Like countless other leaders at Minnesota-based organizations, Chris Knopf has spent the first part of 2026 trying to support his staff as best he can. Knopf is the executive director of a Minnesota nonprofit group with two-dozen employees, many of whom have been impacted by the federal assault on the Twin Cities.

One staffer was at the scene when masked federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti. Another staffer has a child in the same school attended by Liam Ramos, the five-year-old whose abduction by immigration agents sparked national outrage. Some of Knopf’s staff members have spent time out on the streets with whistles and cell phones observing ICE kidnappings or taking shifts guarding preschools from ICE incursions.

Knopf’s staff is doing all this work to protect their neighbors even as they spend time at their day job trying to prevent another federal attack on Minnesota — an attempt by Congress to open the way for a pair of giant copper mines on the edge of the famed Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Knopf is the executive director of Friends of the Boundary Waters, an environmental group that has spent 50 years protecting the labyrinth of lakes that is the country’s most popular federal wilderness. He sees a clear parallel between the siege of the Twin Cities and the effort by mining corporations and Republicans in Washington, DC, to dig up the North Woods. “This assault on the Boundary Waters is part and parcel of the Trump administration’s assault on Minnesota,” Knopf said in a recent interview. “And so we in Minnesota need to stand up for ourselves, just as we’re doing with ICE right now.”

In the second instalment of his new column, The Lookout, Jason Dove Mark writes about the Trump administration’s efforts to revive plans for two copper mines on the edge of a beloved wilderness.

Photo by briandjan607 / Flickr

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