Minneapolis Under ICE: We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For
by Ben Rosielle, Contributor
Growing up in Minneapolis, I’ve seen school cancelled (or moved to remote “learning”) for a variety of reasons: extreme snow, extreme cold, extreme heat, several waves of Covid, even a three-week teachers’ strike in my sophomore year of high school. Like any child or teenager in their right mind, I appreciated these interruptions from the drudgery of school. Looking back on it, I wonder how those hours out of the classroom or the cafeteria added up, how my early teenage years might’ve been different if there was no pandemic or if my school district had the resources to ensure that my teachers wouldn’t want to go on strike.
On Wednesday, January 7th, Minneapolis Public Schools cancelled classes for the rest of the week after students and staff were physically assaulted and sprayed with chemical weapons by Border Patrol agents outside Roosevelt High School, shortly after school let out for the day. For families afraid to send their children back to school in person, the district offered a temporary online learning option. This division of the classroom is familiar to me; it’s exactly what happened in my freshman year of high school during the awkward transition between the pandemic-era lockdown and our “new normal.” At least in Minneapolis, I’m not sure that things ever went back to normal. The aftermath of the pandemic and the uprising sparked by the murder of George Floyd have left wounds in the city’s physical and social geography that still seem nowhere close to fully healing.
It should go without saying that Operation Metro Surge—the title given to the DHS and Trump Administration’s ongoing occupation/invasion of the Twin Cities—has only deepened the damage wrought by the early 2020s while incurring new traumas of its own. Regardless of legal status (not that such a distinction should matter), immigrants and native-born citizens alike are being kidnapped by ICE and Border Patrol agents at work, outside schools, in their cars or driveways, even from their own homes, simply on the basis of their appearance. At the height of the operation, it wasn’t truly safe to be in public at all. Many didn’t leave their homes, not willing to risk detainment and the terror of what might come after it. Once-thriving businesses were closed or near-empty. The ones that managed to stay open locked their doors and had a staff member stand by the entrance to let people in.
The inhumane conditions of immigrant detention centers from Minnesota to Texas cause long-lasting physical and mental harm, particularly in young children. Medical treatment is withheld or delayed, food is often contaminated with mold or worms, and opportunities for recreation or education are extremely limited or nonexistent. Nazi comparisons might be considered overdone, but I struggle to define our administration’s campaign against immigrants in other terms.
On February 12th, “border czar” Tom Homan announced that Operation Metro Surge would be coming to some sort of end, though almost a thousand ICE and Border Patrol agents remain in the metro area as of the time of writing this article. ICE activity has been reduced overall, and abductions have moved towards nighttime operations in suburbs, places where rapid community response (more on that later) is less likely to occur. We’ve gone back to a “new-ish normal,” where the immediate threat of reactionary violence or terror has been temporarily drawn back, receding towards the margins of our popular consciousness. Kids are returning to school, adults are returning to work, grocery stores and restaurants are unlocking their doors again. The withdrawal/de-escalation of ICE and Border Patrol agents from the Twin Cities is partially thanks to the incredible effort of resistance put up by local communities, and partially due to the unmitigated PR disaster incurred by state murders of white people and kidnappings of children in broad daylight. Regardless of whether the operation met its purported goals of cracking down on fraud and crime (it didn’t), it succeeded in demonstrating the ability of our federal government to wage war on its own people—immigrant or native-born citizen—and, so far, get away essentially unpunished.
An excellent opinion piece in the previous issue of the Grape already covers how ICE, a product of the war on terror, didn’t start and won’t end with Trump, and the irresponsibility of glossing over this reality. I’ll go a step further and remind everyone (I’m preaching to the choir, I know) that in America, this kind of terror—detention camps, kidnappings, murder—is as old as the country itself. It produces a buried history, the pile of corpses on which our nation lies. America would not be what it is today without the genocide and forced displacement of Indigenous peoples, the 19th-century massacres of Chinese communities in the American West, or the centuries-long systemic violence and murder inflicted by the defenders of the state—police, militiamen, national guardsmen, vigiliantes, mobs—against Black people for the smallest indiscretions, from stealing a piece of candy to selling cigarettes on the street to the vague possibility of using a counterfeit $20 bill. Even when we’re aware of it, we don’t tend to view this kind of violence as extraordinary; in order to live in America and preserve a certain degree of sanity or happiness, one must find a way to cope with the mental burden of this injustice. You can deny it, normalize it, compartmentalize it, distract yourself from it, or you can come to terms with it and keep going anyways.
The video-recorded state murders of two white U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, cannot be ignored or normalized or pushed aside by those able to do the same for George Floyd or Geraldo Lunas Campos or Silverio Villegas González. They are shocking because white people, myself included, assume that we are not supposed to die like this at the hands of the state, that such deaths are reserved for the other ~40% of Americans. It remains true that white people are still far safer in direct confrontations with state actors, that it is still our responsibility to fight injustice rather than to cower from the potential of it.
Most importantly, one can’t dismiss the actions of ICE under the second Trump Administration as the result of a few bad apples, problems that could be swept aside with a public apology and a few token changes. If the Trump administration has done one good thing, it might be pulling back the veil of legitimate violence and showing our justice system for what it always has been: targeted violence against communities and individuals viewed as disrupting or challenging the state and its allies. The Trump administration makes no worthwhile attempt to disguise the intentions behind their actions with due process for detainees, or regard for legal immigration status and citizenship, or trials for agents who commit murder.
There’s a war over narrative in this country right now, from the removal of public signage detailing the history of slavery or Indigenous ties to what is now national parkland to the further whitewashing of school curriculums to the botched attempt to control the narrative around what happened and is still happening in the Twin Cities. That this attempt failed proves that our government can only go so far before ordinary people are forced to stop ignoring what is happening in their communities.
I’d chalk much of this failure up to the destruction of normality: when schools and businesses are closed or half-empty, when public kidnappings are happening all around you, when makeshift “FUCK ICE” signs become a ubiquitous sighting, only then can the soccer moms and Patagonia quarter-zip dads of an American city become attuned to the injustice that was happening this entire time. Our Democratic mayor and governor refuse to effectively wield power, giving strongly-worded speeches while their electoral foes gleefully run a pair of scissors through the fabric of our nation’s social order. No one has come to save us, no organ of state power has effectively intervened to stop the terrorizing and kidnapping, and we’ve been forced to reckon with that. It’s been up to the ordinary people of the Twin Cities to wield their own power by forming Signal group chats to monitor and defend against ICE abductions, erect makeshift blockades to disrupt the flow of traffic, stand guard around schools, deliver groceries to families unable to leave their own homes, and donate money for rent funds, legal proceedings, and immigrant businesses struggling to stay open.
These last few months have been devastating for me, as I watch the city I know and love torn apart by paramilitary thugs sent in by our own government. I grieve the loss of life and the destruction of community even as I am enraged by it, searching desperately for some glimmer of justice or hope amidst the wreckage of our collective naivety. History offers little inspiration to a fundamentally flawed democracy such as ours in the fight against fascism, but the present does. The people of the Twin Cities refused to stand by as their neighbors were abducted off their streets. They rapidly and spontaneously organized a grassroots, decentralized social network to defend their communities from the terror of ICE. Tim Walz and Jacob Frey and Amy Klobuchar weren’t going to help us, but we didn’t need their permission to wield our own power.
For as many issues or injustices as you can find in American liberalism, it has still instilled in many a sense of the freedom we deserve, and what we stand to lose when it goes away. The loss of this freedom cannot be seen as a temporary deviation from the normalcy of our system, but a symptom of some fundamental problem within it. It’s up to us to come up with a solution, but it starts by accepting that we cannot go back to the way things were, that we cannot go back to normal, that we must forge onwards into the terrifying, joyous unknown.
