The City of Minneapolis vs. Donald Trump

0:02This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It was just over a week ago that Donald Trump announced to the world this. Sometimes you need a dictator. He's made a dictator joke before, but this was no joke. It was a simple statement of how Trump views democracy and the rule of law as hindrances to asserting his own will over the nation and the world. Trump made the dictator remark at the World Economic Forum in Davos as he was threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark and end the post-war order.

0:45But back home, we were looking at quite another side of the same coin, an American city, Minneapolis, seemingly in a state of siege. Federal agents were going door to door, demanding identification from people on the street and detaining those who got in their way. Renee Goode, a poet, had already been killed and others had been wounded, but that did nothing to moderate their tactics. Then Alex Preddy, a nurse, was shot and killed in a hail of bullets after he came to the aid of a protester. The administration did what, frankly, a dictatorship does. They said that Preddy, who had been carrying a licensed firearm that he never brandished, was in fact a terrorist, an assassin, and they justified the killing.

1:36We're going to talk about Minneapolis today and what it bodes for this country. Emily Witt and Ruby Kramer have been reporting from the city, and I spoke with them this past week. They're both staff writers for The New Yorker. Emily, you reported on the protests in Los Angeles last summer, and now you're in your hometown of Minneapolis. how have the ICE strategies changed from L.A. to Chicago to what we're seeing now in Minneapolis? Well, the biggest difference is just the number of agents relative to the size of the population. So in L.A., I don't know exactly how many people were deployed there, but L.A.

2:15is an enormous city, and they were spread out all across L.A. County, which takes hours to cross from one side to the other. So it wasn't the same sense of really, you know, agents everywhere in the very heart of the densest part of the metropolis. And what was the difference in atmosphere, if any? You know, the protests in Los Angeles were really concentrated around downtown L.A. And the confrontations there were between local law enforcement and demonstrators. And so even though there were people following around ICE agents, you didn't see the same face-to-face confrontation between just ordinary people and federal agents with the same degree of intensity that you're seeing in Minneapolis.

3:02Ruby, you interviewed the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Fry, and you spent quite a lot of time with him. He's a very young mayor when he took office. And his first term, of course, was defined by the murder of George Floyd. And now he has this in front of him. That's a lot of trauma for one city. That's a lot of politics for one city, a lot of violence. Let's listen to a bit of your conversation with him. I mean, I feel potholes. you know i i try to make the streets safer you know i put up affordable housing you know yeah we do ribbon cuttings for affordable housing right and we pick up the trash that's what i do that's what we want to do that's that's our goal here our goal is like just would you lay off and like let us have this comeback we're experiencing right right we will right just give it to just Just allow us.

4:00We're not even asking for money, you know? Right. A mayor who just wants to fill potholes, pick up the trash. And then he's talking about this kind of comeback that he wants to be experiencing. What is he referring to, Ruby? So he feels as if Minneapolis was in the midst of a renaissance, in his words, before this happened. Crime in nearly every neighborhood in Minneapolis was trending downward. And Fry, when he came into office, was a candidate who had a passion for housing. Housing was his biggest issue. And as you said, his first term became defined by something completely different, issues of racial justice, police reform.

4:42and now he's in the midst of the very first weeks of his third term, which he said is going to be his last. And he's dealing with a completely unprecedented situation. I think, you know, he told me multiple times, this is the first time anything like this has ever happened in an American city. Yes. I don't see how he's wrong. Yeah, and I think it goes to what Emily was saying about just the presence of the federal force, the occupying force, as he said, is so deeply and viscerally felt in the city because it's such a small city. It's such a small target for such a large operation. How did the response to the George Floyd protests shape what we're seeing now?

5:26I think the biggest impact is the local law enforcement element. This is a city where there's a police force of about 600 officers. So 600 officers to 3 ,000 federal agents. You already have a city where people feel that there's still trauma between the local law enforcement and protesters and the constituents of Minneapolis. And now that local law enforcement force is sort of the first line of defense in a lot of their eyes against this federal occupation. So it's complicated. Like, I've seen at these protests a lot of sort of anger erupting between protesters and local law enforcement. And at the same time, the city is asking, like, how can we build empathy for our police force?

6:18Because they're also in this impossible situation. Emily, you grew up in Minneapolis. What do you think it is about the city, or maybe it's just happenstance, that made it the site of now two of the largest protests in modern history? Well, it's an unapologetically really progressive leftist city. And it's, you know, you've seen from the politicians that Minnesota sent to the national stage, even going back to Paul Wellstone, people like that. You know, it's a place that really values progressive ideals and that isn't scared to be ambitious and in its kind of social goals. And the people here are really civic minded.

7:01They really, people are in block associations. They're in community organizations. The city loves its parks. It's kind of almost like obsessed with its own community-minded practices. And it's an idealistic place and a very sincere place. And I think you see how those ideals in moments of great drama end up coming out and bringing people out and expressing their politics in the streets. Well, if the administration's goal was to deport undocumented immigrants from the United States, is Minneapolis a place that you would put high on the list to deploy such a force? No, I mean, if this was really about immigration and not about political punishment, as it seems to be, you know, Minneapolis's undocumented population is something like 2.2 percent of the state's population.

7:56I think it's around 100 ,000 people. So no, there's states where, you know, if that's the problem you're claiming to fix, there's states with much bigger undocumented populations, especially relative to the size of force that they've brought into the state. Well, if it's political punishment, what is, what's being punished? Well, you know, the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, was the vice presidential nominee. You know, it's a place that, you know, Trump has never won here. He's come pretty close. In the last election, he lost by about four points. The state overall is pretty divided politically, but Minneapolis is really, really not.

8:37It's overwhelmingly Democratic. And yeah, his political rivals seem to be here. The head of the DNC comes from Minneapolis. You know, yeah, Waltz was a national political figure on the left that now, you know, his career seems to be winding down. One of the factors seemed to be a fraud investigation. Give us a straight-up summary of the reality behind the fraud investigations, which seems to be a source for the administration's hostility, especially to the Somali immigrant community. Yeah, so since the pandemic, there was a widespread fraud in Minnesota's social benefits network, especially one nonprofit in particular called Feeding Our Future.

9:28And that fraud has been under investigation by federal prosecutors for a couple of years. They've convicted more than 60 people. A majority of those people have come from the Somali-American community. the person that prosecutors described as the mastermind of the thing was not Somali American. She was a white lady from Minnesota. But Trump has made this fraud an immigration issue even though an overwhelming majority of Somali Americans all across the country are American citizens either by naturalization or birth. So he's turning something that was just some bad actors into an immigration story and using it as an excuse to come here to Minnesota in particular.

10:17Trump is often invoking the name of Ilhan Omar, the Congresswoman, a Democrat, obviously, and trying to make her a central figure in this conflict somehow. Just the other day, she was attacked while speaking. Somebody took out a syringe and squirted some unknown fluid at her, which was certainly scary in the moment. um what does ilan omar have to do with this directly well i think it's pretty clear that the president likes to go after certain people he feels he can other in some way or another so omar's been elected she's in her fourth term um she's seen as a as a leader here you know Obviously, her constituency supports her.

11:04And he it's part of his his he wants Minneapolis to turn against people in their community that they see as their neighbors and their leaders and their fellow residents of the city. He wants them to turn against them. And you see that with his going on about the fraud. You see that with his attempt to demonize Ilhan Omar. He wants to divide the city against itself, and the city is refusing to accept that narrative.

11:40I'm speaking with staff writers Emily Witt and Ruby Kramer. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

11:59This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're talking today about the overwhelming federal force in Minneapolis, the repressive tactics, the violent results, the administration's response. It's all been described as an immigration enforcement surge. Surge. That resonant military term is hardly inappropriate. The operation, ordered up by the president and carried out by heavily armed, often undisciplined federal agents, is ostensibly an immigration operation. But it also seems intended to intimidate an entire American city. The spectacle, the dark reality, is of Minneapolis under siege.

12:43I've been speaking with Emily Witt, who wrote The Battle for Minneapolis for the New Yorker, and Ruby Kramer, who wrote The Mayor of an Occupied City, about the city's mayor, Jacob Fry.

12:57Pam Bondi, the attorney general, recently said that she wanted access to Minnesota's voter rolls and its welfare data. And if she got that, maybe she'd pull out some forces, some ICE forces from the state. What do you make of this? I think it's what, you know, what Emily has said, what the mayor has said. This is, we're seeing evidence that this is directly sort of has to do with political retribution. And so now we see Pam Bondi, who's basically been the leader of Trump's effort to go after his perceived political enemies, now coming to Minneapolis and saying, if you do this related to voter rolls, I'm not sure what that has to do with the surge and what they're trying to accomplish with immigration on the ground in Minneapolis.

13:53We'll do X, we'll pull out. What do we know at this moment about the killing of Renee Good? And what do we know about who killed Alex Preddy? In other words, how far along are the, at least the preliminary investigations into those killings? And is the state of Minnesota even able to investigate? Yeah, I mean, those investigations have been stymied. The Department of Justice has said they won't conduct a criminal investigation into Rene Good's death. And with Alex Preddy, we don't know the name of the agent or agents who shot him. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which is the local law enforcement body that investigates this stuff forensically, has had its access denied.

14:46They haven't been able to see the evidence. They're not confident that the evidence hasn't been tampered with or, you know, destroyed in some way. So there's a real fear here that these killings won't receive a good investigation and that the people who committed them, you know, won't be, there won't be any inquiry into what they did. Well, the amazing thing is that the vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance, declared after the killing of Renee Goode that ICE agents have, and this is his quote, absolute immunity, a comment that he's tried to walk back a little bit since then, but not with great success.

15:26Do you think that's affecting what's happening on the ground and the tension and the anger, Emily. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, certainly the behavior of the agents, it appears they believe they have absolute immunity just in terms of not only the people they've killed, but the way that they're treating protesters, insulting them, spraying them in the face with pepper spray. It's hard to interrupt, but I get the feeling that all of our listeners are a little bit like me. In other words, we get to watch snippets of this on social media or a five-minute report on cable news or something like that. And what I'd love to know from both of you is what it's like to stand there in the freezing cold and watch a bunch of ICE officers and a bunch of protesters facing off.

16:15What's the feel of that? How do the tensions get ratcheted up? What's the vibe between those two people and how it leads to violence? Ruby, maybe you could start. I think protests have, they've been very careful. I mean, I would be more curious for Emily's take on this because she's seen more of it, but people have been very deliberate. I think there's been such an effort by the Trump administration to cast these protests as very unruly and violent and referencing back to the riots after George Floyd's killing in 2020. What I saw was protesters that were very deliberate. I mean, we're feeling lots of things, But we're very careful not to cross lines.

16:56Yeah, I would agree. This is not, you know, the people out on the street are really there to observe the actions of ICE. They're not trying to get into a skirmish with federal agents. They might be yelling things at them, but they're not trying to start fights. They're not breaking windows for the most part. You know, it is what I'm seeing on the streets here is a calm, determined anger, real anger. And there are no outliers. There are no people that are particularly provocative among the protesters in your experience? No, I mean, I think one thing is Minneapolis saw how its anger at what happened to George Floyd was turned against it in the national political narrative.

17:37And I think there's a sense they're not going to play into any narrative that and they're being called domestic terrorists and agitators and professionals, all this stuff. And they're refusing to present themselves that way. They, you know, I really haven't seen exceptions to that when I'm out in the streets. Ruby, there's a relatively new chief of police in Minneapolis. His name is Brian O 'Hara, and he started in 2022. His position is, needless to say, excruciating. Let's listen to a little of your conversation with him about dealing with the influx of federal agents. it doesn't appear that there's much effort to deescalate.

18:23Yeah. You know, we come into chaotic situations and the training for several years has been to be proportional, to be professional, try and slow things down. You come into a situation where, you know, there's some minor offense that may be offensive to you. as a professional you're not supposed to take things personally even if someone's yelling something at you but the problem is especially with some disorderly conduct if you step in as a cop and you start up here yeah and they don't comply there's nowhere else to go but up Yeah, true. It just doesn't make sense. And it makes your own job that much more frustrating and difficult.

19:13Right. It's in no one's best interest. Maybe that's also where some of the confusion comes. It's just like everything's just like. I saw one video with a woman who was saying she was disabled where one officer goes through the open window. While he's through the open window, another officer is trying to open the same door. someone else on the other side is breaking a closed window and they're pulling her out while she's still in her seat belt saying that i'm disabled and there's at least two knives that are out because they want to cut the seat belt it looks like complete chaos yeah and i don't know how anyone can charge can see that and think that is safe for anybody involved right now ruby at the end there, he's referring to an incident that everybody here watched, you know, on cable news and social media, this woman being pulled out of the car with terrific force, I would say.

20:08And here you have the chief of police in very measured terms, but nevertheless speaking oppositionally to these federal forces. So there must be enormous tension between the Minneapolis police and ICE. It was sort of remarkable, actually. I was sitting in his office at the police at City Hall and to hear a police chief speak so critically and in such a detailed way, too, about fellow law enforcement. You know, even though they're different agencies and they're kind of on opposite sides of this conflict, I'd never quite heard somebody be that critical law enforcement to law enforcement, right? I thought that was kind of remarkable.

20:58And there is tension. There's confusion among the police about what these agents are trying to accomplish. I think in that clip that we just heard, Brian O 'Hara was, you know, specifically referencing that incident, but he was breaking it down sort of like movement by movement. Like, you know, now you see one agent doing this, And then they bring out knives. What are they bringing? You know, I think everything in his training from his decades as a police officer was telling him nothing about this made sense, which is kind of crazy. And didn't Brian O 'Hara, the chief of police in Minneapolis, didn't he, wasn't he involved in a program in Newark that informs his experience and his point of view?

21:43Yeah, he was involved in a police reform program in Newark, and he'd been in Newark for his entire career, came to Minneapolis in 2022 to help reform the department, inherited a department that was losing officers or had been losing officers. He was trying to build it back up. It was understaffed, essentially. And on top of that, all the officers that he had that had been working in 2020 had some form of sort of like stress or trauma or anxiety that's now, he said, being reactivated. He used the word triggered, which, again, I've never heard a policeman use this language. But he was saying all these old wounds are being triggered.

22:26And he's really worried about a mass exodus from his department. He said, he told me 100, in his department of 600 officers, 100 of them are retirement age. So he's like, in theory, if this gets bad enough, 100 people could leave. Walk out the door. And then what would they do? Ruby, there's a lot of talk now about how local government is or isn't helping the federal government. It's been a challenge for local government to navigate how to work under these conditions. They're practically unique. Let's listen to a clip of the mayor of Minneapolis from when you interviewed him talking about how his government typically works.

23:06In normal times, we work with every government out there. Like, that's the expected norm. The expected norm is that our Minneapolis police work with the Hennepin County Police. We work with the Bureau of Criminal, which is happening, by the way. Yeah, yeah. We work with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which of course happened. We work with State Patrol, which is happening. And they also work with the feds. Right. You know, a number of, and you expect there to be a partnership when something goes down that's serious or an emergency.

23:42When, I mean, when bad things happen, you expect partisan divides to be eliminated and for people to come together. And, you know, the 35W Bridge is before my time here. But when the 35W Bridge collapsed, you had a president who was not wildly popular in this city, in Bush, come here. And the politics stopped at the water's edge, and everybody did their part. And money was issued, and support was provided, and it was a team. And it didn't matter what party you were on. Political retribution was never a phrase that was even considered. let alone uttered, let alone enacted. Now, Trump has been saying during this crisis that local government refuses to work with the federal government on immigration.

24:33What's the truth or not in that? Fry was telling me that he had had virtually zero communication with the federal government. This was before the shooting of Alex Breddy. Since then, he's had conversations with Tom Homan, who's now taking over the operation in Minneapolis. And he has spoken to the president as well. I think what you're hearing a little bit in that tape is Fry, the realization kind of hitting him over and over and over again that he was locked in sort of a war with his own federal government and that the city was being sort of overwhelmed by the federal government and that the federal government was, rather than being a partner of any kind, was a hostile force that was felt all over the city.

25:26And, you know, eventually he himself learned that he was the subject of a criminal investigation by the DOJ. So then he personally felt like he was being targeted by the federal government. The DOJ was investigating the mayor of Minneapolis? The DOJ is allegedly investigating whether the governor and the mayor have colluded in a conspiracy to obstruct immigration operations in the state of Minnesota. That's pretty incredible, no? Mayor Fry learned of this through the news, like everybody else. Yeah. And the next morning proceeded to go on about four Sunday shows, and they were all asking him, what's this about?

26:15What's up with that? Do you have any information? Have you gotten served a subpoena? What's going on? And he didn't know anything. It was surreal. It was just another layer of unreality to this whole thing. Emily, you spent time with some people who were trying to keep their communities safe, and you rode around with two people in particular who were trying to spot ice on the streets of Minneapolis. Many of us have heard about this kind of effort both in Minneapolis and in other cities. How does it work, and what did you see on that ride? Yeah, Minneapolis is activated in all kinds of ways, and one of them is people who go out in their cars, and they'll call into a signal chat that has a dispatcher and they ride around their neighborhoods and look for suspicious vehicles, which are often, you know, American-made SUVs with tinted windows and out-of-state plates.

27:17And they'll call in a license plate. You know, the volunteers keep a database of known agents. And if they idea, the idea is they follow at a safe distance and they just want to be there to record some of what we've been seeing. And because the government is not really telling us who they're taking and where and how many people with any specificity, they want to make sure somebody's bearing witness to that and also just drawing attention, perhaps to help some of their neighbors have time to lock their doors or get somewhere safe as the agents are moving around the city. You spoke with two ICE observers who ended up themselves being detained, a woman named Patty O 'Keefe and a guy named Brandon Segenza.

28:07We're going to listen to a little of Brandon Segenza describing this situation. I passed by a cell that was like full of people that there was no room to like lay down. So they were either standing or sitting in it. People were like staring at the walls, staring at the floor. a man had his face pressed up against the observation glass. I think just trying to look out and get some stimulation.

28:38I passed a bathroom cell that was a two-way mirror so I could see into it. And the woman whose bottom half was covered by a concrete barrier, she was on the toilet crying. And then on the near side of the concrete barrier was a seat and there was another woman who I assume was her family member but I don't really know was like scream crying and like yeah I can't forget the way it sounded it was horrible and then the bathroom I was brought to was covered in urine toilet paper was wet there was no soap

29:25yeah Yeah, and I get my thoughts like, this is how they're treating me, a U.S. citizen, white passing man. I can only imagine what's causing all these people to be sobbing and screaming and begging. Emily, how long was he in detention? About eight hours. What about the accounts of the time in detention was most surprising to you? I was very surprised that, you know, the person we just heard from was interrogated as if he were not just a person out exercising his right to observe and protest, but someone who was part of an organized network of, you know, bad actors. He was just kind of baffled.