Having trouble keeping up with the fascist Trump administration's "largest ever" wave of immigration stormtroopers that continues to terrorize Minnesota? You're not alone. The rolling updates below will provide nugget-sized intel/links/embeds amid this infuriating news cycle, hopefully making you feel a little better-informed and/or connected to your community. As always, feel free to contribute in the comments.
Warrants—you gotta get ’em. That’s the message U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank gave to immigration officials in his courtroom today when he freed 18-year-old Junior de Jesus Herrera Berrios. If that name doesn’t sound familiar to you, you’re probably familiar with Herrera Berrios’s arrest—he was nabbed after a dramatic chase through the Hennepin County Government Center last week, with the county Sheriff’s office running interference for the feds. Herrera Berrios had a court date “for a hearing on drug charges over allegedly driving a car with 57 pounds of methamphetamines,” the Strib reports.
What deals, if any, were negotiated with the Trump administration to ensure the end of Operation Metro Surge? Unreliable narrator/"border czar" Tom Homan appeared on Face the Nation Sunday to say, “I’ve gotten agreements in Minnesota I never thought we’d be able to get.”
Notably, Homan praised Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for dismantling the traffic blocks that were “unsafe for our officers [driving 75+ mph down Cedar Avenue].”
Frey denied any capitulation to Homan’s demands. “The position that I have had for months is exactly the position that we have as a city today, and that position is the following: We do not enforce federal immigration law, period,” he said.
Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt, last seen in the New York Times “agoniz[ing] over her role,” also denied any deal. "Our policies did not change and I was not pressured, as some have said, to change them. Was I asked? Absolutely," she told reporters.
Homan also claims that 1,000 agents have already been withdrawn from Minnesota, and that “several hundred more” will later leave. However, he also said a “small security force” will hang around to "respond to when our agents are out, and they get surrounded by agitators and things get out of control." How many DHS troops does that leave in Minnesota? And what was with the new vehicles headed into Whipple that Mercado Media spotted over the weekend?
However many or few DHS forces remain in town, we can be sure that they’re just going to get sneakier. Watch here as an ICE agent knocks on a family’s door on Thursday afternoon, pretending to be an ordinary non-evil human being in need of help with her vehicle. When Jesus Flores leaves his home, they abduct him. That’s some foul shit right there. There’s a GoFundMe for the Flores family here.
New legal filings appear to confirm what we’ve been hearing all along—that DHS goons have been indicating that they know where observers live in order to intimidate them. Jonah E. Bromwich collected several such stories Friday in the New York Times of veiled and not-so-veiled threats. Tricia McLaughlin, spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said DHS “does not use force against peaceful protesters or stop cars without reasonable suspicion of a crime,” thus essentially confirming these allegations because she always lies.
The coverup is official: The FBI will not share evidence related to the killing of Alex Pretti with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty says this just shows that the feds are “not confident in their agents’ actions or their immediate response.” The FBI is also denying the BCA access to evidence related to the killing of Renee Good.
Farmers and farmworkers? Also screwed over by the ICE invasion. As Emma Nelson and Trey Mewes report for the Star Tribune, many Minnesota farms find themselves in a precarious position as immigration forces snatch up workers or send them into hiding. There have already been fewer workers available since Trump was re-elected; the trend has just accelerated. And not all of them are undocumented, of course; there are also H-2A visa holders. “They’re detaining citizens. They’re killing people with papers,” one undocumented worker tells the Strib in Spanish. “Imagine what could happen to us.”
Here’s a nice feature in the Guardian about how the American Indian Movement provided a blueprint for the neighborhood patrols response to ICE. It also discusses the participation of Indigenous Minnesotans in protecting their neighbors, and of mutual aid efforts centered in Minneapolis's Pow Wow Grounds cafe. “We’re having so much anxiety because it’s in our bones,” says Jolene Jones, an organizer with the Native American Community Development Institute. “We were still being chased, we’re still being snatched from our homes, our children are being snatched. It’s very triggering.”
Better late than never? Barack Obama, who has signed off on a deportation or two in his day, had some supportive words for the people of Minnesota and criticisms of ICE activity in the Twin Cities. As he told YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen:
It is important for us to recognize the unprecedented nature of what ICE was doing in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the way that federal agents, ICE agents were being deployed, without any clear guidelines, training, pulling people out of their homes, using five-year-olds to try to bait their parents, all the stuff that we saw, teargassing crowds simply who were standing there, not breaking any laws.
