Global Crisis,National Borders,and Welcoming Cities: Urban Sanctuary and Human Rights in Historical Perspective

Introduction

“Cities are on the front lines of this dark hour in our national politics,” Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis confirmed in the days after a federal ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a resident of Minneapolis (Frey 2026a). Operation Metro Surge dispatched three thousand United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in what the Department of Homeland Security called “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out” (Santana and Balsama 2026). The national media broadcast Frey’s anguished entreaty to ICE to get out of his city. The press largely ignored the grieving mayor’s suggestion of a path forward out of the crisis wrought by the federal government: “The best way to convince the country that welcoming and lifting up immigrants is good for its communities is by proving it in our own cities” (Frey 2026a). Minneapolis safeguarded the human and civil rights of its most vulnerable residents in the face of overwhelming national force.

Urban areas have long recognized that strength comes from diversity and that effective governance emanates from shared purpose built from the bottom up. In 2022, a global coalition of cities cited mobility across the globe as a human right in the Lampedusa Charter. This World Summit of Local and Regional Leaders pledged “to endeavor to welcome people who have been displaced—including for climate-related reasons—ensuring fundamental rights and equitable access to services regardless of migrations or legal status.” The municipal officials who gathered to discuss solutions to what national leaders called an immigration crisis rejected “border-centred approaches,” espousing instead “a people-centred and equality-driven vision of citizenship and community” (United Cities and Local Government n.d.-a). Human mobility for cities could not be reduced to crossing borders, rather, it is the stories of people seeking opportunities. In the words of the coalition of local governments, “It is about people converging and exchanging while transiting or settling down and eventually, reshaping communities” (United Cities and Local Governments 2014).

The definition of citizenship endorsed by the global coalition of cities “acknowledges all communities as neighbors, as right holders and community developers.” They set as their shared goal “to reduce inequalities, to promote sustainable development and peaceful coexistence, providing pathways and opportunities for all to enjoy the Right to the City regardless of origin or administrative status” (United Cities and Local Governments 2014). Without claiming control over the formal citizenship conferred by nation states, local leaders pledged to assure the human and civil rights of the residents of their municipalities. They vowed to “transform the social contract by developing caring societies based on the provision of local services” (United Cities and Local Government n.d.-b).

This urban approach to informal citizenship and permeable borders is not new. For as long as nations have fortified their borders and circumscribed citizenship, cities have informally extended housing, employment, education, food assistance, and connections to newly arrived neighbors from elsewhere. This inclusive urban alternative to exclusive citizenship circumscribed by nationalism stretches back at least as far as the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century. It is no coincidence that the first modern refugee crisis in history followed the organization of nation states at the end of the eighteenth century. In the decades after 1776, revolutions and wars for independence drove unprecedented numbers of refugees out of their homes in search of asylum. Exiles fleeing their homelands often ran headlong into the walls of emerging nationalism unleashed by these same revolutions. National borders had come to matter more at the beginning of the modern world than they ever had before in human history.

Nowhere were the forces of exclusion more virulent than in the two largest republics to emerge from the revolutionary era: the United States of America and the French republic. The possibilities for defining the rights of citizens based in the Enlightenment promise of liberty and equality held out promise (Arendt n.d. cited by Benhabib 1999, 711). Instead, the Americans limited “we the people” and the French assigned the rights of man to a narrowly defined category of citizens within the territorial bounds of their nation states. The American declaration of independence and the French declaration of the rights of man that have been exalted as the most significant declarations of human rights in modern history were constricted by national constraints.

France and the United States, among other emerging nation states, organized systems of passports and border patrols. Previously, passports monitored movement within a nation, between regions or cities. National governments now used them to limit who could come in and who could leave their republics and kingdoms. Even before photographs, passports served to document the arrival of “foreigners,” and to guarantee their identity.

The emerging nationalism required unquestioned loyalty to the state. For a short time, the French revolutionaries adopted foreign nationals as citizens advancing their universal revolution before restricting their rights and arresting all foreigners from countries at war with France (Sahlins 2003, 21). Not to be left behind, in this age of foreign threats and competing nations, in 1898 the United States Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts. More than two centuries later, although rarely invoked in the meantime, President Donald Trump cited its terms empowering the American president in time of war to arrest, imprison, and deport aliens.

At the same time, in 1795, in the cosmopolitan commercial crossroads of Königsberg, the influential German philosopher, Immanuel Kant defined mobility as a human right in his treatise, Perpetual Peace. He called on newly formed nations to guarantee hospitality to all travelers by virtue of our shared humanity on the globe. Visitors fleeing persecution should be able to settle anywhere, if they did not disturb the peace, Kant wrote (Kant 1795, 11). Kant’s dictum has been cited by philosophers and political theorists as a cosmopolitan standard ever since (Balibar 2004, 7, 66; Benhabib 2004, 21, 25–31; Cavallar, 2015; Derrida 1997, 19–25, 69–77; Habermas 1997, 113–53; Jacob 2006, 10-12; Kleingeld 2012, 78; Nussbaum 2019, chapter 1).

For 250 years, although nations, including the newly founded United States of America, have excluded immigrants, cities and towns have opened doors. In keeping with Kant’s cosmopolitanism, they have welcomed newcomers, sometimes arriving in waves, and other times individually. If the United States is a nation of immigrants, nowhere is that truer than in its cities.

1790s. Hamburg and Altona: “Cosmopolitan Ports”

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, cities wedged between warring nations and empires in the center of Europe made good on Kant’s offer of hospitality as a universal human right. The cities, some in the larger nation states, and others in smaller spaces along heavily traveled crossroads and waterways, offered refugees asylum from the wars and economic dislocation of the continent. Hamburg and Altona, both port cities, one German and the other Danish, welcomed thousands of political and economic refugees in the 1790s (Polasky 2023, 20–85). Word on the streets of Paris among revolutionaries and counter revolutionaries alike was that not only a free press, but a living could be secured there without crossing an ocean or the Channel, as other asylum seekers attempted.

Situated near the mouth of the Elbe River, inland from the North Sea, the independent German city state of Hamburg with a population approaching 120,000 and to its north, Danish Altona, population 24,000, depended on trade, not only with their neighbors but overseas (Kopitzsch 1990, 139-143; Kopitzsch 1992, 92). Diplomatically flexible by necessity, the neutral ports adjusted more adeptly to the changing fortunes of wars and revolutions than their larger neighbors entangled in alliances and burdened with armies deployed across the continent (Polasky 2023, 66–70). Hamburg and Altona prospered through commerce fostered by enterprising immigrants while the economies of surrounding nations, closed in upon themselves by trade barriers, slumped. Merchants in Hamburg and Altona readily seized the burgeoning opportunities. In 1796, a visitor to the bustling Hamburg harbor marveled at the “countless rows of ships. . .thronging this cosmopolitan port.” Many of the two thousand vessels unloading sugar to be refined or loading goods destined for the Americas belonged to newcomers. The visitor noted how readily these “heterogeneous” immigrants blended into the cosmopolitan mix (Beneke 1796, in Hatje and Smith 2012, 21 and 43). They met over lunch at the venerable Hamburg Exchange that halted for two-hours at noon, at the twenty coffee-houses, and in the numerous clubs. Even if local merchants and visiting aristocrats could be considered odd bedfellows, theirs was an alchemy that often worked in the port cities with their open doors. Many of the political leaders of Hamburg and Altona were descended from families of recent immigrants themselves. Just a few decades earlier, they had made their way to the port cities to pursue trade, marrying into the elite circles of doctors, lawyers, scholars, and entrepreneurs,

The two relatively independent cities took in ideas, people, and goods from all directions (Piper 1914; Schmidt 2007). The cosmopolitan cities prospered while the rest of the war-torn European continent struggled.

Hamburg, a self-governing city state, a “Free Imperial City” within the Holy Roman Empire, set its own laws, taxation, trade, diplomacy, and defense strategies. The wealthy burghers who controlled the Hamburg Senate and held most municipal offices defined policies. It was as independent as a city could be. The situation in Altona was more complicated because the Danish monarch ruled Altona as duke of Holstein. Altona effectively exercised extensive municipal administrative and commercial authority, even if the Danish king ultimately held sovereignty. In both cities, municipal leaders consciously cultivated tolerance and civic republicanism (Pestel 2015). Where trade flowed freely, liberty flourished, the wife of a prominent Hamburg merchant, Johanna Sieveking told a friend to introduce the newcomer to the city of open borders (Sieveking 1794).

Newly arrived merchants claimed their rights to full economic citizenship under Hamburg’s Foreign Contract or Fremdenkontrakt that gave wealthy foreigners the same economic privileges as native-born citizens, even if it did not convey political rights to participate in the government. Formal citizenship with political rights or Bürgerrecht belonged both to the 3,000 to 4,000 propertied citizens and the large and small Bürgers defined by an individual’s business and taxes. Citizenship presupposed an obligation of service to the city’s militia and appropriate civic conduct. Sixteen thousand men acquired Stadtbürgerrecht between 1790 and 1810, seventy-five percent of them immigrants (Aaslestadt 2005, 39 and 51). These newcomers had to disavow allegiance to another state.

Even if local merchants and visiting aristocrats could be considered odd bedfellows, theirs was an alchemy that often worked in the port cities with their open doors. Guests at the weekly Sunday evening suppers hosted by Johanna Sieveking and her husband Georg Heinrich remembered the cacophony of languages blending together. Visiting scholars and merchants felt at home among the guests arriving from near and far. An archaeologist visiting from Dresden described his table, sitting next to “the last descendent of the house of Gonzaga, a prince without a land but with much understanding.” His attention was caught by “two rich Dutch women who glittered with jewels. There sat an Englishman from Liverpool next to a republican from Bordeaux. . .a Swedish Consul returning from Morocco talking to a pair of English Jews from Santo Domingo, and an American from New Jersey” (Böttinger n.d. cited in Uhalde 1984, 74). Throughout Hamburg and Altona, merchants and scholars opened the doors of their homes for gatherings to discuss readings, listen to music, or join in conversations.

These merchants, poets, countesses, artisans, ship captains, bishops, and marquises were part of a massive movement of men and women during the revolutionary era. Revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, and others in between crossed borders, mountains, and the seas in record numbers. Some were fleeing revolution and others seeking a livelihood beyond the reach of war. They joined divergent diaspora defined by revolutionary politics (Jasanoff 2012; Miller 2018; Pestel 2015; Philip and Reboul 2019). Refugees from threats and chaos at home, they sought asylum abroad in a world that was rapidly changing in ways that few of them understood.

Contemporaries labeled the two ports cosmopolitan. Residents took seriously the right of a stranger, as defined by Immanuel Kant, “not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another” (Kant 1996 in Bennett 2017). They took great pride in their outward facing civic identity. They defined patriotism in Hamburg and Altona as a self-conscious civic devotion to the common good that was inclusive of all comers and hospitably tolerant (Aaslestadt 2005; Lindemann 2015, 1990; Polasky 2023; Uhalde 1984). Even under the strain of waves of immigrants, the municipal governments of Hamburg and Altona and their citizens kept their doors open to all who were threatened by the uncertainty of revolution and its aftermath.

Unfortunately, when the cities got caught up in their neighbors’ wars, the larger nation states and empires prevailed. Hamburg could not hold out against the military and administrative might of Napoleon’s empire. Denmark and Altona tried to appease Napoleon with unfortunate consequences. Under Napoleon’s Continental System, shipping and manufacturing collapsed in both port cities. Immigrants who had not fully assimilated, or who were deemed enemies faced harsh legal consequences enforced by the occupying forces. But even with the introduction of increasingly stringent regulations governing travel across national borders—passports and border police—some European cities residing between jostling, security-conscious neighbors still managed to extend a welcome to refugees.

1846-48. Brussels: “All Men are Brothers”

Almost fifty years after Napoleon’s rise, during another revolutionary wave, Brussels, the capital of the new Belgian nation welcomed Karl Marx and his family to settle. Legend has it that a year before Europe was engulfed in the Revolutions of 1848, Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in plain sight in a café on the Grand Place of Brussels. Especially from our contemporary perspective, it seems inconceivable that this incendiary journalist already expelled from both his native Prussia and France would be granted a residence permit by the Belgian authorities for his family to stay indefinitely in their capital. The newly independent monarchy at the crossroads of Europe opened its doors wide not only to Marx, but to a whole raft of political insurgents (Polasky 2023, 111–206).

Shortly after winning its independence from the Netherlands in 1830, the small industrializing Belgian monarchy decided on a policy of open borders as it extended rail lines outwards toward its neighbors (Polasky 2010, 89–92). Trains connecting to neighboring states would facilitate the movement of goods and people, artisans and laborers, as well as entrepreneurial bankers and industrialists, to stoke Belgium’s prosperous economy. Article 128 of the Belgian Constitution of 1831 guaranteed the civil rights of everyone who resided on their territory. Only political rights were restricted to citizens.

Between 1846 and 1856, 20,000 foreigners arrived in Brussels, more per capita than any other European capital (Coppens 2016-2017, 69–70; de Schaepdrijver 1990, 49). Artisans came in search of a living, radicals sought shelter from political persecution, and entrepreneurs found an opportunity for investment. Migration was a widely adopted adaptive strategy in an era of rapid and radical political change and economic transformation.

Upon arrival, like all the other foreigners, Marx signed a municipal register. Although the right of immigrants to reside in Belgium was legislated at the national level, it was enforced locally by the municipal police. The Belgian parliament did not want anything to do with the powerful state police forces of their neighbors, some of whose agents were known to be active in surveillance in Belgium too (Woyna to Metternich 1846). Municipal police did not answer to the federal minister of justice, but to local authorities.

The French, Prussians, and Austrians demanded that the new Belgian nation expel the newly arrived revolutionary. The federal government asked Brussels, and after a month, the municipal police transmitted the reassuring response they had received from professors in contact with Marx at the university, themselves refugees. “He’s just a philosopher,” they affirmed (Marx 1845a). Not satisfied, federal director of public security, Baron Alexis de Hody, called Marx in for an interview. Hody extracted from Marx a promise not to overthrow the Belgian king Leopold I, and to stay out of Belgian politics (Hody 1845; Marx 1845b; Marx 1845c, 125).

The Belgian monarchy was erected in 1830 on a foundation of centuries of municipal governance. Cities within Belgium had enjoyed significant autonomy since the Middle Ages (Vanthemsche 1997). Municipalities controlled policing, welfare, education, elections, and most of everyday life. The Liberals administering Brussels often resisted directives from the Catholics governing the nation. It was within cities, among neighbors, that exiles reestablished their lives. Karl Marx’s wife Jenny had entrusted her husband with a list of expectations for their lodging in “our new fatherland” (Marx 1845a). The Marx family moved house six times during their three years of exile in Brussels. Such a peripatetic existence was common among refugees. Each time, it fell to Jenny Marx to make a home in a new neighborhood for their growing family. If, as contemporary Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said suggested, “exile is life led outside habitual order,” it was Karl Marx’s wife above all who had to reestablish order for their household (Said 1984). She did it in the neighborhoods of Brussels, with green grocers and local hospitality. While her husband read political economy in the national library in the center of the Belgian capital, she inhabited the informal social spaces defined by women, children, and trades people, not by authorities.

The Marxes’ door was apparently always open to visitors. Belgian professors and archivists as well as German, Polish, Russian, French, and Italian journalists, poets, writers, and former soldiers joined family dinners. These acquaintances, many of them also refugees, some planning to make their new home in Brussels and others just passing through, often stayed late into the night, disrupting the sleep of the children upstairs.

The Belgian capital’s reputation as a radical hotbed in the 1840s was well deserved. The offer of political asylum appealed especially to French socialists, Polish democrats, and German communists who congregated freely in the many Brussels cafes such as the Mille Colonnes. The Brussels police kept Baron Hody apprised of speeches or gatherings that they viewed as incendiary, especially if crowds brought laborers and foreigners together, a frightening combination. Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto for the newly formed Communist League surrounded by Belgian workers, artisans, and exiles in Brussels, not in the café Le Cygne, as plaques in the Grand Place proclaim, but more likely in a house just off the Sablon that served as the communication hub for the League.

At the same time, Karl Marx joined Lucien Jottrand, a respected lawyer and one of Belgium’s founding fathers, in the newly formed Democratic Association. Under the slogan, “All men are brothers,” Belgian lawyers and artisans discussed the universality of rights with German communists, French socialists, Polish radicals, and Russian anarchists. Years later, Marx and Engels remembered the Democratic Association as an “international and open society where delegates of the bourgeois radicals and socialist workers coalesced” (Lafargue 1880 in Andréas 2004, 10).

In 1848, revolution overtook them, starting next door in France that had so recently rid itself of trouble-making German philosophers. Informed of the unrest by the Belgian king’s own lawyer, Jottrand and Marx called a public meeting y of the Democratic Association at their local café to discuss the expected spread of revolution across French borders to Belgium (Jottrand,1848 in Andréas 2004). They vowed to meet every night with gatherings open to the public. Jottrand and Marx advised the Brussels City Council to call out the militia “to maintain public peace and avoid all bloodshed” (Draper 1985, 30). The municipal police tracked the activities of the Democratic Association, but remained unaware of the clandestine Communist League, headquartered in Brussels.

Calm reigned in the Belgian capital, but the national army stood on the alert. Hody compiled a list of suspected Belgian republicans he had long wanted to arrest. As cover, he added the names of a number of refugees to his list. He hoped the arrest of foreign radicals would stir Belgian nationalism, and deflect attention from the others.

Hody charged Marx with violating the terms of his residence permit, without elaborating on the alleged infractions. That charge gave the Belgian king the right to expel Marx as a threat to his monarchy. The Marx family was escorted to the border after hastily selling what they could. The day after the expulsion, outraged Belgian newspaper editors demanded an explanation. Debate ensued in parliament over the alleged violation of the constitution. The Brussels police made clear they had played no part in the arrest. Liberals in parliament asked if the Germans’ presence in the country had in any way constituted a threat to public tranquility as required by the law governing deportations? The response of the justice minister raised more questions than it answered (Rogier in Annales parlementaires 1848).

Much to everyone’s surprise, the Revolution of 1848 leapfrogged over the small nation with its open borders and cafes full of communists. The Belgian monarch was one of the few in central Europe not to be overthrown.

On his way out of the country, Marx reminded the Belgians that their prime minister, Charles Rogier, a naturalized Frenchman, was no more Belgian than their king, a German imported to serve as monarch. They were a land of immigrants or had become one with the industrialization. In a public letter, Friedrich Engels thanked Jottrand and the other Belgian democrats who “had shown themselves quite above all petty sentiments of nationality.” In contrast to the security forces, “they saw in us not foreigners, but democrats” (Engels 1848 in Andréas 1978, 49; and Engels 1848, the Northern Star in Marx & Engels Collected Works 2010, 6, 563).

For three years, from 1845 to 1848, Brussels had protected the civil rights of the political refugees lodged in the Belgian capital. Newcomers had to find work to support themselves because public assistance was limited to those who had resided in a municipality for at least eight years. Immigrants were expected to propel the Belgian economy, not to pose a burden to either the municipality or the nation. More often by evasion than outright defiance of federal directives, the local police had attended only to violent disorder that could not be ignored. In 1834, the federal department of public security had been granted the power to surveil and expel foreigners who committed crimes or threatened public order. In the end, under pressure from Prussia and Austria, federal forces prevailed in the small nation at the center of Europe, sending refugees in search of asylum elsewhere, many in the United States.

1958. International Law and “Small Places Close to Home”

Almost one hundred years later, the refugee crisis after the Second World War dwarfed in sheer numbers the migrations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It brought a new level of intervention to protect refugees: international law. Twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt, herself a refugee, asked who would guarantee the “right to have rights” to refugees “who have lost their nationally guaranteed rights” (Arendt 1958, 296; Arendt cited by Kerber 2007, 9). Arendt’s answer: humanity itself must guarantee the human rights of migrants caught between nations.

In 1948, in the wake of the largest refugee crisis the world had ever witnessed, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized the “equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” Article 13 of the Declaration recognized the right to freedom of movement, while Article 14, harkening back to Immanuel Kant, asserted: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” (United Nations 1948). In 1951, the Geneva Convention defined refugees and established international standards for their treatment.

These twentieth-century international declarations define the offer of asylum as a “peaceful and humanitarian act,” not as an obligation. All nations are obliged to let their citizens leave. However, states retain sovereign discretion over whether to allow asylum seekers to enter. The rights of emigration and immigration are asymmetrical, stranding refugees between territorially-bound nation states “in a kafkaesque legal vacuum” (Kerber 2007). They are the ultimate “other” to national citizens, in the words of American historian, Linda Kerber (ibid., 9).Italian political philosopher Giorgi Agamben wondered if refugees, “the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other. . .marked instead the crisis of the concept [of national citizenship]?” (Agamben 2000, 92).

A group of prominent refugees and their supporters asked the United Nations Secretary General why nation states were assumed to be the building blocks of international law following two deadly world wars. If nation states had created the refugees, why look to them to solve the crisis of their own free will? (IRO Records n.d. in Fripp 2011, xvi).

Eleanor Roosevelt, the convener of the International Commission on Human Rights that drafted the Universal Declaration was not easily discouraged. In a 1958 speech, she suggested that instead of going global in seeking an alternative to bellicose national forces as her international commission had, why not seek to protect human rights “in small places, close to home?” Human rights, she affirmed, originated in neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, places “so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world.” People enjoyed “the right to have rights” in their neighborhoods. “Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere,” Roosevelt concluded (Roosevelt 1958 in Black 1990, 190).

The Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida repeated Eleanor Roosevelt’s urgent appeal, calling on cities not to wait on the international community to secure rights denied by nation states to all but their native-born citizens. If the world’s wealthiest nations refused to take in refugees as prescribed by the International Declaration of Human Rights, then they should look smaller. “Could the City, equipped with new rights of greater sovereignty, open up new horizons of possibility previously undreamt of by international state law?” he asked an international conference of writers (p. 22). New models of cosmopolitan hospitality did not need to be invented. They already existed at the local level. Derrida suggested to Look to history: “Perhaps–if it has already arrived, one has just not yet recognized it” (Derrida 1997, 58).

Altona, Hamburg, and Brussels had each practiced Immanuel Kant’s locally-grounded cosmopolitanism. For as long as nations had erected barriers to human migration, cities across the globe had welcomed newcomers. Their neighborhood spaces were not “an order susceptible to sovereign authority,” because, in the words of Canadian political theorist Warren Magnusson, urban governance is built on “self-regulation, mutual tolerance, and collective action for public benefit” (Magnusson 2011, 5 and 32). Cities have historically offered a practical, ad hoc solution when nations formulate policies to exclude all immigrants. But would that model hold in the face of a strong nation state determined not only to wall out newcomers, but to deport?

2025–2026. Minneapolis: “Neighboring”

Is the winter of 2025–2026 Minneapolis offered a case study of urban resistance against a powerful nation state committed to walling out refugees and asylum seekers. In comparison with the historic examples, one a city state and two cities invested with outsized authority in small nations, the mayor of Minneapolis is relatively weak, and the president of the United States wields power far beyond the imagination of the Danish or Belgian monarchs in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The president, in defiance of international norms, picked a battle in December 2025 that he expected to win handily against a city with doors open to immigrants, who he intended to deport en masse.

Minneapolis has a history of immigration, though it has been fractious at times. The Ojibwe and Dakota people who lived for centuries on the land that is now Minnesota agreed to share with the first European settler colonists. The new arrivals repaid Indigenous hospitality by attempting to confine them to restricted areas. Established in 1867, the Minnesota Board of Immigration promoted immigration of Europeans with pamphlets and maps advertising public lands available for homesteading. By the 1880s, 120,000 Norwegians had immigrated to the state (Ratsabout 2025).

A new wave of immigrants from Poland and Mexico in the twentieth century was followed by Hmong, Khmer, Lao, Vietnamese, Mexican, Salvadoran, Karen, and Somali people arriving in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. About 80 percent of the immigrants to Minnesota have settled in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul (Liuzzi 2016). The largest Somali diaspora community in the world, 80,000 strong, is centered in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. Community organizations have facilitated the settlement of over 275,000 immigrants from Latin America by delivering bilingual and bicultural services throughout the Twin Cities.

Ever since 2016, Donald Trump has targeted the Somali community in Minneapolis (Jacobs and Yuhan, 2016). He called them “garbage,” saying that he did not want them in “our country” because they “have caused a lot of trouble.” Jacob Frey responded to the president’s threats: “Minneapolis doesn’t flinch when it comes to our values,” Mayor Frey stated clearly. “We stand with our immigrant neighbors–not just in words, but in the laws we’ve passed, the policies we enforce and the way we stand up for each other every day” (Frey 2026, cited by Friedman 2026).

The city government of Minneapolis did all in its power to resist Operation Metro Surge, the 3,000 ICE and CPB agents who descended on the cities. Minneapolis reaffirmed its separation ordinance limiting the participation of city employees and police in civil immigration enforcement, banned detention without a judicial warrant, prohibited ICE and CBP agents from using city-owned property as staging grounds for enforcement operations, challenged federal operations through lawsuits, trained city employees and first responders to protect resident rights in response to ICE, created a Virtual Resource Center for assistance to families and a Small Business Resiliency Rund to aid immigrant owned and neighborhood businesses, distributed “Know Your Rights” information, and publicly condemned federal actions. Together, these actions of resistance established trust among the residents of the Twin Cities in their municipal government. That allowed some families to seek health care, some children to go to schools, and some to seek legal redress against arrests and deportations.

Important though the prepared resistance mounted by the City of Minneapolis was, it could not guarantee the civil rights of its residents. Decentralized, grassroots, often immigrant-and refugee-led networks provided food, rides, medical care, rent assistance, and basic security to their neighbors. Some say this practice of neighbor helping neighbor in Minneapolis goes back to the key values of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, while others credit the sustained organizing in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

It quickly became evident when ICE and CBP arrived in early December that “the local government could not protect you from the national government,” so neighbors organized their own rapid response teams (Collins 2025). Neighbors discovered the power of collective action. They could not stop the masked, heavily armed agents who had descended on their streets in full battle gear. However, they could film and amplify warnings to neighbors at risk through interlocking encrypted messaging, 3-D printed whistles and cell phones. In addition, hundreds of Minnesota attorneys volunteered to file writs and to help free people detained by ICE. Whistles and car horns of volunteers following ICE vehicles throughout their neighborhoods became the soundtrack of urban resistance.

Pop-up roadblocks and impromptu traffic circles built of signs, pallets, and traffic cones suddenly appeared on major streets, slowing down federal agents and reassuring neighbors with friendly waves. “Filter blockades” prevented ICE vehicles from entering their neighborhoods. “Everyone living here understands that the only people who protect us are ourselves,” one volunteer explained (Collins 2026). As fast as city crews cleared the makeshift barricades, neighbors reconstructed them. “Who controls the public streets?”, the volunteers asked (Hanson, 2026). Faith communities, and nonprofits organized mutual aid. Five pro bono legal services organizations in the Immigration Hub together with the Immigrant Defense Network, a collaborative of more than 90 organizations, trained constitutional observers, and documented enforcement actions. Other coalitions recruited neighborhood observers and coordinated SIGNAL networks to dispatch them. In South Minneapolis, ICE agents realized that the response time of the network of observers was no more than two minutes (Hayes, 2026).

Immigrants afraid to venture outside their homes to shop for groceries, take their children to school, or seek health care for fear of being detained by ICE spurred their neighbors into action. It is estimated that by February, 76,000 people in the Metro Area were food insecure. At a time when the federal government was cutting SNAP benefits, local food banks stepped up. Joyce’s Uptown Food Shelf noted at the beginning of the ICE surge that foot traffic dropped by 50 percent. Volunteers started delivering to families afraid to leave their homes; they wrote addresses on slips of paper, with instructions to swallow them if stopped by ICE. With the realization that more was needed, and 15,000 pounds of donated food were coming in every week, they reached out to 40 schools to distribute food to the families of their students (Press 2026). “I feel so much hope when I see this kind of community response,” Julie Zhou, “a board member of the nonprofit TC Food Justice explained” (Zhou 2026 cited by Hazzard 2026).

A group offering rides, Neighbors Helping Neighbors, started small, offering seven rides every other day, until they were coordinating seventy rides every day for children needing to get to school or adults to work and medical appointments. Anyone can be a neighbor, one volunteer explained. Another added that collective responsibility is what Minneapolis does. Parents from schools and day care centers drove teachers to work, and volunteered for patrol shifts outside the schools.

The Minneapolis community also rallied to support immigrant-owned businesses hit by fear. Many had closed when their employees were afraid to come to work, and others when their customers were not leaving their home, so people who were not vulnerable staged a “dine in” Businesses hosted sign making stations and handed out free coffee and hand warmers to volunteers. Bookstores in particular opened their doors as safe places. Insight Brewing organized a food drive, sending 12,000 pounds of donations to Neighborhood House, an organization assisting immigrants, while another local business, Sociable Cider Works plans to take donations indefinitely, their drive has been so successful.

Neighbors stood up for their neighbors. In the words of a former city councilman, Don Samuels, “Otherness has been replaced with kinship between brown, Black and white Minneapolitans” (Samuels cited by Friedman 2026). Journalist Thomas Friedman, himself from Minnesota, cited this community caring as a Minnesota verb: “neighboring.” Over the winter of 2025–2026, it become clear, Abdirashid Abdi, the principal of a charter school, testified, that “they are not just neighbors only. They are family” (Abidi cited by Friedman 2026).

On a hill in Powderhorn Park, just blocks from George Floyd Square, in one of the most heavily targeted areas for ICE enforcement, adults and kids alike gathered for the annual Art Sled Rally. The homemade cardboard sleds included a six-foot tall “De-Icer, Ice Out of MN” jug on skis, “Love Melts” on flying saucers, cardboard bears on cardboard snowmobiles proclaiming “Resist,” and monarch butterflies declaring “We are Family.” A huge cardboard bowling ball rolled down the incline knocking down human bowling pins named for authoritarian national leaders (Racket 2026).

One week later, tens of thousands of Minneapolis residents showed up in frigid temperatures to march in solidarity with their immigrant neighbors targeted by ICE and CPB agents. People of all ages and backgrounds, many of whom had never taken to the streets before, assembled, summoned by neighborhood Signal chats. They chanted “We are Many, We are One” and “Bring our Neighbors Home.” Clergy sang “We will love our neighbors; we shall not be moved.”

That same day, in the first general strike called in the United States in eighty years, unions, faith leaders, lawmakers, and activist organized “Ice Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom.” Over 700 businesses closed. They posted signs: “We stand with our community. Closed 1/23” and “Allowing time for staff to support our greater community” (Jahn 2026).

Spring came early to the Twin Cities, and ICE melted away at the end of February. Operation Metro Surge, one of the largest immigration enforcement operations in US history, formally ended, leaving less than 500 agents behind in the suburbs and small towns beyond the Metro area. The one thousand immigrant-owned small businesses along the Lake Street corridor of South Minneapolis lost over $46 million, in revenue between December and February, while the citywide economic damage is estimated at more than $200 million (Cueto-Villalobos 2026). Families have been separated and shattered by the deportations.

And yet, there is a faith throughout the city that community organizing forced the federal government to back down and to withdraw in defeat. The McKnight Foundation pointed to “the everyday stories that show how collective effort played out on the ground—people acting without titles, press strategies, or claims of ownership” (Karcher-Ramos, 2026). New spaces in churches, schools, day care centers, libraries, and bookstores that welcomed the community have not closed their doors. Somali language classes multiplied in the schools (Dernbach 2026). Neighbors have buddied with neighbors, checking in on each other. Mutual aid systems remain in place. That is not to forget the families disrupted by deportations and the immeasurable loss sustained by the immigrant communities through the Twin Cities.

On behalf of cities with open doors across America, Jacob Frey called “for this federal government, to stop the unconstitutional conduct that is invading our streets each and every day” (Frey 2026d). The mayor of Minneapolis denounced this “threat to the long-term endurance of our Republic.” City officials might not be in the front seats of federal policy making, he realized, “but make no mistake: we are on the frontlines” (Frey 2026c). With that declaration, the mayor stands in a long tradition of cities defending the rights of all their residents, no matter when or how they arrived.

Conclusion

These case studies spanning the centuries since the establishment of modern nation states suggest that immigration reform need not originate in national legislation or international treaties. Cities, the birthplace of democracy, have functioned as laboratories for an expansive, if informal, citizenship. Municipalities from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century have provided access to rights: to schools, housing and food, public health care, legal defense, and employment. Altona, Hamburg, Brussels, and Minneapolis all created spaces in which human rights claims were recognized despite the exclusions and limitations of national citizenship schemes. In their provisional success, they point toward an alternative framework for immigration policy rooted in local inclusion rather than in border enforcement.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s suggestion that human rights be found in “small places, close to home” is strikingly relevant in an era of fortified national borders, transgressed international treaties, and mass displacement. The lessons to be drawn from the historic case studies is not that cities can act in the place of nation states to resolve the global migration crisis. Instead, the history of cities opening doors demonstrates that local institutions and neighborhood solidarity offer the means for securing the “right to have rights.” Durable alternatives to exclusionary immigration systems may not emerge from national governments or international organizations, but instead grow from the streets, schools, clinics, workplaces, and public spaces where newcomers and established residents come together as neighbors.

In contrast to national immigration policies focused on exclusion that separates citizens from the rest, these urban practices were organized around human interdependence. Hamburg and Altona’s commercial republicanism, Brussels’ municipal guarantees of constitutional civil rights, and Minneapolis’s affirmation of “neighboring” all were rooted in the recognition that cities depend on human mobility, diversity, and social cooperation. Cosmopolitanism has been integral to their understanding of civic virtue. Jacob Frey spoke for all of the cities when he asserted that they epitomized “the common ideals that we hold are essential to the endurance of our great republic” (Frey 2026b). Their informal urban citizenship has served as a parallel system of belonging alongside formal national citizenship.

Their open doors and rights claims grounded in participation and mutual interdependence within neighborhoods, however, have proved as fragile as municipal autonomy. At the end of the eighteenth-century Hamburg and Altona, both inclusive of immigrants, prosperous, and enjoying substantial independence succumbed to Napoleon’s imperial power. Brussels in the nineteenth century had less formal autonomy, but controlled municipal affairs, including issuing residence permits and politicking, within the Belgian capital. Ultimately, it was forced to yield to national security forces pressured by larger foreign powers. The doors opened for refugees and other immigrants could be forcibly closed when political winds on the continent shifted. Minneapolis, with the weakest government of all, may have prevailed against the most powerful nation state. And yet despite its remarkable resistance, the city could not shield its neighbors from detention, deportation, and economic devastation.

Even if nation states continue to monopolize borders, deportation, and citizenship, could a new immigration policy be woven from the grassroots up? What would immigration reform look like if it were based in the neighborhoods where immigrants live, go to school, shop, and seek employment? Are not the rights affirmed in the cities the same ones that the international coterie of refugees identified to the United Nations in 1958? Or will the constraints imposed from above by national policy—from unscalable borders to executive orders refusing work permits for asylum seekers—inevitably shut down even the most tenacious of local organizers? It seems that there is reason for optimism. Cities across the globe appear committed to extending Kant’s hospitality, to expanding rights and transforming abstract commitments to human rights to the daily practices of neighborliness.