Helen’s Place LLC Update February 02, 2026
No one could have predicted that the front line of the new nonviolent, civil rights movement would be in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Here we are seeing the greatest acts of nonviolent resistance since the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
The people of Minnesota are not going to back down or be convinced to behave by any right-wing propaganda from the government including Tom Homan, The President, Kristi Noem, and Steven Miller.
What Minnesotans have demonstrated is that nonviolent resistance is better than passively hiding when times are tough and violence is at hand. In times like these we must fight to protect our neighbors. A new civil rights slogan could be: Ice out of Minnesota; Trump & Company out of America!
What The Situation Means
In America, it gets down to a simple question that will change the direction of our country forever: Are Americans going to stand up and fight to protect themselves and their neighbors or not? To do otherwise means allowing ICE to ethnically cleanse undocumented non-white people from America – including deporting 11 to 15 million people, as well as stopping thousands more non-whites from legally immigrating.
The Trump regime is marked by revenge and authoritarian control – not legitimate concerns for law enforcement. Saying that they’re just trying to get criminals out of America is a pretext for rounding up and deporting people.
How could this happen?
Human beings haven’t changed that much in 15,000-25,000 years since our latest homo sapiens DNA was established.
Humans exhibit the same behavior: someone always wants to be a dictator or there’s a group wanting to have dominance over another. It’s a fallacy to think it couldn’t happen in America.
People wear different clothes, have different languages, customs, and ideas, but right makes right, and violence is used to settle scores. A historic figure like Joan of Arc was burned at the stake by the British for being a heretic in 1431. Today people are still being tortured and killed around the world – sometimes executed in barbaric ways.
Americans don’t like to see brutality and be reminded of our history, but ICE agents are inflicting terrible harm on the American people – more every day. The Trump administration sends people to be tortured in in El Salvador and other countries – spearheaded by Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem.
And the fact remains that American culture hasn’t always stayed at a high levels in the past either – consider the last Civil Rights Movement.
Today the government is going after people of color, non-immigrants, and anyone speaking out against the Trump regime, calling the opposition – domestic terrorists, agitators and insurrectionists for conducting nonviolent protests.
Nonviolent Resistance; New Civil Rights Movement
The new civil rights movement is picking up and expanding where the old one left off, except this time Americans are standing up for diverse groups of people, and the fight is on whether the U.S. will remain a melting pot of racial and ethnic diversity or be turned into a white, Christian Nationalist society.
But nonviolent resistance influences people more than violent behavior. It’s an incredible phenomenon that it changes people from the inside out. In fact, there are many forms of nonviolent resistance that changed the world. They have been spoken and written about for centuries. In America, our first civil rights movement was incredibly influence by Mahatma Gandhi, and his walk to the sea to protest British salt taxes on India.
Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven lies within you.” Tolstoy wrote a book on the topic with the same name about nonviolent resistance.
It takes absolute honesty and willingness to face facts for a society to improve, and regression often happens as progress often doesn’t go in a straight line.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “the arch of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice.”
Leah Greenberg, Co-Executive Director of Indivisible , on Jan 19, 2026 elaborated:
“The arc of the moral universe does not bend on its own. It bends because people organize, resist, and refuse to comply with injustice — again and again, even when the path is hard.”
Yes, MLK said, “We shall overcome,” and the new civil rights movement is on!
Nonviolent Minnesota Against the Trump Administration
In the icy cold – the people of Minneapolis are not standing for what Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) is doing there. They want ICE out of their city and state, and won’t back down until ICE is gone or returns to normal operations of deporting only criminals.
It started in December 2025 when Minneapolis residents recognized immediately that something was wrong when ICE surged forces and started carrying out raids and random search and seizure operations. This new ICE force appears to be more like WWII Nazi police – picking up, disappearing and terrorizing people, including children, with the wrong ethnicity or non-white skin tone – sometimes with no criminal records at all.
Since people in Minnesota are mostly white, a case for ICE expansion doesn’t make any logical sense to the people there. Instead, it appears more likely that Trump thought he could punish Minnesota for being a blue, sanctuary state for political purposes.
The killing of protesters Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7, 2025, and Alex Petti on Jan. 24, 2026 just confirmed their suspicions especially when Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and President Trump lied and labelled protesters as domestic terrorists, insurrectionists and political agitator.
Breaking Through Mainstream Conservative Media
We will know that the truth about ICE has broken through the propaganda bubble, when Fox news and other conservative media, tells the truth about ICE detention warehouses to hold and deport one million non-immigrants a year. Also, to report honestly about the Trump regime’s efforts to stop legal immigration of non-white people.
The Monks Walking for Peace
Sometimes nonviolent resistance takes the form of standing up for what one believes and higher principles.
The monks walking from Fort Worth to Washington D.C. are spiritual soldiers in single-file formation. They remind us that the better path – and higher path – is the path to peace. They don’t need to protest or fight anyone to stand firm in their devotion to truth.
Their presence reflects that you can take anything material away but we’ll still be here intact – because we are spiritual beings. The spiritual world exists whether a human being knows it or not.
The spiritual world is not violent. It is peace and contentment.
In this world there is only love.
Personal Nonviolent Resistance
Nonviolent resistance also includes the internal struggles we all face including being kind to ourselves and protecting our personal rights.
It involves being respectful of other people’s opinions – even from those who challenge us at every turn and are not necessarily respectful back to us – including family and friends.
Sometimes people are aware of the voices who speak or say it better than they could, and stop talking. But they’re worthy of being asked what they are thinking or writing about. Our society is full of people judging others for being deficient. Now with ChatGPT there’s no need to have a conversation with anyone about the world when you can just ask the chatbot for the answer.
But we need to speak anyway. It’s not enough to read the experts, or take the word from your AI chatbot and regurgitate what it says.
Instead, processing thoughts through one’s own mind is vital to our wellbeing, and we should never stop doing it.
Therefore, we should read what the experts say and then make up our own minds about how we feel about it. Sometimes we might benefit from telling these experts – “Hey, save some words for someone else!” Sometimes we should turn our electronic devices off.
If everyone is equal to another, then all voices matter, and we should never be silenced by someone or something that tells us we don’t. Instead, we should use nonviolent rolling resistance to stay in our own unique voice and be authentic.
Lasting Peace
We could learn something from what we’re going through in our second civil rights movement to improve American culture for future generations. Or as New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan pointed out in recent articles – when the Democrats get back in power they will follow the same old practices of imposing their agenda on America that got them kicked out as the dominant party in the first place. It would be tragic if this happens.
Alternatively, our government could work to bring the best out in its people. It could resist being violent, indifferent, or cynical. It could resolve to be kind and do the right thing. It could stop belittling, lying to, and mistreating anyone.
We hope that someday Americans could be proud to work for the American government again and not be ashamed to work for agencies that are morally reprehensible – so much so that Catholic clergy, for example, have told parishioners they have to quit working for ICE immediately.
Conclusion
Even when human beings are horrible, and history shows they keep repeating the same mistakes, we should never give up trying to work with the human brain to bring out the best in ourselves and others through education and training. This includes practicing prayer and medication.
There are many forms of nonviolent resistance that changed the world and ourselves. Perhaps the greatest was written about by Victor Frankl who said in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh said, “In the garbage, I see a rose. In the rose, I see compost. Everything is in transformation. Impermanence is life.”
Therefore, perhaps somewhere in the ash heap of the Trump Administration lies a pathway to enlightenment where we never forget again what America really is or who we are. Thank God the people of Minnesota and the monks walking for peace lead the way.
