How Minneapolis Fought ICE With Dildos

A Feb. 7 protest at the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis became decidedly phallic when hundreds of protestors chucked purple and pink dildos at vehicles driving out of the gates of the facility that houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) office.

“Fuck you” chants resounded as the dildos bounced off a sheriff’s SUV. Police scrambled to gather the dildos and toss them over a fence, away from the protestors screaming “eat a dick.”

Since early January, near daily protests in Minneapolis have demanded an end to the federal occupation of the city, where 3,000 immigration agents were deployed until a drawdown in late February. The protestors have been largely non-violent. The ICE agents have not, leading to the killings of two local residents, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

This particular anti-ICE protest employed an unlikely projectile: the humble rubber shaft.

Operation Dildo Blitz

The Minneapolis dildo protest was the brainchild of Rook T. Winchester, a pseudonym for a man who declined to use his legal name for safety reasons.

Much like Portland’s inflatable “protest frogs” and Chicago’s speedo-clad demonstrator, the point of “Operation Dildo Blitz” is what’s known as tactical frivolity—that is, a funny form of protest meant to expose as absurd the government’s claims that protesters are dangerous or violent.

Protesting absurdly, Winchester believes, also irks the immigration agents in a particular way. Mockery, he told Rewire News Group, is “kryptonite for these fascists.”

He got the idea after meeting a young woman during a prayer vigil outside the Florida ICE detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” After her father was arrested by ICE and transported to that facility, she moved in with a conservative aunt who supports President Donald Trump.

The aunt later kicked her out for being outspoken about her political beliefs, Winchester recalled. In response, the woman “put a suction cup dildo on her aunt’s door as a message for her to … go fuck herself,” Winchester said. He decided dildos could send a similar signal in Minneapolis.

One of the anti-ICE protestors, Russell “Jolly” Ellis, nicknamed the action “Operation Dildo Blitz” in a nod to Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s aggressive September 2025 immigration enforcement operation in Chicago.

This is not the first time sex toys have been used as a political message.

A 1768 Japanese parody of a samurai etiquette book for women replaced pictures of origami gift wrap with dildos. The authors of the 2013 book Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art took that insertion to be a rebuke of the samurais’ pretensions.

In 2015, an artist inserted dildos in place of guns in Republican leadership’s photos in a bid for more gun control. And in 2016, students at the University of Texas staged a “Cocks Not Glocks” action, where they toted dildos around to protest a concealed carry law.

Five days after “Operation Dildo Blitz,” Border Czar Tom Homan announced that the Minneapolis “surge operation” concluded. As of Feb. 25, roughly 500 agents remained.

Joy is resistance

Winchester knew that Minneapolis-based sex toy store Smitten Kitten had transformed into a donation center that provides supplies to people affected by the ICE operation. So, he called the store to see if they had any dildos they could donate for a protest at the Graduate Hotel in Minneapolis in late January.

“Fuck ICE, how can I help you?” the Smitten Kitten clerk answered.

“We’re going to protest ICE. We’d like to bring some dildos with us. … Can we stop in and get some?” Winchester asked.

The store was game. Winchester and his friend swung by Smitten Kitten and left with dozens of discounted dildos. They then took a Lyft to the Graduate Hotel.

They arrived to a “couple hundred” protesters making noise and hoisting signs. Winchester and his friend distributed the dildos throughout the crowd.

“What people do with these dildos after we hand them out is on them,” Winchester said, recalling that protesters “juggle them, they attach them to their helmets, they wave them.”

The mood shifted from intense chanting and noisemaking to a lighter atmosphere—until a protester tossed a dildo at the feet of an ICE agent. It didn’t touch the agent, according to Winchester.

He claimed that, “No one was hurt, other than their egos.”

Nonetheless, Winchester said, he believes the agent retaliated by spraying pepper balls.

“I didn’t see the pepper ball get shot, but I certainly breathed it in,” Winchester said.

Natalie Johnson, CEO of Minneapolis-based sex toy manufacturer Like a Kitten, saw a video of the protester being pepper sprayed on social media. She said the violence shows “how much lack of control there is over these federal agents.”

“It’s that whole culture of fragile masculinity, and nothing puts a point on that as much as just throwing a dick at their feet,” Johnson added.

Dildos made another appearance at an anti-ICE protest about a week later outside the Whipple Federal Building. And this time, there were a lot more of them.

Johnson got connected to Winchester and asked if protest attendees would need more dildos. He said they did. She offered to donate 500 dildos. She purchased them for about $2 a piece from a local bank that was liquidating excess inventory from a recently shuttered Minneapolis adult store.

Winchester drove to Johnson’s warehouse and filled up his Subaru Crosstrek’s backseat and hatchback with boxes of eight-inch dildos, in colors ranging from clear to Day-Glo pink to purple. This time, he and a friend drove to the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis, wheeled the dildos out in a wagon. They passed them out to the crowd of protesters that the dildo distributors estimated to be in the hundreds.

Ellis arrived at the protest around 11:15 a.m. He was covering it for his Instagram and working as a “designated dildo retriever.” After protestors threw the dildos over the fence in front of the Whipple Building, he would gather them before police did.

“There’s this ridiculous juxtaposition of these agents that are armed to the teeth with masks on, and bulletproof vests, and AR-15s, and we were literally armed with rubber dicks,” Ellis told RNG.

Ellis said the protest felt different than the others he’d attended at Whipple.

“There was joy because people felt like they could express some of that righteous anger,” Ellis said. “Joy is resistance. Fascism wants you to be bitter and miserable and angry and wants you to just give up.”

After about nine cars had been pelted with dildos, Ellis said he was “certain” he’d be arrested, even though he wasn’t throwing any dildos. He’d previously seen protestors being arrested outside of Whipple for throwing bologna and snowballs.

“Then it occurred to me exactly why they’re not arresting nobody, because then they have to have an arrest report that says ‘arrested for throwing dildos,’ ” Ellis hypothesized.

Winchester and Ellis both left as tensions rose.

“When [the dildos] all started getting lobbed over the fence, and I heard a car get hit, then I was like, all right, well, I guess the distribution is done, because I’m not there to hurt anyone,” Winchester said. “We’re nonviolent.”

Eventually, at least 42 people were arrested at the Whipple protest for failure to disperse. The Hennepin County Sheriff reported that chunks of ice were thrown and that an officer was hit in the head. Winchester disputes that account.

When Johnson watched videos of the protests, she saw some commenters saying that the protest showed “how crazy and unhinged everyone on the left is.” But she thinks it’s absurd to be more upset about throwing dildos than about taking children from their parents and killing civilians.

“Why are you having this reaction to a dildo when you are not having this kind of reaction to human life?” Johnson asked.

The supply is cut off

When protestors from across the country contact Johnson to ask if she can supply sex toys, she suggests they go to their local sex toy store. Johnson’s dildo supply line has ended.

Recently, when she called her bank contact to purchase more of the liquidated supply, the man said he’d been informed that the bank could no longer sell dildos. He said management had expressed concern that its customers would be upset about their bank selling sex toys.

Johnson believes the decision was political—that the bank cut her off because the dildos were used to protest ICE. (The bank in question declined to comment on this matter.)

Though her supply in Minneapolis has been cut off, the anti-ICE dildo movement has spread nationwide, most recently at a State of the Swamp protest in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 24. Winchester brought a suitcase of dildos to distribute to protestors. The Portland protest frog also joined the demonstration in the capital.

“It’s in line with the spirit of the Merry Pranksters or Abbie Hoffman,” Winchester said, referring to some notoriously mischievous activists from U.S. history.

ICE defenders “want to have this narrative that we’re all a blood thirsty, violent mob. But once you stick dildos in our hands and we embrace that absurdity, it becomes harder for them to fight.”

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