There is much talk today of the politics of polarisation, hate, and division. Practice theory helps reveal that contemporary divisions may be more complex, contradictory, and contested than the discourse of division and hate suggests. It also nourishes hope for humanity.

In the first issue of The Journal of Practice Theory, Stephen Kemmis (2025, 111) argued that practice theory can “... throw light on how distributed learning in social ensembles contributes to social movements for cultural, economic, ecological, social, and political transformation.” A vivid example is unfolding before our eyes. In the US, distributed learning in local social ensembles is powering a burgeoning social movement of resistance to the Trump administration’s policy of apprehending, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants.

The US President’s Executive Order, Securing Our Borders (2025, January 30), has ushered in sweeping changes to immigration policy. It is designed, in large part, to fulfil Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign promise “… to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history…” (Council on Foreign Relations 2026, February 27). The Executive Order replaces the decades-long practice of ‘catch and release’ vis-à-vis undocumented immigrants, which is considered to strike a balance between border security and humanitarian concerns, with a prioritisation of detention “… to the maximum extent allowed by law.” Recently, a US Appeals Court ruled that this policy can include the mandatory detention without bond of noncitizens suspected of immigration violations until their removal from the country.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has deployed federal immigration enforcement agents, primarily Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers, to implement the Administration’s mass deportation agenda in many cities. To do so, these agents have adopted an evolving array of practices that are beyond the scope of established federal and state policing policies and practice. Six kinds of practices coming under close legal scrutiny are - use of force, arrests, vehicle stops, street stops, home entry, and workplace enforcement.

Examples of agents’ alarming activities have been widely reported and further supported by video recordings and images from the cameras of bystanders, testimony at Congressional Oversight hearings, and multiple first-hand accounts from eyewitnesses to and victims of these practices. Among the most egregious and tragic cases were the 2026 fatal shootings in Minnesota of two US citizens: poet Renee Good and Veterans Affairs hospital intensive care unit nurse, Alex Pretti, both of whom had, at a minimum, been observing immigration agents (conduct protected by the US Constitution).

Flagrantly abusive, often lawless behaviour appears to have become normalised. Roving bands of masked, unidentifiable agents have engaged in unlawful practices including racial profiling; apprehending suspects without adequate grounds; failing to obtain judicial orders to detain and remove people; entering private and normally protected premises without judicial warrant; exercising indiscriminate brutality in seizing people; detaining US citizens and others with legal rights to be in the US; whisking detainees to out-of-state detention centres, bypassing legal protections; detaining people in appalling conditions; defying judicial orders intended to protect noncitizens due process rights; and defying judicial stay-of-removal orders.

Reuters (2026, February 14) reports 68,000 immigrant detentions - a 75% increase - between Donald Trump’s 2025 presidential inauguration and February 2026. Politico (2026, March 20) reports that by the date of their report, judges had ruled over 7,000 times that the Administration has unlawfully detained immigrants. Several federal prosecutors have resigned due to the overwhelming caseload: over 20,000 lawsuits filed on behalf of immigrant detainees.

The excesses of immigration agents in the US today are disturbing on several fronts. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara notes that their abusive conduct is antithetical to law and policy both in Minnesota and the US. Holocaust and human rights educator Kristin Thompson (MPR News, 2026, January 22) draws parallels between ICE agents’ behaviour and the policing tactics of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany. A former ICE trainer turned whistleblower testified at a Congressional hearing that agents are inadequately trained: officer training days have been reduced by over 40%, and several courses on use of force have been removed from the syllabus (PBS News, 2026, February 24).

The present authors, Emily in the US and Stephen in Australia, have watched in admiration as people in Minnesota - as well as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland Oregon, to name a few - have resisted ICE and CBP excesses by practising ‘good neighbouring’: what Minnesota Governor Tim Walz described in a Facebook post (2026, January 28) as ”... practices of decency, humanity, courage, and common sense.” In response to the excesses of immigration agents, people in Minnesota (and many other places around the US) are expanding the scope and varying the forms of their previous everyday practices, which had long earned Minnesotans the moniker, ‘Minnesota-nice’. As Rachel Hutton said on NPR (2024, August 9):

“People in Minnesota are literally nice, meaning they’re kind. They’re polite. They will help you push your car out of a snowbank if you get stuck in the winter.”

That tradition has now differentiated and evolved to encompass ‘Minnesota-strong’, explained by a reporter for The Atlantic (2026, January 25) this way:

“Again and again, I heard people say they were not protestors but protectors - of their values, of their communities, of the Constitution.”

Examples abound. Daily, Minnesotans have engaged in practices of care for their neighbours: bringing food and assistance to those cut off from work and school; caring for grief-stricken members of families now torn apart; taking students to and from school; sharing the location of ICE agents (via free apps like ICEBlock and ICE Activity Tracker); undergoing training as constitutional observers in record numbers and video-recording ICE agents with their phones; forming cordons to protect the vulnerable; and - a practice that travelled to Minnesota from protesters in Chicago - using whistles to alert residents to the presence of ICE agents.

One poignant report of selfless citizen practices is that of Minneapolis mother ‘Bri’, who expressed and delivered breast milk, diapers, and wipes for babies whose mothers had been detained by ICE. (In ways like these, Bri’s donation network has supported over 500 families).

Another example is the practice of tow-truck operator Juan Leon, who picks up and returns to their families - gratis - the abandoned vehicles of people seized by ICE agents.

These citizens are practising evolving forms of good neighbouring that expand previous repertoires of good neighbouring practices, incorporating new discourses (‘Minnesota-strong’ and ‘protectors’), new activities (constitutional observing, whistle-blowing to alert people that ICE agents are nearby), new social relations (supporters taking vulnerable students to school and adults to work), and new projects (providing breast milk to babies, returning cars to families). These practices of care have also been complemented by new practices of protection (forming cordons around ICE agents).

Across the US, people demonstrate they are well-versed in good neighbouring practices. They have reinvigorated practice traditions of civility that emerged in the beginnings of humanity - the practices of the Good Samaritan, through which innumerable generations of humans have cared for the stranger at the gate. Some Minnesotans’ practices of good neighbouring may also reflect mutual aid traditions fostered by midwestern winters, as well as farming traditions in which people relied on neighbours to build a barn or bring in a harvest.

The practice tradition of good neighbouring now confronts a practice tradition of competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky, Way & Ziblatt, 2026) that is likewise woven into the fabric of the American republic (as in many nations). These two sets of practices, in obvious tension, coexist, clash, and evolve in relation to one another in American cities, towns, and neighbourhoods: a struggle between a set of distributed practices rooted in communal lifeworld values of love, care, and protection and another rooted in hierarchical system values of competitive authoritarianism, compliance, and control.

The implementation of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation agenda across the US has refreshed and expanded both clusters of practices. The actions of ICE agents and the Minnesotans resisting them have fostered the evolution of new practice-arrangement bundles (Schatzki 2012, 16) and new practice architectures composed of discursive, material, and social conditions and arrangements that shape and support people’s ways of thinking, speaking, working, and relating to others and the world (Kemmis 2022).

Some of these emerging practice architectures support good neighbouring and help people to curb ICE excesses. One example is the document-and-record training offered by the national No Kings Coalition, which attracted more than 200,000 participants in January 2026.

At the same time, the practices of ICE agents and the practice architectures that support them are likewise evolving, in response to citizen solidarity, resistance, observation and reporting. One such architecture is the inventive self-protective public relations machinery of the Department of Homeland Security, its former Secretary Kristi Noem, and DHS spokespeople who branded some victims of immigration agents’ brutality as ‘domestic terrorists’ even before incidents were properly investigated and shielded perpetrators of ICE violence from prosecution. Another is the DHS practice of purchasing warehouses to house detainees (provoking citizen protests and, in several states, legislation banning such detention centres).

At a time in the US when practices of authoritarianism have been unleashed against immigrants - the strangers at the gate - millions of American citizens have responded with care, compassion, and love: practices of good neighbouring. People and communities across the US are learning, recovering, and renewing these practices. Minnesota may seem like an island where these values are particularly prominent, but the practices of Minnesotans echo and resonate across the US and around the world. They remind everyone what it is to be human, to care, and to be a good neighbour in threatening times.

The practices of good neighbouring as both care and resistance - prominently on display in Minnesota and elsewhere - are travelling practices (Wilkinson et al. 2013) that move through a vast web of capillaries of care. They are travelling to thousands of communities. For example, they are now flourishing in the practice repertoires of people in Emily’s community in Boulder, Colorado and in the practice architectures her local network is assembling to sustain them - such as meetings to discuss local actions, to identify resources for immigrant neighbours to access, and to share updates about local ICE operations.

Donald J Trump and the Department of Homeland Security may have wanted to rid the US of criminal immigrants and to remove ”the worst of the worst” residing within US borders, but in their violent pursuit of that goal, they have ignited an extraordinary counter-movement that recovers the profound humanity in the hearts of millions in the US and beyond. It has revived a moral impulse as old as humanity itself - to embrace, care for, and protect the stranger at the gate. This impulse resides not only in human hearts but in everyday human social practices of good neighbouring.

Contemporary upsurges of good neighbouring are also being revealed in the responses of allies and partners to other arenas of US policy like the ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, the war against Iran, and Trump’s rush to resuscitate the oil industry. In these arenas too, people who see themselves as citizens of a shared world are reaching out to one another to refresh and renew practices of good neighbouring - for each other and for the planet.

References

Kemmis, S. (2022) Transforming Practices: Changing the World with the Theory of Practice Architectures. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-8973-4

Kemmis, S. (2025) ‘Practice Theory Perspectives on Learning and Social Change’, The Journal of Practice Theory, 1, 107-113. https://doi.org/10.71936/96np-s549

Kemmis, S., Edwards-Groves, C. and Grootenboer, P. (2025) Reframing Learning: Changing Practices, Sites, Histories, Lives. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003581710

Levitsky, S., Way, L., and Ziblatt, D. (2026) ‘The Price of American Authoritarianism: What Can Reverse Democratic Decline?’, Foreign Affairs, January/February. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/american-authoritarianism-levitsky-way-ziblatt

Schatzki, T. (2012) ‘A Primer on Practices: Theory and Research. In Higgs, J., Barnett, R., Billett, S., Hutchings, M. and Trede, F. (Eds.) Practice-Based Education: Perspectives and Strategies, pp. 13–26. Sense. Part of: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6209-128-3

Wilkinson, J., Olin, A., Lund, T. and Stjernstrøm, E. (2013) ‘Understanding Leading as Travelling Practices’, School Leadership & Management, 33(3), 224–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2013.773886

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the many Minnesotans who inspired us to recognise good neighbouring as a practice, and to the editors for their generous and constructive suggestions.

[1] Corresponding author – contact: stephen@stephenkemmis.com