The Minnesota ICE update

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Regular service on this blog will resume soon–probably on Friday, although I make no promises. I’ve had a post in the queue, waiting for its moment in whatever faint sun Notes has to offer. In the meantime, after last Friday’s post about ICE activity and the Minneapolis resistance, I’ve been sent new bits of information, some from friends and some from news sources you may not have seen. I’d like to pass them on. 

You will have figured this out if you’re awake and breathing, but I’ll say it anyway: Notes isn’t a newspaper. I can’t cover the situation with the thoroughness even a half-decent journalist could manage. But I also can’t sit on my couch eating popcorn and pretending none of this is happening. I grew up in the US and spent 40 long, cold years in Minneapolis, although I live in Britain now. What’s happening there is close to my heart and given the power the US wields in the world, it matters to all of us.

The usual irrelevant photo: Yes indeed, folks, it’s the moon and two trees. They’re in Cornwall, or at least the trees are. The moon is–or was–where moons usually are. None of it has nothing to do with anything.

News from friends

A friend writes that churches, community organizations, and businesses are collecting and delivering food, diapers, detergents, and other necessities to families hiding at home. They have an army of volunteers to collect and deliver. “My two faves,” she wrote, “are my dentist and . . . a sex toy store. Doulas have offered to help with delivery and postpartum care since women are afraid to go to the hospital. A vet said he’d take care of dogs by visiting homes for free. A couple guys with trucks offered to tow abandoned cars back to their owners’ homes. I just read now that the city will tow a car abandoned because of an ICE abduction for free.  People are sitting in warm cars with clothes, food and burner phones to help people who just get thrown out into the freezing air after being detained.”

My goddaughter* writes, “Almost every place you go–shopping, churches, to work, doctor’s office, whatever–they have free whistles that are hanging by the doors for everyone to grab when you walk in because there is a good chance you’ll need one. Driving by [ICE agents] when they’re in the vehicles, they stare you down, challenging you with their eyes. People are giving out food, tear gas relief, effing GAS MASKS. I have a friend making entire kits for chemical irritant relief, free, funded via crowd sourcing. We are teaching each other new ways of protecting buildings with vulnerable people in them. At one of my jobs, I walk the perimeter hourly to scan for [ICE agents] camped out, looking for folks. We all have signs on locked doors indicating ICE is not permitted to enter.

“Yesterday they tear-gassed a PRESCHOOL looking for a 21-year-old teacher, who’s legal to be here. Neighbors surrounded the school to protect the kids, using their bodies as shields. They’re now using something called LRAD, which I’m learning causes permanent hearing damage, up to full deafness. They’re surrounding businesses they know cater to minority populations, just looking for anyone that looks like easy pickings. Bus stops and schools are DANGEROUS places to be right now. They’re targeting white people with cars full of groceries, because they assume they’re doing deliveries for scared neighbors. Those volunteers are advised to keep no records on their phones, paper only, and instructed to EAT THE PAPER if stopped to avoid giving away info on those families.

“We are all scared. But we can get through scared because we are on the right side of history. We love our neighbors here. We don’t back down. Considering they’re armed with guns and vests and aggression, and we are not, we’re doing ok. Not really, but we’re holding the line.”

 

It’s not all about ICE

A small Minneapolis charter school that’s focused on social justice was outed first by CNN, then by the New York Post, and after that by a paper further to the right than the Post, as the school Renee Good’s 6-year-old son attended. (Good was the first Minneapolis observer to be killed by ICE.) After that, the pile-on started. A Georgia congressman called for the school to be defunded. 

“This institution radicalizes students and pushes a left-wing agenda that demonizes ICE agents,” he said. “The federal government should not subsidize anti-American education.”

A TikTok video said, “So, Renee Good was trained to fight federal agents through a Minneapolis charter school?!”

It got 100,000 views.

Social media went wild. Teachers got death threats and the school shut down its web presence and switched to online classes to keep students and teachers safe.   

 

From social media and the news

St Paul’s mayor, Kaohly Her, who’s Hmong, writes that ICE is targeting the Karen community, a large ethnic group from southeast Asia.  

“They are refugees and asylum seekers on the path to earning their green cards.

“ICE is now using a deceptive new tactic to detain them. Individuals receive ‘call-in’ letters instructing them to report to the Whipple Building [a federal building and the center of ICE activities in Minneapolis], warned that failure to appear could jeopardize their legal status. But when they do exactly what they’re told, they are detained on the spot — without an interview, without a case review.

“It’s a trap that puts people who came to this country seeking safety in an impossible position. These detainment tactics are cruel, deceptive, and deeply un-American.

“I recently visited the Karen community to pray together and to make clear that they are not alone — and that I will continue to stand with them.”

An article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports the people detained in the Whipple building–ICE’s all-purpose, overcrowded lockup–are being denied medical care, including diabetes and epilepsy medication, as well as products for their periods. Some report being given one sandwich a day and left to beg for water. Some are held in toilets, sometimes shackled or handcuffed, sometimes in mixed-sex groups, and packed in so tight that one person reported that they had to take turns to lie down. A woman reported that her wedding ring and some of her clothes were cut off. Citizens and legal immigrants are held separately from the undocumented, who conditions are worse.

Lawyers say it’s virtually impossible to get access to their clients.

And on Facebook, someone writes, On Facebook, someone writes, “One of the nuts things about organizing in the Twin Cities right now is that even the most long term organizers who’ve been here for decades can’t keep track of all the resistance that is going on. There are so many self-organized crews just doing work that in any conversation with someone from another neighborhood you might stumble over a whole collective of people resisting in ways you didn’t think of. There’s a crew of carpenters just going around fixing kicked-in doors. There are tow truck drivers taking cars of detained people away for free. People delivering food to families in hiding. So many local rapid response groups that the number is uncertain but somewhere between 80 and the low hundreds- especially when one considers that several immigrant communities have their own non-English rapid response networks usually uncounted in the main English-language directories. People standing watch outside daycares and schools.”

 

Two notable arrests

A legal Turkish immigrant who was his severely disabled son’s primary carer was picked up by ICE when he appeared at a regularly scheduled immigration hearing. His son’t condition deteriorated. The government refused to release him or let him communicate with his son.

When his son died, they refused to allow him to attend the funeral. He’s still in detention.

On a cheerier note, ICE picked up a Brazilian influencer who’d defended ICE, arguing that the people ICE had detained were “all crooks. The lot of them.”

 

Is it settling down?

After Alex Pretti’s killing caused an uproar, Trump made a few noises about dialing things down, but it doesn’t look like target groups (Asians; people who are brown- or black-skinned) are any safer. ICE has expanded its power to arrest people bothering to get a without warrant. As far as I can tell from the wording of the news articles I’ve seen, ICE granted that power to itself. A judge could overturn it, and may, but the order would then get bogged down in the courts until eventually Trump’s Supreme Court upheld ICE’s power to forgo warrants, and if the mood takes it, to turn spring to winter and wine to caustic soda. 

The government’s offered to scale back the Minnesota operation if the state “cooperates.”  

What does cooperate mean? With a bunch as chaotic as this, you can never be sure. I’ve seen one statement saying they want access to the prisons, presumably to deport people, but several say they want access to voter rolls, which raises the chilling (and not unlikely) prospect that they would use them to tip the November midterm elections in their favor. They’ve already asked 43 states for access and only 8 have allowed it. The ones that refused cite privacy concerns and the right of states to determine voter eligibility. The Justice Department has sued 23 for access.

 

The musicians fight back

I can offer you not one but three songs about the Minnesota resistance: Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis,” Billy Bragg’s “City of Heroes,” and the Marsh Family’s “Minnesota,” an adaptation of the 1967 “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)”; it keeps the original line about wearing flowers in your hair, which–sorry, guys–no sane Minnesotan would do in the winter and just isn’t a Minnesota kind of thing in the summer either. Never mind. The rest of it is a good fit. 

____________

* If you’ve been around here for long, you will have stumbled over some mention of me being a Jewish atheist. So what am I doing with a (yes, Catholic) godkid? Religiously, I admit, it’s strange. It’s also been wonderful. My partner and I became joint godmothers, and it formalized our relationship with the family and let us know we were welcome to stay involved. I’m proud to quote her here and in awe of the person she’s grown up to be.

62 thoughts on “The Minnesota ICE update”

  1. Thank you for this info. I am in awe of those who are resisting and helping others while facing these cruel, violent employees of our national government. I fear our next election will be stolen using this private personal army to intimidate voters and destroy ballots. Terrifying times.

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    • On the positive side, it does give me a slightly closer view of what’s happening. The image the world had of the US (and that many Americans had of it) really has shattered, hasn’t it? It was never an accurate picture but what’s happening now is beyond anything I ever imagined, and I’m hardly a political optimist.

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  5. Thanks for the illuminating update, Ellen. This sounds to me, even if I treat it with my usual scepticism, allowing for the eye witness bias we’re all familiar with and the exaggeration that creeps in without any intention to deceive, as if Minnesota is effectively occupied by an invader. Your account brings to mind the resistance movements of the Second World War, where private citizens effectively became a covert army. I don’t want to believe that a western democracy can be subverted in such a way but the evidence is overwhelming. Cynic that I am, I never expected this.
    Do they not see that when a gang (for that’s what they are) attempts to take control by throwing the rule book out of the window that society can no longer function? We are a cooperative species, society is based on trust, although there are always outlaws or we wouldn’t need a legal system. Once we reach a point where that no longer works, where power is abused, we’re done for, as any revolution demonstrates.
    What to say? What to do? To offer my ‘thoughts and prayers’ would be as meaningless as it is when politicians do it, especially as I’m a fellow atheist, so I won’t insult you with that. I just hope that people come to their senses soon and that we can all escape this dystopian nightmare, even the onlookers like me.
    Love
    Jeannie

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    • What to do? Good question. You’re in Britain, right? Sorry, I lose track. Make sure it doesn’t happen here. (It could, it could.) Wherever you are, talk to people. It’s a surprisingly powerful and quiet way of taking action. A friend just sent me a reel of a choir in Wales singing in solidarity with Minneapolis. Sadly, I couldn’t pick out the words but the voices were beautiful and it was moving that they did it–and made it public. It’s not what comes to mind when someone says “political action,” but it is a political action. I think you’re right that we’re a cooperative species. What we do affects us all. We’re not just onlookers.

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      • Remember Hitler did not set up the death camps first. First he went after his political enemies on trumped up charges sending them to jail or the firing squad. Then he set up concentration camps for German citizens he considered enemies like Jews, other minorities, the disabled and the critical press! Then when these prison camps were full he set up the extermination camps in 1939! See the progression? The US now has concentration camps for the brown people no matter if they are undocumented or not. People are living in these camps in inhuman conditions and many have died!

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        • And from what I read, they shuffle people from one to another so their court cases keep getting canceled. It not only keeps them from being released, it means (since they’re for-profit institutins, that the owners make more money from them.

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  7. What don’t you understand about entering a country illegally? It seems you are getting the side of the story you want to hear. Where was your horror at some of the murders, rapes, and human trafficking many of these people have committed? Did you migrate to the UK legally or sneak in the backdoor? Comparisons to the Jewish Holocaust are ridiculous. A ticket back to one’s home country is NOT a concentration camp. Glad you care about your grandchildren. How would you feel if they were trafficked? An estimated 300K juveniles were let into the country unaccompanied, and people picking them up were unvetted. The UK has its own immigration problems, but feel free to take these in from the US if you care so much. https://borderhawk.news/dozens-of-missing-children-rescued-in-florida-human-trafficking-sting/

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    • Hello, sweetheart. I wondered how long it would be before a troll found me. 1. Many of the people who’ve been swept up in these raids are in the country legally and are stopped only because their skin is brown or black. And not all of them are released. Many have been detained when they attend immigration hearings as part of the legal process of staying in the country. They’re playing by the rules, but suddenly the rules don’t apply to them. Many (sorry–no statistics available because ICE doesn’t release them) have no criminal record. They’re not rapists, murderers, whatever else plays in the dark of your imagination. Are you equally cranked up, by the way, about US-born white rapists?

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    • I don’t suppose this will make the slightest difference to your opinions but I’ve always understood that the Americas, north and south, already had well established populations when Europeans began their invasion, which seems to fit the definition of undocumented immigrants illegally displacing legitimate residents quite well.
      Jeannie (Old, white, female, middle class, happily married to the same man for over fifty years, no plans to vote Reform).

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    • When the government packs people back to their home countries, I can understand their THINKING they’re in or going to concentration camps. They may have to stand or sit in crowded, unsanitary places for hours.

      I just posted on my blog about the Christians on both sides of this issue who probably had sung “Faith of our fathers, we will love both friend and foe in all our strife,” and are forgetting all about that thought in this winter’s strife.

      Our hostess can defend herself but, if you click back to 2015 or so, you’ll find the posts about her immigration status. She did it legally.

      Pris cilla King

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      • Hours. Or days. Or longer. Sometimes with overflowing toilets and minimal or barely edible food. In one detention center, with a measles outbreak. They’re shuffled from detention center to detention center, in part because it cancels court appearances so they can’t be released–which incidentally makes them more lucrative for the companies that run the detention centers.

        Thanks for weighing in, Priscilla.

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  8. Ellen, thank you for this detailed update. It seems that we swapped countries. I am originally from Bristol and now live about 10 miles south of St. Paul. Even here, we have neighborhoods attending protest rallies. I cannot express myself well enough to tell you of the shame that this administration has brought upon the residents of the State of Minnesota. Brighter days are ahead.

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    • They will comes, those brighter days. I just hope they don’t take too long.

      Just after this posted, I found a web address for a petition supporting Minneapolis’ Nobel Peace Prize nomination. In spite of planning to shut up about this for a while, I’ll post it. Rather than focusing on the shame the administration’s brought on the state’s residents, I’m in awe of people’s resilience and courage. The shame goes to the administration and its supporters.

      How long have you lived in MN?

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      • I was transferred to Chicago in 1969 and to L.A. in 1976. From there I came to MN the first time in 1980. A few more transfers later I returned to Minnesota from Hong Kong and have been in this great state ever since. Gov. Tim Walz doesn’t take any of Trump’s racist BS which is basically why we have this chaos inflicted upon us.

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  9. Thank you for the update. It’s so important to spread this information, to counter the constant disinformation that’s coming from the administration. Thank you for providing this conduit.

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  10. It’s ironic that I’m getting more on-the-ground information from a writer in the UK than I am from major news media in the US, where I live. So carry on—this needs to be documented, both as useful information for other cities that will be attacked, and as witnessing for the history books when they try to erase it.

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    • That’s interesting, not to mention ridiculous, that you’re not getting much information in the US, although I don’t suppose I should be surprised. Thanks for the note. It’s good to know there’s some value in doing this.

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  11. Thank you for this, Ellen — keep up the good work! There’s nowhere near enough coverage of this in the mainstream press.

    On the subject of godparents, there’s nothing wrong with having an assortment. When I was baptised in the Anglican church, my godparents were a member of the Russian Orthodox church, a Jew, and a Swedenborgian. My parents were both good atheists; the object of the whole exercise was to insulate me from deciding to join a cult when I hit my teens.

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  14. Thank you to your goddaughter and all those like her who are using their time, resources, and skills to protect and care for others who are extremely vulnerable right now. Minnesotans have proven to be an inspirational example of what community activism looks like in action and about how powerful a force that can be to reckon with.

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  16. That Whipple Building reminds me a bit of the Hotel Metropole in Vienna.

    (There were such places in Paris (Hotel Lutetia), Prag (Palais Petschek), Budapest, Amsterdam (?), Rouen, Lodz … yeah.)

    To reduce this militia by seven hundred troops, and this connected to conditions. They want to show that they are the masters, die Herren im Haus. In the end it is the Diktatur des Hausknechts, nothing else.

    Yes, many “small” acts of resistance do make a difference (they are never “small”, takes something to think for oneself, and finally act). May it be a good omen for the things to come.

    Ldar is a noise weapon for crowd control, disgusting but within the range of police weapons.

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    • Trump’s administration is such a chaotic mess that anytime I start a sentence with “They want,” I can think of six counterarguments. They want to show they’re in charge, yes. They also want to show they’re de-escalating without giving up any power or changing their tactics. They want to practice for the November elections. (I read an article this morning saying they plan to use ICE to surround the polls come November in the hope of keeping voters away. Is it accurate? I don’t know. It’s not outside the realm of possibility.)

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      • “use ICE to surround the polls come November”

        That’s what I expect “them” to do. Because safety, ya know ?! Jewish space lasers, and shduff. Fits well with the idea to “nationalise” the elections. Victor Orban would be proud.
        Again, it is about owning the public space, to make clear who’s boss. It is intimidation, nothing else.
        The POOH can not risk to “loose” this election, absolutelyfucking no way. So he and his sycophantic henchmen will do anything to make sure that he “wins”, because he’s the winner, yeah, always. And they will not abandon their nice project of that old/new, white, “Christian” Trumpistan, respected always and everywhere – utopia is a mean force.

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  18. This is truly dystopian. Obviously, I’m not completely unaware of what is going on in Minneapolis but the sheer scale of it is just… I have no words. It’s really weird watching America turn on itself.

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    • Just now, my partner was reading an article about two men released by federal court order and picked up again by ICE before they could leave the building. ICE is defying court orders and no one is in a position to enforce them. In other words, what I’ve written barely touches the depth of what’s happening. A friend–US born, Asian-Pacific, child of an Army lifer–wrote about carrying her passport just in case, not going out as much as she used to, just in case. Her daughters are terrified for her.

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  19. Last night, I talked to a friend who moved to Minneapolis when he retired. (He’s a priest, and two of his children ended up there.) He said it’s really tense in the city for everyone. His son is helping a few families who can’t get out. His grandchildren went to one of the schools being targeted. It’s unbelievable how the government thinks this is a good idea.

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  21. Randomly, earlier, while I was going through my emails, listening to politics-podcasts, and trying to get back into a “reading-blogs-I-follow”, I thought “I wonder what the Notes from the UK blogger has been saying lately–quite a [interesting] lot, I imagine…” and here is your “lot”. Glad to catch up on your posts…

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