch of agents jumped out of the vehicles. I went to just text my aunt, because I have a dog. I assumed I’d be going to jail or something, and that’s when they smashed my window.

Treasure Thoreson:

I see six more agents standing in front of my house. The woman at the door, she just said, “We’re here with a warrant for your arrest for a conspiracy to harm or impede a federal officer.”.

Alec Stewart:

Exposes that while the government was targeting immigrant communities, tearing families apart, abducting children and murdering spokes in the street.

Emmett Doyle:

I had just typed in on my phone the location of the house that we were working on that day. I was boxed in by a vehicle, and so I rolled my window down to ask the guy like, “Hey, what’s the deal? You’re a pretty bad driver. What’s going on?” And then I looked around and I realized that my car had been surrounded. There was a swarm of armed federal officers with HSI on their uniforms.

Alec Stewart:

I do not think it’s a coincidence that over half of us are rank and file union folk. I think that speaks to, again, the working class nature of both the attack by the federal government and the working class predominant response to that attack.

Treasure Thoreson:

We had at least one person from every single site who was plugged into our committee and was able to get information out to their members and arm their building with the knowledge that they needed to face this kind of violence. And people stepped up in really major ways. Everybody did something, whether it was patrols or walking students to and from school, riding in a cab with a kid to and from school, making sure that their parents had rent money. There were some schools in the district that were delivering hundreds of boxes of food every week.

Emmett Doyle:

The unions that did get involved, I think understand what the labor movement is about in a way that some of our other unions have forgotten. An injury to one is an injury to all isn’t just a moral statement. It’s a hard reality of life. And the unions that stood up during Metro search understood that and demonstrated what solidarity means.

Treasure Thoreson:

We got a lot of great information from the Chicago Teachers Union who had been fighting back ice for months at the point when they came here. But we learned a lot from their struggle and were able to adapt that to fit what we were doing here in Minneapolis.

Alec Stewart:

And that was all without coercion, without money exchanging hands. That was just horizontal organizing. And I think how effective that is, how the power of mutual aid and horizontal organizing is evident because of this indictment. This wouldn’t have happened if what thousands of Minnesotans were doing hadn’t worked. I think the success of the January 23rd general strike speaks to that connection of the labor movement and just seeing the numbers and the outpouring of support for such a strike is historic.

Emmett Doyle:

I think that the general strike that happened in Minneapolis terrified the federal government. There were downtown, just hundreds of thousands of workers in the streets marching. And people have to remember this was severe sub-zero. It was a fantastic feeling of power and of joy and of resistance. And unfortunately, the next day that joy and resistance was answered tragically with the brutality of the beating and murder of Valence Preddy. But I think that the general strike was a major turning point in the regime’s logic of violence that they realized they couldn’t defeat the city.

Background music:

Stores are getting thin. There’s passing down that’s going on. Scabs anymore. We’ll put ourselves in union down this year of 34. Can’t you hear the mark? Either sign or behind. See the times get better when we hold that picket line.

Alec Stewart:

The revelation of Operation Puppet Master exposes that while the government was targeting immigrant communities, tearing families apart, abducting children and murdering our neighbors in the street, they were also attempting to disrupt and dismantle one of the facets of Minnesota that makes us so unique. And that is our strong and unified labor movement.

Isaac Sant:

This is not just an attack on me and my friends and our little group. This is an attack on our entire community. They were spying on us from day one. In fact, five days before Operation Metro Surge was declared on November 28th, they began spying on our organizations. These prosecutions were inevitable. Somebody was going to be on trial in there. If it wasn’t us, it was going to be somebody else. It was going to be one of you. We were being prosecuted for doing something that every single person that everybody and their mom in Twin Cities did to resist their federal occupation.

Emmett Doyle:

This case is meant to intimidate the entire community. It’s meant to tie up the time and efforts of many activists. But beyond that, as a conspiracy case, what they’re trying to do is set up a situation where they can expand and expand and expand the conspiracy. They’re trying to use our own solidarity and close-knit community against us through guilt by association.

Treasure Thoreson:

They want us to be separated. They want to separate out the good protestors from the bad protestor. I don’t want folks to feel afraid to stand up for their neighbor and do the right thing.

Alec Stewart:

It was such an obvious threat on what the Twin Cities is all about, which is community connections and helping each other’s neighbors. And the face of fascism, complacency, I think has no place. I think there was just a very justified feeling of standing up.

Emmett Doyle:

The support and solidarity towards us by our community has been overwhelming in just the most amazing way. I

Treasure Thoreson:

Think that they see our ability to bring people together as threatening. However, going after the 15 of us isn’t going to stop anything in Minneapolis or the Twin Cities because this is a place full of great organizers. We can’t let them bully us out of doing the right thing. We need to stand strong in our values and our morals and know that we are protecting our neighbors and that is the right thing to do. They’re afraid of us and that’s why we’re getting this response.

💾

On Tuesday morning, a coalition of leaders and members from labor, community, and faith organizations in Minnesota denounced Operation Puppet Master, an alleged campaign by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to spy on Minnesotans during Operation Metro Surge earlier this year. In a press conference held outside of Target’s headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, the coalition urged Minnesotans to continue standing in solidarity with one another, and demanded companies headquartered in the state sign the business for democracy pledge.

The call comes after the New York Times published a report on August 13 about the campaign by DHS. Details were made public in a motion for discovery filed by Kevin Riach, an attorney for healthcare worker Isaac Sant. According to the motion, federal agents “surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment right to protest ICE’s lawless rampage in our state. The agents gathered information about Minnesotans from law enforcement databases and internet searches, and created dossiers that are apparently now available agency-wide.” 

The documents describe surveillance and infiltration of union and community meetings during and before Operation Metro Surge. Eighteen organizations, including labor unions, were listed in a chart connecting them to Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN), a group of individuals who resisted what coalition members call a “terror campaign” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during Operation Metro Surge. Sant is one of 15 individuals who were indicted and charged by the federal government for conspiracy in what organizers have called an act of political repression and retaliation. More than half of the 15 are rank-and-file union members, and now the federal government is claiming labor organizations to be part of the alleged conspiracy. The motion continues: “With no evidence, the government alleged to the grand jury that this conspiracy in this case extends far beyond the defendants to include the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, Monarca, Veterans for Peace, and the Grease Pit bicycle repair shop, among others.”

In addition to the AFL-CIO, Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE) Local 59, and Minnesota Association of Professional Employees (MAPE), SEIU Local 26 is also named by DHS along with the Workers Solidarity Circle and Black Cat Workers Collective. The motion also states that Homeland Security Investigations subpoenaed financial records for several labor unions, including SEIU locals in Minnesota and the Communication Workers of America (CWA). 

Alec Stewart is a MAPE union member and one of the Minnesota 15. “The revelation of Operation Puppet Master exposes that while the government was targeting immigrant communities, tearing families apart, abducting children and murdering folks in the street, they were also attempting to disrupt and dismantle one of the facets of Minnesota that makes us so unique, and that is our strong and unified labor movement,” he said at the press conference.

Treasure Thoreson is a teacher, executive board member at MFE Local 59, and one of the Minnesota 15. Thoreson spoke at the press conference about the food drives, fundraisers, grocery deliveries, and support that educators gave to their community all while continuing to show up to schools to educate students. “The government feels so threatened by our ability to come together and use our protected First Amendment rights, our legal rights as unionists that they feel they must surveil and disrupt. However, that to me is a signal that what we are doing is effective, impactful, and powerful,” she said. According to Thoreson, a GoFundMe that she donated to was flagged by DHS as evidence that she is part of a conspiracy.

Gabriel Van de Water is a community organizer and artist who is one of the Minnesota 15. Van de Water referred to a report by Human Rights Watch detailing the human rights abuses that happened under Operation Metro Surge. “Human Rights Watch referred to the occupation as a manufactured crisis. This administration has chosen to follow up that crisis with a manufactured conspiracy,” said Van de Water. “The Minnesota 15 case and others like it must be understood as an attempt to criminalize dissent, to make an example out of some of us so that all of us hesitate to exercise our rights to protect one another. We will not allow this to happen.”

Kieran Knutson is president of CWA Local 7250, which was also named in the document. “We are more determined than ever to stand up to our repressive government. We are more determined than ever to stand in solidarity with working class people,” he said. “The Minnesota 15 are some of the finest people I know. These are our people, we have their backs. We know that this prosecution against them is a bogus attack on the entire movement.”

Emilia Gonzalez Avalos, the executive director of Unidos MN, a grassroots social justice organization, spoke about the surveillance and infiltration enacted by the federal government on community members and noted the silence of corporations like Target. “They sat in our libraries, in training rooms, and wrote down what we thought about the Constitution. They took down license plates outside a church in Roseville, and built files of the families inside, their addresses, children, and where they work. Federal agents walked into a Target store in Richfield and detained two citizens who were at work,” said Gonzalez Avalos. “To this day, Target has said nothing about it. We came here today because that silence still has answers available.”

Target has been the center of national boycott campaigns for rolling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments, and now this Minnesota coalition is demanding that the corporation meet with coalition members before early voting begins on September 15. Best Buy, 3M, and Cargill were also named by the coalition as corporations that are being urged to sign the pledge.

There is also a labor-endorsed call to boycott Target during the back-to-school season. President of MFE Local 59 Marcia Howard highlighted this call by the American Federation of Teachers that was supported by the national AFL-CIO, which passed a resolution supporting the boycott at its constitutional convention held in Minneapolis in June. 

“Educators spend eight billion dollars on back to school supplies,” said Howard. “Between AFT calling for a boycott and AFL-CIO extending that boycott, the only thing that this corporation needs to do is make good. Make good for Alex Pretti, for Renee Good. For all of us who have been in the streets, for our students, for each other.”

Target made $5.1 billion in profits in 2025, and its chair and former CEO Brian Cornell pulled in over $21 million. 

Bernie Burnham, the president of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, which represents 1000 local unions and hundreds of thousands of workers in the state, said at the press conference that “attacks on labor are not new. Those with power always push back when they face the kind of solidarity we saw in Minnesota last winter.” Burnham continued, “Instead of holding federal agents accountable for shooting and killing Renee Good and our [American Federation of Government Employees] union brother Alex Pretti, or addressing the dangerous and deadly conditions within immigration and detention facilities, the Trump administration continues to weaponize our federal government to intimidate our unions, our communities, and anyone who peacefully opposes their radically authoritarian agenda.”

Coalition members say they remain unintimidated. “Countless Minnesotans rose to the occasion and stood strong in the face of what the Trump administration tried to do to our communities and the whole nation owes those Minnesotans a debt of gratitude,” said Phillip Cryan, the executive vice president of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota & Iowa. “We keep us safe. If they come after any of us, 15 of us, or 1500 of us, the hundreds of thousands of us who did what we needed to do this winter to protect our communities, will be there to support them.”