The Tamesis
Last summer, Katie raised the issue of gun reform in a moms group chat the day after the deadly school shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“This is where we all talk about where to send our kids to summer camp or what our experience with ear tubes was like,” she said. All of the more than 200 mothers who participated in the discussion have children who attend an elementary school near Linden Hills, just a 10-minute drive from the Annunciation. “We started talking about politics. When it started drowning out other everyday topics that moms find useful, I decided to create a thread specifically around politics.”
That day, Katie (who asked that only her first name be used out of fear of retaliation — like the other moms cited in this article) created the “LH Policy Chat” group on the encrypted private messaging app Signal. “After the shooting, it was a little quieter, but now that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is in the city, it has a new look,” she said.
Mom groups have become a hot topic in 2026. But while some groups, like the one described in a viral article by Ashley Tisdale French tailoring—Trading was largely the passive-aggressive behavior of mean girls, while other progressive-minded trades were outraged by ICE and became a vital resource for grassroots organizing, information sharing, and mutual aid.
“This is the opposite of a toxic mom chat,” Katie said, noting that other action plans that emerged from her group chat include paying rent for families unable to work due to ICE concerns and boycotting agencies like Target where employees have been detained by ICE agents. “We’re facing a lot of adversity right now in Minnesota, but this shows me how much people want to connect and protect each other,” Katie said.
“As a mother, you have to be very organized because you spend a lot of time multitasking and taking care of other people,” said Eliana, another member of the Minnesota LH policy chat room. (As of a few days ago, the group had been renamed the Southwest Minneapolis Policy Chat and expanded into the neighborhood. It now has nearly 400 members.) When one of the members told the group that their sibling had been violently detained by ICE as a bystander, Eliana, with the help of a lawyer friend who worked for the ACLU, helped another mom find their sibling. “So it makes sense that we all want to expand these skills into our communities.”
Zoe, a mother of three in St. Paul, Minnesota, said some of her mom group chats (“my high school friends, my birthing class chat, my older daughter’s preschool group”) have become political lately. But group chats, which started out as a way to plan casual pickleball gatherings, have become downright radical. “We were all exhausted moms of toddlers when it developed,” she said. Today, the group of 40 still gets together to play pickleball, with one mom occasionally requesting size 8 boots because her two-year-old outgrew them in a week, but they also regularly discuss ICE’s rapid response and new mutual aid needs.
“I cannot stress enough that ICE is present every day and everywhere in the Twin Cities,” Zoe continued. “You don’t need to go out to the exact spot where Renee Goode was killed. ICE is on my block, in every day care center.”
Such chats are proliferating not just in Minnesota, currently a hotbed of ICE activity. Morgan, a Dallas-Fort Worth mom, found people who share her views in a predominantly conservative district in her “F The Patriarchy” moms group chat. She recalled her family’s decision to cancel their Disney+ subscription after Jimmy Kimmel was suspended. “My colleague suggested I watch a show and I told her we no longer had a streaming platform because we decided to cut our ties after Jimmy Kimmel’s free speech was suppressed,” she said. “She just looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re one of those people.'” I’m proud to say I am; I have two daughters and I’m always thinking about their future. “
