Under ICE occupation: A Minnesotan in the trenches

I’m on the board of Indivisible Asheville. I’m from Minnesota, and have many friends in Minneapolis-St. Paul — some in the neighborhood where Renee Good was murdered by an ICE agent.

If you don’t have close connections, chances are you aren’t aware of the full scope of ICE’s invasion of Minnesota. There’s no way snippets on the evening news can capture this. You need to know, because if we can’t stop this in its tracks now — if Congress or the courts won’t put the brakes on ICE Barbie’s rampage — it’ll be coming for all of us, all over the US. So I want to share this first-person account of what daily life is under, literally, an occupation. (This is one account, but I’ve heard many of these same details over and over.)

The resistance in Minnesota is strong, and fierce, and incredibly well organized. They’re developing a playbook we can all follow.

You do have to ask yourself, though – why Minnesota? Data from the Immigration Research Initiative shows that fewer than 1% of the nation’s undocumented immigrants lived in Minnesota in 2022. Why have the ICE surge there, rather than California, Florida, or Texas?

From a Minnesota resident in the trenches:

I want to try and describe what it is like in Minnesota right now for my friends in other states. As a reminder, my wife and I live in the suburbs — Apple Valley — not Minneapolis. This federal invasion and occupation is occurring all across the state, not just in Minneapolis.

ICE is not looking for specific people. They don’t have a sheet of paper with specific names, specific addresses, that they are arriving in communities to get. They drive around looking for kidnappings of opportunity.

So they will sit and idle in their car, waiting for a Black, brown or Asian person who is walking into the gas station, taking out their trash, walking their dog, or working at their job and then swarm and grab them.

ICE drives around *incredibly recklessly* and uses license plate readers to find people with mostly-Hispanic sounding last names, pulls them over, and kidnaps them. Again, these aren’t specific people ICE has been tasked with finding. Most of the people who are kidnapped are U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, or have legal status of some sort (work permit, a social security number, or are a refugee or asylee)

These are documented immigrants or citizens who have broken no laws — including not having broken laws entering the country. These are people just going about their daily life who get stopped and snatched because they’re Black, brown or Asian.

Just going about OUR daily life, we see abandoned cars in the middle of highways, on neighborhood streets, in front of doctors offices. Sometimes the doors are still open and the car is still running. We could be in line to get Burger King and watch ICE snatch a teenager on his way into work. We could be taking out the trash, walking kids to the bus stop, going for a walk outside, and there will all of a sudden be a swarm of anonymous, masked, violent men ripping a family from their home or out of the booth at a restaurant.

This can happen anywhere at any time.

There is no place we can go and be assured we won’t see someone be violently taken. Target. The grocery store. A restaurant. Driving our daughter to swim lessons. Driving to church. Going to the doctor. Multiple times a day, we get texts from co-workers, neighbors, friends, family members about a person they know (or are related to, or work with, or are their kids’ friends parents) who was taken.

ICE sets up checkpoints in neighborhoods and makes everyone leaving or entering show their papers (note: very few people can prove their citizenship at a moments notice. A majority of Minnesotans don’t have passports. Citizens don’t just carry their birth certificate around). They go door-to-door in apartment buildings and neighborhoods, just hoping a Black, brown or Asian person will open their door (because they have no judicial warrant to take a specific person(s), just kidnapping whoever accidentally opens their door).

Schools have had to close.

ICE has shown up to schools and just pepper sprayed kids and parents. Districts are calling families and advising that their kids switch to online school. ICE circles and targets Spanish-immersion programs, forcing moms and dads to sit watch over their kids’ school to keep their kids and teachers safe. Kids come home from school to empty houses, their parents having been stolen sometime during the day. When parents are kidnapped in front of others, they will yell out their full names and the name of their kids’ school(s) so someone can call the school and alert the administration, hoping their kids can be put with a safe adult instead of coming home to no one. There are people who signed delegation of parental authority (DOPA) forms — agreeing to take a neighbor or friend’s kids in the event of an emergency — who now have multiple children from multiple families.

ICE is ubiquitous. They are everywhere. We see them 3, 5, 7 times a day just going through our normal routine. There are more federal agents in Minnesota than there are local law enforcement from the ten largest metro police departments COMBINED.

This is going to come to other states and I want people to be prepared —I cannot overstate how many people have (had to) come together to respond.

Regular Minnesotans — people who have never once gone to a protest, called their elective representatives, participated in an economic strike, people who rarely even vote — have been activated.

• Grandparents carry whistles in their cars in case they come across ICE while living their lives and need to warn the surrounding area.
• Parents of kids in K-12 organize to ensure there’s parents at bus stops and the area around schools, because ICE stakes out bus stops and school properties — taking parents who are waiting at the bus stop or in the carpool line.
• We’ve set up massive food donation and delivery infrastructure.
• We organize rides to school and work.
• People are literally taking in families.

(Indivisible AVL added these next two points)

• Groups of clergy are meeting with corporate leaders such as Target upper management—people have been taken from Target, and ICE stages in its parking lots—to persuade them not to support ICE
• Individuals are buying single boxes of salt (salt melts ICE, get it?) from Target and then returning them, to clog up the retail process.

Minnesotans are being collectively punished and traumatized.

Six-month old babies have been teargassed because their parents are just driving in their own neighborhood. We are coming together in the most beautiful ways — I don’t want to understate that. But I want everyone outside of Minnesota to understand: we are under a federal invasion and occupation of armed, masked, paramilitary that roam our streets, brutalizing, harassing and murdering with impunity. SO many kids aren’t going to school right now.

So many businesses are closed or have lost their customer base entirely. So many families are facing eviction because they can’t go to work and won’t be able to pay their rent.

There may be people who might think that when this comes to your state, being white or being a U.S. citizen or living in a suburb or rural area or living in a neighborhood with few or no immigrant neighbors means you won’t see or experience this kind of daily assault of an invasion and occupation. I want to dispel that idea.

There are things I’m forgetting, certainly, but I wanted to try and paint the picture because this isn’t ending in Minnesota. We are the test case before expanding to other states in the country.

Help us to stop this before it spreads. Organize in your communities now.

If you want to help, the Minnesota Indivisible Alliance, which connects 81 Indivisible organizations in the state, endorses

The website lists mutual aid and direct support funds, community organizations, ways to take action, and places to learn what’s actually happening.