MN ICE Watch Feb. 2-6: Daily Updates on the Federal Siege of Minnesota

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 dizzyingly depressing 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.

MONDAY 2.2

Twin Cities Drum Collective is staging an anti-ICE protest at 3:30 p.m. this afternoon that’ll make noise throughout downtown Minneapolis. “This is not a march or rally,” the press release stipulates. “It is a sustained, sound-based protest designed to create repeated public encounters as people move through downtown during peak departure and transit hours.” In practice, that’ll look like 60+ drummers from around the state sounding their thunderously peaceful opposition to a fascist government’s deadly siege on a great Midwestern city. “We have a lot of drummers committed,” T.C. Drum Collective founder/Dillinger Four kit basher Lane Pederson tells Racket. “Should be loud!” Give ‘em hell.

Lil Liam is home! The ICE-abducted Columbia Heights tot, 5, and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, were released Saturday from a Texas detention facility after being taken from Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge. The judge who ordered their release didn't mince words: Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas offered bars like “the perfidious lust for unbridled power” and “the imposition of cruelty.” Lil Liam Ramos got a special trip to the cockpit during his return flight home, and later received a replacement bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack while meeting with lawmakers at MSP. 

Helluva scoop by ProPublica’s J. David McSwane: Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez killed Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis. CBP hadn’t released their names. Writes ProPublica:  “We believe there are few investigations that deserve more sunlight and public scrutiny than this one, in which two masked agents fired 10 shots at Pretti as he lay on the ground after being pepper-sprayed.” Amen. 

Three of the Star Tribune's heavyweight reporters—Reid Forgrave, Susan Du, and Christopher Magan—got a sense of what life is like for immigrant detainees inside Minneapolis's Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building. It's a nightmare, they found, both in terms of due process and the living conditions. Folks are crammed “shoulder to shoulder" amid overflowing toilets and provided one-sandwich-per-day meals. "Basic human needs like food and medical care were sometimes denied," write the Strib journos, who quote one detained woman as saying “there was no humanity" inside Whipple. A class-action lawsuit alleges that the building, which was not designed for housing prisoners, has become “the epicenter of the systematic deprivation of fundamental constitutional and legal rights at the hands of the federal government.”

Sahan Journal asked all 112 Republicans in the Minnesota Legislature, plus all Republican gubernatorial and congressional candidates, how they feel about the federal government's deadly invasion of our state. The soul-deadening levels of wormy bootlicking Sahan encountered via the responses? Well, see for yourself.

When the feds killed Alex Pretti, they said they were pursuing 41-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant Jose Huerta Chuma. A resident of the U.S. for over two decades, Chuma is now hiding as DHS tracks his whereabouts. But CBS News managed to conduct this painful interview with him. "I think, maybe if I hadn't gone to that place, or I don't know, a little later or a little earlier, I mean, that never would have happened," he said in Spanish. "I do feel guilty, I do feel bad. I saw stories about the man and I saw a very good person." DHS describes Chuma as a "violent criminal illegal alien," but CBS News could only turn up traffic violations and a disorderly conduct misdemeanor; the Minnesota Department of Corrections couldn't find any felony convictions related to him.

Speaking of violent threats to Minnesotans! This is who we’re dealing with, man.

Ward 11 Minneapolis City Council Member Jamison Whiting has organized a massive GoFundMe to help keep families in their homes as 3,000+ immigration thugs lurk around town. "Every dollar you give will go directly to those who need it most for emergency rental assistance," he writes. So far, 492 folks have pitched in $67,606 of the $70,000 goal. A friend who’s a teacher assures me the need for these funds is very, very real.

Hero principals, teachers, and parents are rallying to keep families safe from ICE, The New Yorker reports. “We’ve had a family self-deport,” a principal says. “We’ve had families move out of state just to get away from this level of enforcement here.” Elsewhere in the New Yorker: Why ICE is hammering Columbia Heights, the immigrant-dense 'burb where Liam Ramos and other children met the vengeance of federal agents.

No, it isn’t just Minneapolis. It isn’t just St. Paul. Homeland Security goons have been wilding through the suburbs as well—especially our diverse first-ring ‘burbs. Columbia Heights, with a population that’s nearly 50% people of color, and more than 20% foreign-born, has been a particular target, especially its schools. You may know Columbia Heights is the home of recently released bunny-hatted icon Liam Conejo Ramos; you may also know that four other Columbia Heights children are in Texas detention centers. And just today, classes were canceled across the district because of a bomb threat, while ICE was staging in school parking lots. So yes, this town needs our solidarity. The march begins at CHPS HQ and ends at Valley View Elementary. Let’s show these thugs that if they mess with one Minnesota community, they mess with us all.

Take a bow, Target PR team:

Meanwhile, Minnesota excellence on display outside of Tacos El Primo on Minnehaha Avenue in south Minneapolis:

Very cool: About one in four Minnesotans either participated in the January 23 work/school/shopping stoppage or have a loved one who did, according to a poll commissioned by May Day Strong and conducted by Blue Rose Research.

Actor Peter Dinklage dedicated a poem to Renee Good on the steps of New York City's Public Theater as part of this past weekend's "People's Filibuster" protest.

We'll never get tired of hearing about Minneapolis's history of radical labor actions. In These Times assembled this nifty primer on how our "all-out rebellion against ICE builds on more than a century of labor and social justice organizing."

We’ll take it! Progressive magazine The Nation nominated Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize.

If you're anything like me, thousands upon thousands of bikes passed by your home Saturday afternoon. It was a rally to honor DHS shooting victim Alex Pretti, an avid Minneapolis cyclist, and Racket reader Jeffrey Van Voorhis provided this report about it…

Honestly up until the moment the ride started, I kept thinking, "There is no way that anyone else can show up." And time and time again I was proven wrong.

The ride's vibe was off the charts positive, inclusive, and elated. The fact that it was a balmy 20 degrees with full sun for the first time after weeks of sub-zero temperatures certainly helped, but even still, people there were certainly somber at moments, but it was good to see people smile and enjoy themselves as a reprieve from the terror unleashed by the federal government. At any given moment of the way, there were dozens of our neighbors and community members cheering us on or leading or participating in the dozens of ride chants, ranging from but not limited to "Kristi Noem is a stank leg hoe" to "Whose Streets? Our Streets!"

From what I heard, there was only one incident of an aggressive driver or any sort of conflict, which is insane given that the last estimate I heard from one of the organizers was that roughly five thousand riders participating in Minneapolis. I think to a lot of people this was a great balance of participating in something to raise awareness of the current situation in Minneapolis, while getting outside and being with some chosen family.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Minnesotans of all ideological stripes are arming themselves. Writes reporter Dan Frosch:

Gun ownership soared in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, after the unrest surrounding the 2020 murder of George Floyd and during the pandemic crime wave that followed. Applications for permits to carry guns, which in Minnesota allows one to carry a gun openly or concealed, nearly tripled. Newcomers of all kinds bought guns. Pretti was among them.

Operation Metro Surge is kneecapping Minnesota's economy, the New York Times reports. “It’s not good for the economy, it’s not good for families, it’s not good for anybody," St. Paul grocer Henry Garnica tells the paper. Meanwhile, Adam Platt of T.C. Biz writes that local restaurants are facing an "extinction event," one Platt manages to reflexively both-sides in a way that's stunning to behold. 

Dave Infante, a certified pal of Racket, published a terrific report on how the Minnesota brewing community is meeting the moment: "The Twin Cities’ Beer Scene Is Showing the Rest of the Industry How to Fight Back." That story comes from Vinepair, but you should also check out Ifante's newsletter on the bev industry, Fingers.

The SNL cold open? It was all about us. Like the decision to showcase Pete Davidson’s impossibly lazy Tom Homan impression; love the portrayal of ICE agents as mouth-breathing oafs.