Minneapolis Federation of Educators President Marcia Howard said that teachers along with their “bosses” and elected officials are present and active in anti-ICE group chats.

Howard, an outspoken leftist political activist since the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, shared in an interview with Al Jazeera that she and other teachers-turned activists are undeterred in participating in anti-ICE protests and watches because leadership stands behind them.

“The notion that people that are actively engaged in ICE watch, in being vigilant, in protecting our neighbors in signal chat groups, running plates on their [ICE] cars, doing patrols that somehow we’re ashamed of that activity, that somehow you can call our bosses or show our faces, and then we would be shunned by our community,” Howard said.

“Our bosses are in the signal chats with us. Our elected officials are in the chats with us.”

“Our nana’s, the hockey coaches, the soccer moms. Everybody that’s anybody is doing the work of protecting our neighbors, because that’s how we show up in Minneapolis and St Paul,” Howard continued.

Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer six summers ago, Howard, an English teacher of 25 years, became a leading voice in the summer protests, which turned into riots. She played a prominent role in the creation of George Floyd Square, which marked where Floyd was killed.

Howard criticized the federal immigration agents which have overtaken Minneapolis over the past month, accusing the agents of being agitators.

“We’re armed with whistles and our phones making sure that students are safe going to class,” Howard said. “And then they escalated the brutality. Every single day they taunted us. From their rental trucks, they would do things like — the agents that they brought to the Twin Cities — these hapless, untrained, overly-militarized agents, were in hotel rooms where they did not detain the workers in those hotel rooms because they wanted to be served by immigrants.”

The growing involvement of members of teacher unions and the unions themselves in political movement has garnered greater scrutiny in the past few months. Last month, it was reported that the National Education Association, one of the largest teacher’s unions, funneled millions of dollars into left-leaning organizations.

It’s literally the last place on Earth you’d imagine movie-goers racing to see Melania, the new $75 million Brett Ratner-directed documentary about the first lady — but tickets are apparently selling fast in Minneapolis. Or at least fast-ish.

The movie, which opened better than predicted last weekend — pulling in $7.2 million in just under 1800 theaters, the best showing for a non-concert doc in a decade — is being expanded to 2,000 theaters, with many of those additional screens in blue cities like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and, yes, the one in Minnesota where two U.S. citizens were gunned down last month by ICE agents, sparking widespread and on-going protests. 

“Look, the movie isn’t for everybody,” says Marc Beckman, Melania Trump’s longtime advisor and the lawyer who put together her $40 million licensing deal to make the film with Amazon, which also spent an additional $35 million on marketing it. “But the people who voted [for Trump], they love it. And it’s very satisfying — after all the negativity — to see that it’s playing well in blue cities as well as red.”

Exactly how well it’s playing is subject to some interpretation. An unscientific look at theater maps in Minneapolis shows that a few theaters, like AMC Southdale 16, are indeed doing some business — 15 of 80 seats for its Feb. 3 screening at 6:45 p.m. have sold so far — not terrible for a normally slow Tuesday night — while the AMC Eden Prairie Mall 18 has sold 26 seats, nearly half the theater, for its 6:15 screening. Curiously, all those 26 sold seats at Eden Prairie are contiguous, which suggest either they were purchased in a block or else movie-goers are much more friendly in Minneapolis than in the rest of the country. Also, nobody seems to be interested in going to the next showing, at 7:30, at the same theater; only two seats have been sold for that screening. Meanwhile, AMC Inver Grove 16 has sold only three tickets for its 6:45 show and Coon Rapids 16 has sold precisely zero for its at 7:30.

Of course, the film will be even more widely available when it starts streaming on Amazon Prime, alongside a two or three-episode Melania Trump doc series — made from bonus footage shot by Ratner — but that may take a while. Beckman predicts the movie won’t drop until sometime this summer.