Minneapolis was not the war zone I expected to find. Depending on who you are and where you live, things can seem, for a few fleeting moments, almost normal, like a few blocks or neighborhoods over people aren’t being tear gassed or rounded up by ICE or, in two tragic cases, being gunned down by federal agents. Even now some people walk their dogs, run errands and buy groceries, meet friends for dinner and drinks. Daily life has become sinister in its banality, because Minneapolis remains a city under siege. ICE and CBP agents roam the streets, though their tactics have shifted as of late: No longer acting like an occupying army, the Department of Homeland Security now operates like secret police. They do their best to blend in, to look like the people they terrorize, and in this, they often fail. Everyone knows that they’re there, that they’re watching. But they aren’t everywhere — not at once. The fear is that they will arrive at any moment, that they will take someone, that they will arrest or attack or kill anyone who gets in their way.
These fears have been realized. Children and parents have been snatched off the street while walking to school. People have been taken from their jobs and grabbed mid-commute, their empty cars left on the streets, hazard lights still flashing. And so those who are most vulnerable — immigrants at risk of deportation, US citizens who have learned that DHS will, depending on the color of a person’s skin, detain first and ask questions later — have retreated into their homes.
DHS has met unprecedented pushback in Minnesota. Residents of the Twin Cities have done everything in their power to hinder the occupation. Locals follow ICE on the streets, jeer agents outside their hotel rooms, and kick them out of restaurants. A robust mutual aid network has emerged virtually overnight to provide the most basic resources to families that have been forced into hiding. This widespread resistance has fueled a triumphalist narrative, one in which the community has banded together to protect their immigrant neighbors and Minnesota Nice has triumphed over fascism and xenophobia.
This is true and yet it isn’t. ICE has been slowed but not thwarted. Most national reporters, myself included, have left, but the story isn’t over. The siege is ongoing, and it has created a noticeable void. ICE may have lost the battle for public opinion, and its operation in the Twin Cities may be hampered by local pushback, but it has succeeded in one respect: It has instilled terror in Minnesota’s immigrant communities, forcing them into the shadows. The question that remains is how long this can go on, and how the community can rebuild once it ends.
“‘Odd’ doesn’t seem like a good enough word, but it’s the one I have, and it’s a very Minnesotan one, but it’s odd to live here right now,” Kai Shelley, a senior policy aide for Minneapolis City Council member Aisha Chughtai, told me. Chughtai, the council majority leader, represents Whittier, the neighborhood where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed.
“You walk down the street of Alex Pretti’s memorial and every business has a sign that says ‘ICE OUT’ or ‘Come in and get warm’ or is offering free water bottles and opening up their restrooms. There’s a lot of unity and resistance in that,” Shelley said. “So many people have stepped up to do rapid response and mutual aid. But the undercurrent of all of that, and the reason it’s happening, is because our immigrant neighbors can’t leave their homes, are afraid to send their kids to school, are afraid to do pickup and drop-off at schools, are afraid to go to work, can’t go to work, are afraid to be in the neighborhood. Immigrant-owned businesses are closing or are going to close. We won’t know the full toll for months.” Each person grabbed off the street and removed from the community causes a ripple effect. Every arrest is a warning: You could be next.
“There’s a real contradiction here right now. It’s eerie and it’s terrifying, and it’s inspiring and there’s resistance here. It’s always both.”
The occupation is inescapable. It’s all anyone can talk about. It’s visible on every street and every storefront, as is the community’s response. Signs on every door warn ICE not to enter without a warrant. Bundled-up people stand like sentinels, whistles hanging from their necks, watching over their blocks despite subzero temperatures. Groups of friends drive around their neighborhoods in search of ICE agents who troll around in unmarked cars. Each morning and afternoon, volunteers in neon vests station themselves outside the city’s schools to ensure students and parents make it home safely. No one person is doing everything, but nearly everyone who is out on the street is doing something.
“I couldn’t be a bystander anymore,” Sid, one of three people patrolling a corner of Lake Street, told me on a sunny, freezing afternoon. Sid, Kay, and a friend who declined to be named were stationed outside Karmel Mall, a once-bustling Somali shopping center just blocks from the site of Pretti’s killing. The vilification of the cities’ Somali residents, Kay said, is “disgusting, especially because the immigrant community here — and I’m sure across the nation — is so vibrant and supportive.” As we spoke, a Somali man exited Karmel Mall and thanked the patrollers for their work, offering them sambusas and chai to keep warm. “We can fight ICE, but we can’t fight the winter,” he told us. “I moved here because of the people. Really nice people, really good-hearted people.”
Some of this infrastructure was in place long before DHS kicked off Operation Metro Surge, its campaign in the Twin Cities. The American Indian Movement, founded in 1968, resumed armed patrols shortly after ICE descended on Minneapolis. Mutual aid organizations that sprung up around the city amid the racial justice protests of 2020 have reported an upsurge in demand, both from volunteers and people in need of support. This fact, too, is inescapable: People are missing. Cut off from the world, immigrants throughout the Twin Cities have been forced to turn over some of the most mundane and intimate parts of daily life to their neighbors: school pickup and drop-off, grocery shopping, and, in neighborhoods where ICE has been especially active, even trash collection, to avoid the possibility that agents will grab someone in the few yards between their front door and the curb.
Jae Yates, an organizer with the Community Aid Network, first noticed a shift in mid-January. The organization, founded in the wake of the George Floyd uprising, has distributed food and diapers to hundreds of families each week since the summer of 2020. Early this year, some regulars stopped showing up. “Now it’s mostly white folks picking up groceries on behalf of their neighbors,” Yates said. “Everyone who’s not white is terrified to go outside if they have any kind of precarity around citizenship.”
Even those who feel secure in their citizenship are at risk. White skin and American birth did not protect Renee Good or Alex Pretti. The government has suggested that observers are part of a vast conspiracy, and some protesters have been arrested on federal charges, while others say ICE has followed them to their homes. Because of this heightened surveillance, the majority of people I spoke to asked to be referred to by pseudonyms, often to discuss otherwise unremarkable activities like buying groceries for their neighbors or forming community watch programs.
Parallel ways of life have emerged. Nearly everyone I met said they feel more connected to their community than ever, but they also spoke of a glaring absence. Untold numbers of people are now cut off from the world beyond their doorstep. These are twin cities, operating in tandem; one cannot exist without the other.
For Jamila Keisar, a lifelong resident of the Twin Cities, the ICE occupation is reminiscent of past government abuses. “Minnesota isn’t new to this,” she told me. “I think of George Floyd, I think of Philando Castile, of Daunte Wright, of Jamar Clark. These were all super high-profile murders at the hands of law enforcement in our city. And these are just the ones we know about because they were caught on body cameras.”
Keisar, a Somali American therapist, said the DHS presence has resurfaced old traumas among some of her clients, many of whom were already victims of racial profiling. The vibrant community response to this latest crisis, she told me, is bittersweet. “I hear a lot of people say, ‘Why can’t things go back to how they were before?’” she said, “but when you ask communities of color how things were then, they’ll say, ‘Not great!’ But I’m hopeful.”
If this feels like a breaking point, it may be sobering to remember that there have been other ruptures before. George Floyd’s murder sparked worldwide protests, but eventually, for some people, life went on. “I think it’s really easy to go back to the status quo,” Keisar said. “My hope is that all the folks who seem to be waking up now can sustain themselves in a way that allows them to participate in this movement, because work still needs to be done even after ICE leaves.”
Last December, shortly after DHS announced Metro Surge, Keisar started offering free Sunday sessions for immigrants. “The number one thing I’m seeing is isolation and a lack of social connection folks are now experiencing because they’re sheltering in place,” she told me. Her clients are no longer “able to just stop at the coffee shop and have a small conversation in the way that you’re doing here today,” she said. “I fear what the ramifications will be of this moment and if things continue in this way.” Life has become so unbearable for some of her clients, Keisar told me, that they’ve started thinking about self-deporting.
A vital segment of the city’s population is now missing. Immigrant-owned businesses along Central Avenue have closed their doors; a few restaurants have cautiously reopened, shifting to takeout-only to protect workers and patrons alike. On a recent Sunday, Karmel Mall was nearly deserted. “It’s been empty the past few weeks,” the owner of a women’s clothing shop told me. The mall’s largely Somali American clientele has stopped coming, and its businesses are struggling. At a dinner in Minneapolis’ Standish neighborhood, a woman sidled up to me after learning I was a reporter, telling me her niece teaches English as a second language at a school that has been targeted by “right-wing agitators.” She showed me her latest attendance numbers: Out of 26 kids in her first-period class, just one showed up. A new tag has popped up, a haunting complement to the “FUCK ICE” and “ICE OUT” graffiti that has become ubiquitous throughout the city. Stenciled on walls and street signs, it reads: “A NEIGHBOR WAS TAKEN HERE.”
“I deliver food to families that have not left their house in six weeks,” Pam, who asked that her last name be withheld, told me over breakfast. She and seven friends had just left a movement class — “You have to bring down your nervous system if you’re going to be out there,” one of them explained — and were back to discussing the inescapable. Nearly everyone in Minneapolis, they said, was fighting back. They weren’t the first to tell me about Smitten Kitten, a local sex shop that had started collecting diapers, nonperishable food, and other essentials to distribute to the community. “I bought two gift cards for my friends,” one of them told me, “and a little something for myself too, but I won’t tell you what it was.”
That morning, Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s “border czar,” had held a press conference announcing an ICE “drawdown,” with the caveat that he’d be “staying till the problem’s gone.” Homan had recently replaced Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol official in charge of the Minneapolis operation, after pushback. (The press conference had been scheduled for 7AM, likely to keep protesters at bay; unable to get on the media list before the RSVP cutoff, I watched the stream from my hotel room.) According to an internal ICE memo that leaked to Reuters, agents had been instructed to focus on immigrants with criminal records and advised to refrain from engaging with “agitators,” a practice that had clearly only succeeded in “inflaming the situation.”
The gaggle of women didn’t buy it. Homan “is just Stephen Miller with a potbelly and Bovino in a suit,” one of them said. “They’re just trying to control the narrative. They’re trying to say things have changed, and they haven’t changed.”
At the press conference, a sycophantic correspondent for the right-wing news outlet Real America’s Voice had thanked Homan on behalf of “all the folks out there in America that voted for this, that want mass deportations.” He also asked whether the administration planned on arresting “the leadership on the Signal chats or the WhatsApp chats that are organizing the attacks against you, obstruction against you.” Homan declined to answer. “I’m not going to show our hand,” he said, “but they’re going to be held accountable. Justice is coming.”
The administration has characterized Minnesotans’ resistance as organized, hierarchical, externally funded, and above all, dangerous. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem accused Renee Good of engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Stephen Miller, one of Donald Trump’s closest advisers and the architect of much of his immigration policy, called Alex Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin.” The FBI is reportedly investigating the Signal chats locals use to monitor ICE activity.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton, a Minneapolis resident and host of the leftist podcast Death Panel, told me ICE showed up to her house on two consecutive afternoons while she was alone with her 11-month-old baby. Adler-Bolton, who said she’s been showing up for her neighbors “in really boring ways,” believes she was targeted for speaking out against ICE, not for her mutual aid work. Two days after I met Adler-Bolton in Powderhorn Park, federal agents tear gassed observers there, just yards from where we had stood.
The first time ICE came by, “there was a guy in the front in hideous fucking Oakleys, he had a big rifle in his lap, and he was holding the barrel of the rifle. He looked right at me, pulled out his phone, and took a picture,” she said. Five cars showed up the next day. This time, she said, the agents got out of their cars, walked around her house, and took pictures through her windows. “They were making their presence known. It was obviously intimidation.”
In addition to a custom-built Palantir tool ICE relies on to identify deportation targets, DHS is reportedly using two facial-recognition tools to track protesters and observers. One woman who was photographed by an ICE agent had her Global Entry privileges revoked three days after the encounter, according to court filings. Both DHS and the Department of Justice have posted photos of detained protesters on social media, calling them “rioters.”
Everyone I met in Minneapolis pushed back against the government’s characterizations of the resistance. Instead, they described informal networks of friends coming together to support their neighbors. “What we’re building is a movement outside the traditional nonprofit sector,” Pam, one of the women I met at the diner, said. “It’s so much more nimble, and it’s hyper-local.”
Pam told me she had helped crowdfund rent for five families on her block. Another told me that after the man who plows snow on her street got picked up by ICE, their neighbors pooled money to hire him a lawyer. When a friend from out of town asked her for a list of nonprofits to donate to, she told her to send it to a trusted local who could pass it directly to people in need. “Send cash to people on the ground,” she said. “The entire thing is about trust.”
On the morning of Alex Pretti’s killing, Mac*, a retired Army medic, was putting together a grocery list. She popped into one of her Signal chats, saw the news, and immediately headed over. “Things got really spicy really fast,” Mac told me. After declaring an unlawful assembly, the police alternated between firing tear gas into the crowd and pushing protesters back. The protesters had been boxed in — the Minneapolis Police Department surrounded them on one side, the Minnesota State Patrol on the other. “It’s what I call a fatal funnel,” Mac said. “One way in, one way out.”
Protesters started calling for medics. “That was when we got into the fray,” Mac said. “We run in, and I just see this person holding their hand — they had caught, likely, a rubber bullet, a nonlethal round. Their hand was shattered. We bandaged them up, and then EMS arrived and we got them out.”
A couple dozen protesters were arrested at the site of Pretti’s killing. After being released from the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, some may have run into Julie Prokes, one of the many volunteers who has become a fixture in Whipple’s parking lot. I spoke to Prokes on a frigid morning as he loaded a folding table with hot chocolate, instant noodles, and assorted snacks to distribute to protesters and released detainees alike. “I took the week off work,” he said, adding that he suspects most of the people who come out of Whipple are US citizens. “I don’t necessarily know their citizenship status. I don’t ask. I’m just out here to offer aid however I can.”
As we spoke, Prokes pointed to a building across the way, which he said was an apartment complex for homeless veterans. “These guys over there are dealing with PTSD, and now you’ve got people out here playing military, throwing chemical irritants, and disrupting their normal flow of life,” Prokes said, adding that the food vendors that typically work with veterans’ services are now afraid to send their drivers near Whipple.
I ran into Prokes again on Friday morning, the day of the second mass anti-ICE protest in as many weeks, at his usual spot in the Whipple parking lot. Five hundred or so protesters had gathered outside the federal building, behind the concrete-and-steel barriers that had been set up in the aftermath of Alex Pretti’s killing; their numbers had dwindled to a couple hundred by the time I arrived. A small group sang: “This is for our families who are locked inside / Together, we will abolish ICE / This is for our friends who are locked inside / Together, we will abolish ICE.” A man yelled at two Hennepin County sheriff’s deputies: “You’re protecting ICE! Liam is in a concentration camp because of ICE. You know who I’m talking about. You’re protecting his captors!” Constellations of ice formed on people’s beards and eyelashes. Despite the cold, there was a drum circle. Two protesters in matching pink gas masks told me I had just missed all the action. There had been no tear gas, but plenty of flash-bangs. I asked how many people had been there earlier. “A shit ton,” one of them said.
Two ICU nurses in medic gear told me they had flown in from Colorado to offer support. “I’m a former military nurse, and I have a strong sense of patriotism. Seeing the government turn on the people, as a veteran, really upset me,” one of them told me. “Alex was an ICU nurse. I couldn’t just sit idly and watch it all unfold.”
The medics carried tourniquets, dressing, and oxygen bags. Mac told me she takes her medic bag everywhere, just in case. She volunteers as a medic “when the situation calls for it” and tries to go out commuting four or five times a week. Lately there’s been a greater need for commuters than for medics, and so that’s what Mac does. Commuters tend to stick to their own neighborhoods and adhere to a set of best practices, but there are no leaders, only volunteers. “I come from the military, from a very hierarchical, bureaucratic system,” Mac told me, “and this is completely foreign to me to the degree that I sometimes struggle, because I’m not familiar with operating in a system that doesn’t have a chain of command.”
In some ways, commuting is less high-adrenaline than treating people who have been tear gassed and shot with pepper bullets, but following ICE around is not without its risks. Several observers told me ICE has threatened them with arrest. Sometimes commuters will trail ICE through familiar streets, only to end up in front of their own homes; they suspect ICE has run their plates through a database, identified where they live, and led them there as a warning. One woman showed me a video of agents approaching her car and threatening her with bear mace. She was able to capture it thanks to a dashcam she had been given days earlier.
“It stressed me out so bad,” Nick Benson, a resident of the nearby town of Burnsville, told me of his first commuting experience. Benson ultimately decided commuting wasn’t for him, but he’s found other ways to get involved. “Everyone is finding their lane and kicking ass in it,” he told me. An airplane photography enthusiast, Benson has started tracking ICE’s charter flights out of Minneapolis. I met him on a sunny Monday afternoon on the top floor of the airport parking garage, where he stations himself every day to document ICE’s efforts to transport immigrants out of the state.
Benson and I watched as a bright-blue plane operated by GlobalX, a charter airline, descended into one of the terminals. In addition to ICE, GlobalX contracts with private companies and college sports teams. “A few weeks ago, another one of these GlobalX flights flew handcuffed people down to Texas, then did a ferry flight to Houston, where they picked up the University of Wisconsin women’s volleyball team and then flew them back to Madison,” Benson told me. “Same day, same airplane.”
His telephoto lens pointed at the terminal, Benson explained what we were looking at: two vans pulled up to the plane. A few people, presumably federal employees, emerged from the vehicles and ascended the airplane stairs. Then came the detainees, each of them shackled at the wrists and ankles. One of them moved slowly. Another needed help getting on the plane. There were 23 of them in all, each of them still in the clothes they wore when they got picked up by ICE. One wore a pink jacket. “Once in a while you’ll see people that look like construction workers or tradespeople, because they’re wearing bright-green hoodies. A few weeks ago, we saw someone who was still in their Amazon uniform get on one of the flights,” Benson told me. “They’re just taking our neighbors off the street and shipping them out.”
Benson told me his role in all of this is to document what happens “at the narrow end of the funnel.” This is the moment between abductions and deportations, when the people ICE rips from the community are shuttled to detention centers in Texas or elsewhere. In addition to tracking these flights, Benson has started distributing dashcams to locals so they can document their own interactions with ICE. Since early January, Benson has given out more than $65,000 worth of dashcams to his fellow Minnesotans.
Mac, the medic, told me she has a dashcam she’s been meaning to install for weeks. She and the other commuters have had too many close calls to count. On a recent patrol, ICE led Mac and another commuter into an unfamiliar neighborhood. “I was behind the other commuter,” Mac recalled. “They brake-checked him, got out of the vehicle, guns drawn, and started threatening him. They were like, ‘We will arrest you if you honk your horn or blow your whistle.’”
I had no such experiences in my week in Minneapolis, though I tried to go commuting almost every morning. On my first day in the field, the people who let me tag along with them commented on how sleepy it was: We saw exactly one ICE agent on our three-hour patrol through Whittier, and he was napping in his car. “I’ve been rattled,” Thomas, the driver, told me while maneuvering the car through the neighborhood, but he had also started feeling anxious when he wasn’t out there. “Yesterday I was sitting in the back seat and I was the one on the call, and I was like, ‘This is not my role!’” His friends had started calling him Baby Driver.
Today, his friend Larry was on Signal duty. He had one earbud in to monitor the call, a litany of intersections, car descriptions — “Wagoneer” repeated over and over with Minnesotans’ characteristic long vowels — and plate numbers. “I’m sick of getting tear gassed,” he told me. “There was a period where I was getting tear gassed literally every day.” This was a reprieve, but the relative stillness made us all uneasy.
Things hadn’t exactly slowed down, but they had shifted. The next morning we parked outside of Whipple and watched as ICE’s convoys of unmarked cars left for the day. Where they previously rolled out in groups of five to seven, this morning they left in pairs. We drove around Whittier in circles searching in vain for ICE. That night, someone showed me a video taken around the same time, just one neighborhood over: Observers leap out of their cars, blowing their whistles to alert their neighbors of an arrest in progress. A man flails as ICE agents struggle to force him over a chain-link fence. Agents yell at the observers, liberally deploy pepper spray into the crowd. One man, clearly marked as press, stands off to the side. An agent pulls down his gas mask, sprays him in the face, and leaves.
“They’re evolving,” Mac told me. “As soon as we catch on to them, they evolve. And they know that we’re onto them, because they keep putting out new restrictions, saying, ‘You can’t make noise, you can’t film us, we don’t need a warrant.’”
The opposition’s tactics are evolving, too. Some South Minneapolis residents have begun setting up “filter blockades,” makeshift roundabouts designed to slow traffic and keep an eye out for ICE. On a recent Saturday, a dozen or so people stood in the middle of Cedar Avenue surrounded by signs, mattresses, and pallets of wood. Farther up the road, volunteers in neon vests handed out flyers to drivers, most of whom honked and fist-pumped in approval.
People are fighting surveillance with surveillance. Garrett Guntly, a tech executive who has lived in Minneapolis for a decade, told me he’s installed a network of more than 20 cameras across the city. “I’ve been out there in negative 15 weather trying to install these things,” he said.
At first, Guntly felt awkward about asking his neighbors if he could set up cameras on their property. The response has been almost universal assent. Their reasoning, he explained, is simple: “The government’s already watching me. Why not my neighbors?” Unlike consumer-grade doorbell cameras, Guntly’s network isn’t connected to the cloud. It’s a network-based internet protocol system. “In layman’s terms, think of it as a CCTV system,” he said. “If the landowner agrees to have a camera on their building facing out onto the street, only then do they have access to the broader camera matrix. It’s a skin-in-the-game approach. If you’re part of the network, you have the network.”
The cameras are installed on private property, but they’re pointed at “critical areas” with lots of foot traffic, like bus stops and busy intersections. “With these cameras, we’ve been able to get a lot more surgical and rapid at getting people onto the streets. One human can cover one and a half square miles of street, where they wouldn’t have been able to before,” he told me. “We’ve been able to thwart close to a dozen attempted abductions.”
I’d heard rumors of the ways DHS agents tried to disguise their otherwise conspicuous vehicles: dirtying up rental cars with snow; putting stuffed animals on their dashboards, just visible through windows tinted to near-opacity. On Saturday, we followed an unmarked car up and down Hiawatha Avenue, where it stopped in the middle of traffic, presumably in an attempt to deter us. I fiddled with my gas mask, trying to tighten the straps so it would fit snugly against my head. The tags were still on; I hadn’t needed it thus far. We had seen lights flash inside the car, visible even through the pitch-black windows. This was a law enforcement vehicle of some kind, and it was running a light to get away from us. Hours earlier, we had trailed an SUV with Florida plates. It sped away from us, and we followed, passing a small group of anti-ICE protesters stationed outside an Enterprise Rent-a-Car. When we caught up to the SUV, which had gotten on the highway that leads back to Whipple, I noticed it had a bumper sticker: “BABY ON BOARD.”
I met Myles, a Minneapolis resident of 19 years, on a Friday afternoon. His affluent pocket of Southwest Minneapolis felt almost like a parallel universe: A pair of elementary schoolers walked home unaccompanied, unworried about being stopped by ICE, discussing their favorite kinds of sushi. Myles’ foyer, however, quickly brought me back to reality. In addition to the requisite winter boots and pile of coats, the entryway was full of paper grocery bags, each loaded to the brim with toiletries and nonperishable food.
Myles started fielding individual requests from neighbors last December. “At first it was helping with one-off needs, like if a kid needed a ride to school or someone needed groceries,” he said. When the DHS operation began, “we were doing small-scale mutual aid and planning for a significant invasion” down the line. He assumed ICE would descend upon Minneapolis like it had on Chicago, Portland, or Los Angeles, other so-called sanctuary cities where the agency has conducted large-scale raids since Trump’s inauguration — but Metro Surge is DHS’s biggest operation yet, one that residents of the Twin Cities have met with an unprecedented degree of pushback.
“Everyone seems really willing to step up,” Myles said. “If they’re not already involved, they’re eager to get involved.” What started as a handful of neighbors organizing one-off grocery runs is now a network of about 20 volunteers supporting 150 families. Myles told me he’s had to discuss the additional grocery trips — and everything else — with his two young children. “I have to explain why we’re doing it,” he said of the deliveries, “and that people are afraid to leave their homes, people are being assaulted and taken just because of the way that they look. Having to explain all of those dynamics to a five- and an eight-year-old, I wish I didn’t have to do that.”
Lyn, a doctor, told me her two teenagers have been “distraught, angry, and deeply saddened” by what’s going on. Many of her son’s classmates are first- or second-generation immigrants from Africa and Latin America. “Some of his friends aren’t going to school,” she said. “One friend’s dad was just abducted, which is what I call it.”
I met Lyn at a Mexican grocery store on the west side of St. Paul, where she was shopping for two families she had been connected with through Neighbors Helping Neighbors. The organization started in mid-December as a local mutual aid project run by a group of friends and has since evolved to a network of more than 500 volunteers who run errands, buy groceries, and crowdfund and deliver rent to families throughout the metropolitan area.
Like nearly every business in the Twin Cities, the grocery store had signs on the door denying ICE agents entry without a judicial warrant. A security guard noticed my photographer’s equipment and asked us to wait in the vestibule while he asked management whether we could enter. This whole nightmare, after all, had started with a right-wing provocateur armed with little more than a front-facing camera. Inside, Lyn loaded up two carts with a week’s worth of essentials — onions, beans, eggs, plantains, cooking oil — and a few treats. “I like to get something sweet for the kids,” she said, reaching for a package of chocolate cookies.
Other customers seemed to be doing the same thing. A woman wearing a hoodie that must have been printed recently — “It’s a Pretti Good day to defend the Constitution,” it read — asked a man whether he needed help with deliveries today. He introduced himself as Marco, and showed me a GoFundMe he’s put together that has raised more than $90,000, which he and a team of volunteers have used to buy groceries and other essentials — diapers, cat litter, dog food — to some 300 families. Marco has taken on other responsibilities, too. One of the women he delivers food to is pregnant and in hiding; Marco told me he connected her to a midwife. He’s seen no signs of the “drawdown” Homan announced.
“They’re still here,” he said. “They’re still brutalizing people.”
Even here, life must go on. Rent was due February 1st, just like it always is. Eight days had passed since Alex Pretti’s killing. In that time, at least 265 people had been sent to Texas on ICE’s charter flights, according to Benson’s daily airport observations. Desperate to avoid the same fate, an unknowable number of people have confined themselves to their homes; their absence is unquantifiable because there’s no reliable way to measure a void.
“We know of countless people who were unable to make rent this month,” Kai Shelley, the city council aide, told me. “There are folks who have received eviction notices, folks who have just been able to eke by this month but know they won’t be able to make it next month. We’re looking at a pretty dire situation.”
The city council unanimously called for a moratorium on evictions in mid-January — in the weeks between Good’s and Pretti’s killings, while ICE arrests continued to climb — but the power to halt evictions lies with Gov. Tim Walz, who has yet to indicate whether he’ll do so. At a city council meeting last Friday, Chughtai, the majority leader, challenged the idea that the city could “GoFundMe its way” out of crisis.
“That doesn’t mean we should stop doing mutual aid, but the only thing that’s for sure going to keep people in their homes right now is if we put a pause on evictions,” Shelley said. “The mutual aid is great, but the mutual aid is there because the government can’t or won’t step up in certain circumstances.”
For now, it’s up to the residents of the Twin Cities to look out for each other. It’s clear no one else will.
Three days before rent was due, I accompanied Kat, a volunteer with Neighbors Helping Neighbors, as she dropped off an envelope full of cash for a family in Midtown Minneapolis. Alex Pretti’s name was spray-painted on the highway barrier walls. “Something that feels particularly salient right now is how much daily life has changed,” she told me, “both from the danger of ICE presence and all the helping that’s going on. People have completely reoriented their day-to-day and week-to-week.”
The occupation isn’t over. Guntly, the activist who set up the surveillance camera network, told me he thinks ICE is biding its time until mid-March, when Temporary Protected Status is set to expire for Somali nationals. DHS is reportedly scouring the suburbs for empty warehouses to convert into detention centers. The day before I arrived in Minneapolis, the department asked to use an Army Reserve base at Fort Snelling, a decommissioned military base next to the airport, to house agents and store weapons. On my last night in town, I met a small group of Indigenous activists who had set up camp across from the historic fort, which is now a museum. The two acres we were standing on had somehow been overlooked in the series of federal treaties that funneled Dakota and Ojibwe lands to the United States. This land still belongs to the Dakota.
They had built a fire, and they planned on staying. The idea was to provide a warm place for protesters and released detainees from Whipple, located less than a mile away, to rest and recharge. Wasu Duta, a Dakota activist, described a clear link between the ICE operation in Minnesota and the dispossession of Native land.
“We have to hold these people accountable for their actions,” he told me. “They actually, under the Constitution, broke their oath and have committed acts of war on our people.” Tribal governments, including the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Navajo Nation, had members questioned and detained by ICE even after showing identification proving their citizenship. In mid-January, a Mdewakanton Dakota woman had been detained by ICE while observing agents from her car. One of the agents reportedly smashed her windows, and she was held at Whipple for 48 hours before being released.
Four tepees have been erected on the snowy ground across the way from Fort Snelling. They stand in the shadow of the old garrison, where a little less than 200 years ago, 1,658 prisoners, most of them women and children, were held during a brutal winter as punishment for the Dakota uprising of 1862. Hundreds died of hunger and disease. An Episcopalian priest pleaded for clemency, and when spring came the government loaded most of the prisoners onto steamboats and deported them to reservations in Nebraska and South Dakota. Henry Whipple couldn’t save them all; of the 303 initially sentenced to death, 38 Dakota men were hanged in what remains the largest mass execution in American history. The Whipple Federal Building opened in 1969, and activists have been trying to get the bishop’s name scrubbed from its walls since Trump’s first term. Government attorneys are working around the clock to keep immigrants locked up in Whipple, where detainees say they’ve been denied food and medical care.
In 1872, a decade after the Dakota War, the painter John Gast unveiled what would become his most famous work yet. American Progress was Gast’s celebration of manifest destiny, a visual representation of settlers’ triumph. A white angel dominates the small canvas, guiding pioneers farther and farther west. Civilization trails her, and Native people flee in her wake. This new world of railroads and telegraph lines cannot coexist with what came before. The parallels between past and present are obvious to anyone who bothers to look. DHS posted the Gast painting on its X account last summer. This, the department wrote, is “a Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”