The day after last summer’s lethal school shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, 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 ICE agents have detained employees. “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 Elianna, another member of LH Policy Chat. (As of a few days ago, it was renamed Southwest Minneapolis Policy Chat, having expanded beyond the immediate neighborhood. It now has almost 400 members.) “So it only makes sense we would all want to expand those skills to our community.” When one of the members told the group that ICE had violently detained their sibling as a bystander, Elianna was able to help that mom locate the sibling through help from a lawyer friend who works at the ACLU.
Zoe, a mother of three in St. Paul, says that she has a handful of mom group chats that have turned political of late (“my friends from high school, my birthing-class chat, my eldest daughter’s preschool group”). But it’s the group chat that started as a way to plan casual pickleball meetups 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 day care.”
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 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.”
Former librarian Lindsey, who lives in Tennessee, says her first political mom group chat formed years ago, when she went viral for testifying on behalf of her nonbinary 16-year-old at the school board meeting. Since then, the group has organized to pay off school lunch debt for seniors so they can graduate and stocked the local health center with feminine-care products. She’s also part of another group chat, Mom-Dem, that’s filled with mothers from the local Democratic Party. “Last election, we didn’t have a Democrat running for office,” she says. “We have recruited 30 candidates to run for local office so far.” It’s no small feat for a Democrat in very red Tennessee.
Each of the mothers I spoke to discussed how strange and complicated it is to be a politically minded parent on the left in this country right now. “Add it to my tab,” Zoe says. “I’ll do this alongside working, getting groceries, getting my kids signed up for swim lessons—because when I imagine myself in the shoes of a mom with three kids just like me, who can’t leave the house or even look out the window because she’s scared, not only can I not tune it out, but I also need to feel like I’m taking care of my family and my neighbors.”
For Lindsey, it’s simple: “We are taking what we have been forced by society to do—survive, thrive, and organize—and we’re turning it into a movement. Moms get shit done.”
