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.”