Minneapolis citizens on protecting their neighbours from ICE

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, Minneapolis vs. ICE.

0:15I don't know about you, but this week it feels like all I've been watching are video clips of what's happening on the streets of Minneapolis. High-pitched whistles piercing through the wind and falling snow to signal the presence of immigration agents. No, you get back. That's right. Get off the street. Get off the street, sir. Get off the street. Since the beginning of January, thousands of ICE agents have been deployed to the city. Confusion, violence and chaos followed. Two people have been killed. Hundreds have disappeared. But that's not the full story. This week, we've been talking to people living in Minneapolis about how they've been mobilizing to protect their communities.

0:59Hundreds more people started going to training, started learning, you know, joining networks. And after the death this weekend, it has only by the thousands expanded. What does it feel like to see your neighbourhood become a place you don't recognise anymore? We all grab a whistle before we leave. I know it's a joke here. Make sure you've got your keys, phone, wallet, gloves, and now your whistle. Seeing family members dragged away, schools targeted, children tear gassed. To find yourself standing between your neighbours and masked men with guns. This has been a real campaign of terror and political retribution.

1:43And they are wanting democratic cities like ours to bend the knee to their administration. but Minneapolis is showing that we're not going to do that. And in the face of repression, we just get stronger.

2:04Six days ago, ICE agents killed a 37-year-old nurse, Alex Pretti, who was protesting and filming ICE agents. Since then, there's been a growing backlash from Democrats and Republicans. But has ice changed the city and its people forever? From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today on Focus, the Minneapolis residents fighting back against ice.

2:34So first, could you just explain who you are, where you live and why it is that you don't want to use your name today? Sure. Yeah, I am a Minneapolis resident. And the reason I'm not comfortable sharing my name today and I've asked for it to be kept private is because we've had reports from a lot of people here in Minneapolis of ICE agents following them home, bringing them to their homes, even calling them, sending threats. This is a teacher I spoke to from Minneapolis earlier this week. She's lived in the city for 15 years and she loves it. She told me about her neighborhood. So in my section of Minneapolis, which is South Minneapolis, kind of the broader area, we have a lot of streets that have different types of restaurants from every different culture and really people from every walk of life.

3:23So could you tell me how this has changed since the ICE deployment and how it's changed your experience of living in the neighborhood? Yeah, there's less people that are out just in their daily lives. schools are offering online learning versus in-person learning. And, you know, there's an elementary school that's four blocks from my home. And so I have friends that work there that will send texts like ice is outside circling right now. I have a whistle. And after this most recent shooting of Alex Preddy, I also have a vest now, because every time I go to the store, every time I leave my home, I can see ice.

4:04You know, I was on the highway the other day and looked over and I was next to a car full of four people who are in ICE. I mean, they're in complete tactical gear. They have masks, they have glasses, weapons on them, and you can see all of them inside their car. And, you know, those are just the ICE members that are dressed in tactical gear. We've been finding that a lot of ICE members are dressing in plain clothes. And so I will go to the sandwich shop in my neighborhood and ICE will be in there eating. They're really everywhere. So what you're saying is there's a sense that they are invisible around you as well.

4:39I think that adds a level of fear too, because you really never know when something is going to happen, if somebody is going to be abducted. Everyone is just on alert all of the time. I work from home sometimes and I heard a horn and I ran out of my house with my whistle and I didn't have a coat on, I didn't have shoes on. It just, you know, anytime we hear a horn or a whistle now, we think an abduction is happening and people are running. That's why you see so many people in videos, because this is where we live. This is where we eat. It's where we work. It's where we are. And everybody is still going to come out and record and whistle because we care about each other, even though obviously there's huge risks now.

5:19And we know that there are risks. I think the other thing too, is they have so many weapons. There was a raid that was occurring and I happened to be a block down and three agents left that scene and got in their car. And so I got my phone out to video what was happening. And we had a weapon pointed at us. And we don't know what kind of weapons they are. We don't know if it's a gun. We don't know if it's tear gas. We just don't know. I mean, I don't know enough about weapons. And whenever they leave and go to another state, I think the aftermath here is going to be anytime a car horn honks, everybody looks.

5:57Same with anything that squeaks that sounds like a whistle. Everybody just feels that fear and that kind of like intense unknowing all of the time here. I can't imagine how families who are black and brown who don't look like me feel because they're just staying in their homes, right? I have a friend who has had zero kids in their class over the last two weeks. And then they combined with another teacher and between the two of them they had three. I mean I just feel this kind of complete shock of what you've described in terms of how a city can change like how your neighborhood can change so fast it's like literally a number of weeks isn't it?

6:40It feels so much longer but when I think back it's like oh it's really been you know this month of January right it was 2026 and then everything has, life here is completely different. And it's hard to go to work. It's hard to focus. Your phone goes off. You can see in your neighborhood. It's just hard to go about your regular day and not, and then you feel exhausted at night and sad and scared. And it just doesn't feel like there's any end in sight.

7:21Yeah, my name is Jenny. I am from Mexico. My parents are from Mexico. I was born in Minnesota. And I run a small business. Jenny's a mother of six, and she's had first-hand experience of what it's like when ice comes to your door. As a child, I saw my dad being taken by ice. It should have been like a normal day. He was getting us ready for school, and we heard like a big, loud knock on the door. They broke into the door, and they threw my dad on the floor, and they pointed guns on his head. And he wasn't a criminal. He was just a dad getting us ready to go to school. It was a very traumatic experience for me and my sisters.

8:04And you question if you're going to see your dad again, and it stays with you. So I see how kids feel. You see videos of them crying and you just remember when you were that little and you had to experience the same thing. That's like one of the reasons why I'm doing this, because I know how scared they are. And it just, it breaks your heart. It really does. So how have you been responding to ICE coming to Minneapolis? I created a small Facebook group, I think a bit more than a month ago. It was just for friends and family. And then it just turned into 16 ,000 people in the group because everybody is trying to find ways to help.

8:46I wasn't ready for something like that. We had people trying to donate money, volunteering for rides. We had scare families asking for food, transportation to get passports, birth certificate. just information on how they're going to be able to pay the rent and bills and just afford normal living expenses. Is that because they're too scared to leave the house? Yeah, we had families that they had a normal life and working, you know, providing for their families. And then after ICE came, I don't know if you guys remember during the pandemic that you couldn't go out. That's how they see it. You can go out.

9:32you're stuck at home 24-7 and you do the same thing all over again the next day. What's that been like for you suddenly finding yourself at the centre of all of these people needing all these things? It was a bit overwhelming because I'm trying to keep them safe. And I'm also trying to see if the volunteers are trying to do it for good reasons. And I've had multiple times where I catch myself crying. Families come, wives come saying their husbands have been taken away. The kids are crying. So it's just, it's really overwhelming for me to hear stories. And you mentioned having to kind of almost vet the volunteers that are asking to help.

10:18Can you tell me a bit more about that? We actually had tips on having ICE agents on Facebook community group too, that they've been in there and they try to join. So we are always trying to keep checking their profiles and any weird activity they post or they comment. Sounds really stressful. Yeah. Yeah, it's a really stressful and all day job that I'm doing. And that's not my real job. And you run your own company and you've got six kids on top of this. Yeah. So I'm pretty busy. And do you have any personal experience of ICE coming into your business or trying to kind of come to where you might be collecting food?

10:57Or have you had any experiences directly of ICE on the streets? We have a donation location. And so you see them there driving by almost every day, two, three, four, five times a day. And it's scary. They see your skin color and they think you're not a U.S. citizen. I also had a family member yesterday that called me crying and screaming, telling me that I was knocking on their door. She's like, Jenny, please help me. What am I going to do? Help me, help me. They're here. And so I just kept telling her, don't open the door. And I got dressed really quick. I was shaking and crying. I was driving as fast as I could to get to her.

11:35And I was talking to my cousin, and I did tell her, I'm like, please pray for me. I want to come back to my babies. Because you never know. It makes me emotional because you never know what could happen if you're trying to protect someone else. And you know you have kids to come back. And it's a scary situation for everyone. I'm so sorry. I cannot imagine that feeling. Yeah, it's a scary thing that we're living here in Minneapolis. And it's just not us, not just us, Hispanic. I feel like everyone in the community feels scared, unsafe. We want this to end. We want to go back to normal life.

12:36Minneapolis is a place where it can be 30 below zero and you hear your neighbor get stuck in a snowbank or you see someone their car slide into a curb and everybody will stop for a stranger and push them out and make sure that they're okay it doesn't matter who you are. This is Erica. She's a video producer who lives on the outskirts of Minneapolis. Now there's this sense of paranoia and state of hypervigilance. ICE has been changing their tactics here. They are dressing in plain clothes now. We all have lists of things to ask when we see new people at schools or sites that are typically targeted to know, you know, if there's somebody that's supposed to be there or not.

13:26I mean, we have people that are out at the Whipple building, the detention center that I think people think that they're just there protesting. And yes, they are. But, you know, they're also looking to see who's walking out of the building, what kind of clothing that they're wearing, the put alerts out. And so the whole community knows, you know, we have somebody in a blue sweatshirt today and the woman in a hat that has a pom pom on the top. You know, it's just it's incredibly specific. And how did you get involved in the response? I kind of thought that I couldn't do anything. I have chronic pain, fibromyalgia, so I'm in my house a lot.

14:03And it wasn't until I was speaking to a friend and she said, well, hey, even if you're not in the street corner, you know you can be part of a rapid response team, right? And she explained that these teams are so organized. It's absolutely wild. I mean, they have dispatchers, plate checkers, people who go give aftercare to folks. There's an entire vetting process to get in where you have to meet people in person. And yesterday I was in a chat and they said, hey, this room is compromised. We need to move to a different room. You know, we have people doing grocery delivery. The sobering fact of that is I was talking to a friend of mine.

14:48She said, hey, my church has us delivering groceries. And can you believe this? They told us we have to put our phones in airplane mode. We can't use GPS. We have the address on a piece of paper. and if we're pulled over, we're supposed to eat the piece of paper. Because they're so afraid that someone's going to get a hold of it and go after these people.

15:24One, my name is Wintana Melikin and I am a proud Airtrand American who lives in the city of St. Paul. I'm the executive director of Groundwork Action. So we're an organization that develops leaders and trains folks to run for office. In the past weeks and months, Wintana has been drawing on her experience of grassroots mobilisation to do what she can to protect the city. And she says Minneapolis is uniquely prepared to fight back. I think Minnesota is the home of George Floyd. George Floyd was a catalyst for this country to wrestle with the inequalities and the differential treatment that people experience based on the colour of their skin.

16:09and it created not only a moment of mass solidarity, but it also created networks to keep each other safe. And when this moment occurred, Minnesotans were just ready to stand up and lead. And what does that look like? I think about a friend of mine who picks up and drops off a child to school every day because their parents don't feel safe going outside. And one day after dropping them off, the parents weren't home. And so he went inside, he hung out, a full night went by, he slept at their home. The parents never came back. They had been picked up by ICE. I had another friend tell me how he has a neighbor that is trying to figure out what to do with the pets of someone who was picked up by ICE.

16:54There are folks working on attorney networks to figure out what do you do with people's couches and sofas and property. And just to name, we're not talking about just 22-year-olds, you know, big hearts and ambition. We're talking about grandmothers bundled up in winter coats, just sitting at a corner waiting for the kids to get off the bus and making sure every single one of them gets on their home and is blowing their whistle. Like it is every genre of human being has stepped up in Minnesota overwhelmingly to participate in this. In terms of your own experience of ICE, have you known members of your community that have been actively targeted?

17:34I've had loved ones, I've had family members, I've had friends. I've had folks who had nothing to do with anything were sitting in their car and then just picked up by ICE and sent to a detention centre. I've had to go to Whipple, the detention centre myself, and get people out. Walk people through the process of figuring out where your family member is and finding out they're in New Mexico or Texas. The first time it happened, I was just sitting at a desk, got the phone call, began working with members of Congress and my legislators and trying to figure out what was going on. We couldn't find this person.

18:07Supposedly, they're not at Whipple. And I'm like, they're in ICE detention. Like, what do you mean? Like, ICE picked them up. And then, check the websites. We're waiting and waiting and waiting. And then we see notice they're in Texas. And I don't know how to explain how horrifying it is. And I think the worst part is that in the beginning it was just like full of tears and pain. And now I'm like, I've actually just normalized it myself. We've had it happen to so many people and at such a high volume that we're just like, all right, solve the next problem.

18:39Coming up, what it's like when you come face to face with ice.

18:58My name is Patti O 'Keefe. I am a 36-year-old Minneapolis resident, have lived here for the last 14 years, and grew up just west of Minneapolis, so I've been in Minnesota my whole life. When President Trump called the Somali community in Minneapolis garbage and then said that there would be ICE agents descending on the city is when I decided, OK, we need to get involved. Patty is one of Minneapolis's volunteer observers who fan out across the city, attempting to document ICE raids as they happen. A couple weeks ago on January 11th, days after Renee Good, I responded to an alert that I got from my neighborhood group chat that ICE was in the area and was cornering another car of a legal observer and had pepper sprayed into their vent of their car.

19:54We drove over to the scene and we were blowing our whistles and honking our horns. The things that we know alerts our neighbors that ICE is in the area. And they got out of the car clearly very activated. They're wearing tactical gear, but there's no name badges to be found and no markings that this was ice. And what are they going to do to me right now? I put my hands up. The car was in park. I was doing everything that I possibly could to signal that I was not a threat to them. But also in the back of my head, I was like, I don't know if that matters anymore. They were yelling at us to turn around.

20:40and then one of the agents pepper sprayed into the front windshield vent of my car. And when we didn't turn around, they smashed the front drivers and passenger side windows of my car, dragged my friend and I out of the car, and put us in separate unmarked vehicles where I was immediately just taunted and mocked by the ICE agents in the car. One of them took a photo of me and was showing the others and laughing. They insinuated that I was ugly. And then one of the agents said, you guys got to stop obstructing us. That's why that lesbian bitch is dead. Speaking of Renee Good. Patty was taken to Whipple Detention Center, put in ankle shackles and kept in a cell for over eight hours.

21:32We heard lots of pain and agony from the people there wailing and crying. And I heard a man just pleading, let me go, let me go, let me go, let me go over and over again. I heard a child crying. Also heard, you know, the small talk and the banter and the laughter from the federal agents that were outside of our cells. And that juxtaposition was just pretty disturbing to me because how disconnected, how desensitized you have to be to people's pain to be able to have lighthearted conversation in that environment. And when we were able to get to use the bathroom, I was able to see further into the detention center.

22:20I saw probably around 100 people, mostly Hispanic people, but also East African. And, you know, the looks on their faces were hopeless, despondent, just staring straight ahead, kind of in a daze, very clearly experiencing the trauma of having just been ripped away from their family, their friends, their community, and knowing that they aren't going to get to go home, right? Um, and yeah, I'll just, I'll never forget it. How, how sad it was. But despite all this, Patty has refused to stop. I am a little bit more scared when I'm out there now, I'm not going to lie. But the goal for them is to make us feel fear and to make us feel intimidated and to ultimately deter us from doing what we're doing.

23:18and I don't think that they would be putting so much time and resources into trying to deter us if our actions weren't having an impact. So I want to keep gumming up the works. As scary as this has been, this has also made me feel a lot of hope because in the face of this repression and political targeting from the federal government, our community has really come together. We are more connected and more organized than we ever have been. And in the face of repression, we just get stronger and ultimately building our movements and building our community. And that's going to help us see through these dark times.

24:17Speaking to people in Minneapolis, it's clear how much ice coming to their city has changed their everyday lives. Yet all of them talk about a huge sense of pride in how they've come together to resist. My partner and I were cuddling on the couch the other night and I said, you know, do we need to move? And he goes, you know, I was thinking about that this morning and I thought, no, because, wow, look at our city. Seeing what's happening right now and people fighting for their neighbors is, I mean, I cry all the time. And that's the beauty of it. I think what people aren't seeing are the incredible things happening here.

24:58You know, people getting together in huge groups and walking through the streets and singing so that their neighbors that are hiding can hear them. or the band Brass Solidarity showing up to, you know, Alex's memorial. And the entire street singing Stand By Me with a big brass band outside of where this happened, you know, taking back the street.

25:29I see people posting those little moments and going, you know, Minneapolis, I love you.

25:51And that's it for today. My thanks to everyone from Minneapolis who spoke to us. And you can read all of our reporting on the ongoing situation in Minneapolis at theguardian.com. This episode was produced by Alex Atak, Ivor Manley and Guy Zafman and presented by me, Annie Kelly The sound designer was Brian McNamara and the executive producer was Homer Khalili If you want to hear more about Minneapolis over on our sister podcast, Politics Weekly America Jonathan Friedland has spoken to George Conway former Republican turned Democratic candidate about why Trump's ice dream might be coming to an end.