The day after last summer’s lethal school shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Katie went to her mom group chat to raise the issue of gun reform.
“It had been a place for all of us to talk about where we are sending our kids to summer camp or how our experience with ear tubes went,” she says. All of the moms in the 200-something chat had kids at an elementary school in the neighborhood of Linden Hills, a 10-minute drive from Annunciation. “We started to talk about politics. When it started to drown out the other daily topics that moms find helpful, I decided to create one specifically for political issues.”
That was the day Katie (who asked to be identified only by her first name—as did the other moms quoted in this story—for fear of retaliation) made the “LH Policy Chat” group on the encrypted private messaging app Signal. “It quieted down a bit in the time since the shooting, but now that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has come to the city, it’s taken on a whole new life,” she says.
Mom groups have been a hot topic in 2026. But while some—like the one described by Ashley Tisdale French in a viral essay for The Cut—trade mainly in mean-girl passive aggression, other, progressive-minded ones have been piqued by ICE, becoming important resources for grassroots organizing, information sharing, and mutual aid.
“This is the opposite of the toxic mom chat,” Katie says, noting that other plans of action that have come from her group chat include paying the rent for a family unable to work because of ICE concerns and boycotting establishments like Target where employees have been detained by ICE agents. “We are facing a lot of adversity in Minnesota right now, but this is showing me how much people want to connect with and protect each other,” Katie says.
“You have to be good at organizing to be a mom, because you spend so much time multitasking and taking care of other people,” says Eliana, another member of the Minnesota-based LH Policy Chat. (As of a few days ago, it was renamed the “Southwest Minneapolis Policy Chat,” having expanded beyond the immediate neighborhood. It now has almost 400 members.) When one of the members told the group that their sibling had been violently detained by ICE as a bystander, Eliana was able to help the other mom locate their sibling through help from a lawyer friend who works at the ACLU. “So it only makes sense we would all want to expand those skills to our community.”
Zoe, a mother of three in St. Paul, Minnesota, says that she has a handful of mom group chats (“my friends from high school, my birthing class chat, my eldest daughter’s preschool group”) that have turned political of late. But it’s the group chat that started as a way to plan casual pickleball meet-ups that’s gone full-on radical. “When it formed, we were exhausted moms of toddlers,” she says. These days, the 40-person group still meets up for pickleball, and a mom will occasionally sound the call for size 8 boots since her two-year-old outgrew theirs during the week, but they also regularly discuss ICE rapid responses and new mutual aid needs.
“I can’t emphasize enough how every day and everywhere ICE is in the Twin Cities,” Zoe continues. “You don’t need to go out of your way or to the exact spot where Renee Good was killed. ICE is on my block, at every single daycare.”
These sorts of chats aren’t only proliferating in Minnesota, the current hotbed of ICE activity. In her “F The Patriarchy” mom group chat, Dallas-Fort Worth-based mom Morgan has found people who share her politics in an otherwise predominantly conservative area. She recalls an experience after her family decided to cancel their Disney+ subscription in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension. “My coworker had suggested that I watch a show, and I told her we didn’t have the streaming platform anymore because we had decided to cut our ties after Jimmy Kimmel’s free speech had been repressed,” she says. “She just looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re one of those people.’ I was proud to say that I was; I have two daughters and I am constantly thinking about their future.”