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.
FRIDAY 2.6
The following headline from the Washington Business Journal grabbed me this morning: “How Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta responded to ICE hotel uproar in Twin Cities.” Did Chris Nassetta, president and CEO of Hilton Worldwide Holdings, stand behind his Lakeville franchisee when U.S. Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem attacked them for standing against ICE? His first quote—a colorful one!—sounds promising: “It’s like Mike Tyson punched me in the face. It was difficult, and I don’t like living through those things. But it was not difficult in the sense that we made principle-based decisions.” But then we learned his courageous act amounted to… caving to the feds, with an added dash of condescension—”These young kids basically made mistakes,” he said of locally based EverPeak Hospitality. Cool story. Just great stuff.
It's hard to calculate the economic damage Operation Metro Surge has inflicted on Minneapolis, but the city took a stab at it Thursday: $10 million to $20 million in lost sales per week. The Lake Street Council estimates that its corridor of 1,000+ immigrant-owned businesses lost $46 million since this past December. “It’s an economic crisis of catastrophic proportions,” the council's Russ Adams tells the Strib.
Wait, could “Border Czar” Tom Homan possibly be lying to us? Evidence of a recently announced federal government drawdown isn't being felt around town, Bring Me the News reports. Here's a report from Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne's spokesman, Liam Davis Temple, who says, "On the ground nothing is changing."
Everything you're hearing in headlines, they are lies. There was a large convoy of multiple cars that Tom Homan said wouldn't be happening anymore, that's a lie. They were up and down Central Avenue all day today, running red lights, driving erratically, being unsafe in our community. They were at 26th and Jackson, known school bus stops for children. They were circling around Edison and then driving on Central. We got reports they were at Northeast Middle School, we got reports they were at Spero Academy, a school for students with disabilities. Everything you're hearing from the Trump administration, what's happening on the ground is just as bad as it’s ever been.
Local ICE-watchers rely on tracking the plates of sus vehicles, as we learned in this ridealong with one of ‘em. The hunch that out-of-state plates might belong to an immigration officer? A solid one, the Star Tribune found in its analysis of 100+ DHS plates it cross referenced through the state’s Driver and Vehicle Services database. Almost 60% of those plates weren’t from Minnesota, reporter Jana Hollingsworth found, while 11% had an irregularity like expired tabs and 25% were attached to rentals. Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin didn’t even bother to lie about this, opting instead to whine that this reporting “put[s] an even larger target on our officers’ backs.”
JFC: The Trump administration is moving to deport the family of lil Liam Conejo Ramos, the internationally famous 5-year-old tike with the rabbit hat who just returned to Columbia Heights from a Texas detention facility. "It's really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way. There's absolutely no reason that this should be expedited. It's not very common," immigration attorney Danielle Molliver tells Regina Medina at MPR News.
Celebrated local poet Danez Smith authored an essay titled "Minnesota Goddam" in Jewish Currents.
Of the 70,000 people being detained at the moment by ICE, most are locked away in private prisons. In These Times and The Appeal looked at every sitting member of the Congress to determine which have accepted money from prison companies CoreCivic, GEO Group, Management & Training Corporation—some of the largest ICE contractors. “Perverse financial incentives are a bedrock of incarceration,” Stacy Suh with the Detention Watch Network tells The Appeal. “As long as detention exists, profiteering will exist—whether it’s a local elected official or a local government with a shrinking budget or by a corporation.” At this point, you might be asking yourself: any local scoundrels on the receiving end? Just Rep. Tom Emmer, recipient of $2,500. Color us surprised.
How legal is ICE's creeping and growing arsenal of surveillance tech? Great question, one our buddies at 404 Media attempted to answer.
Greater Minnesota sheriffs are getting cozy with ICE, Kirsti Marohn of MPR News reports from Brainerd. Last month, Crow Wing County Sheriff Eric Klang put out a press release bragging about his officers helping ICE arrest four people inside downtown Brainerd's El Potro Mexican Restaurant. Locals held a candle-light vigil in response. Like Klang, Mille Lacs County Sheriff Kyle Burton has signed a task force agreement with ICE. In semi-related news: Minnesota gubernatorial candidate/U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar did some bragging herself Friday. "Our sheriffs play a critical role in keeping our communities safe and upholding the rule of law," she said after accepting the Major County Sheriffs of America’s Legislator of the Year Award. This, of course, tracks.
Eleven more protesters were arrested late Thursday for making noise outside of the Graduate By Hilton hotel on the University of Minnesota campus, WCCO reports. They were likely wondering how the ICE agents believed to be sleeping can, well, sleep at night. Elsewhere at the U: Four students have chained themselves to Morrill Hall in an effort to “GET ICE OUT,” the Minnesota Daily reports.
“None of this should be legal,” Columbia Heights teacher Kristen Sinicariello says of the damage immigration officials are causing on her students. As such, two Minnesota school districts and the state's largest education union sued DHS on Wednesday, Becky Z. Dernbach reports for Sahan Journal. Their big ask? Keeping ICE from prowling around schools.
Eviction filings throughout Minnesota have hit their highest level in 10 years, Deena Winter and MaryJo Webster report for the Star Tribune. "It’s too soon to tell how much of a factor Operation Metro Surge might be," they write, but this doesn't appear to be a random coincidence; last month the number of filings in Hennepin County more than doubled the monthly average over the past three years.
THURSDAY 2.5
Annoying update on our first blurb from Thursday: Massive loser Jake Lang, a uniquely pathetic MAGA influencer (which is really saying something), filmed himself knocking over the 20-foot-long "PROSECUTE ICE" sculpture outside of the Minnesota State Capitol; the public art had been erected by Common Defense, a veterans org dedicated to fighting authoritarianism. Lang claims he was later jailed in Ramsey County and dinged for $6,000 in damages. A smarter person would realize this doesn't amount to "posting your wins," but here we are.
One day after border czar Tom Homan hinted at de-escalation, we’ve got footage of federal agents storming a downtown Minneapolis apartment complex courtesy of journalist/filmmaker Ford Fischer. “Bullshit,” concludes Minneapolis City Council Member Aisha Chughtai, noting that the feds broke a window and didn’t present a warrant.
Disturbing passage from Paul Rosenzweig in The Atlantic:
Department of Homeland Security agents already have a notably poor level of compliance with legal requirements. Indeed, one remarkable fact is that today, before the recent hiring surge comes fully online, customs officers and Border Patrol agents have committed crimes at a per capita rate that is greater than the crime rate for people who immigrated here illegally. These problems are likely to only get worse; instead of, as it used to, principally recruiting from the military and law enforcement, where applicants might have relevant experience, ICE now plans to spend millions of dollars to advertise for new agents at Ultimate Fighting Championship matches and gun shows. Perhaps of even greater concern, ICE’s recruitment efforts appear to deliberately echo white-nationalist rhetoric—bringing in a wave of new agents who are more inspired by MAGA ideology than by the virtues of public service.
Published in Literary Hub, "Letter to My Daughter After the Murder of a Poet in the Streets of Minneapolis" was authored anonymously by a poet from the Midwest. It's a heavy read.
“Hastily constructed [ICE] detention centers” face a growing need for health-care professionals to tend to the abducted, NPR found, but some U.S. Public Health Service workers would rather quit than participate in the federal government’s campaign of immigration cruelty. "We have been tasked with protecting and promoting health, and instead, we are being asked to facilitate inhumane operations," says nurse practitioner Rebekah Stewart, who quit in October.
U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, says his office can't address “pressing and important priorities” due to the flood of lawsuits being filed by immigrants who've been swept up in Operation Metro Surge, Politico reports. There've been 427 filed in January alone, he says, resulting in a "crushing burden" on the office. Related: In a separate legal story from MPR News, a DHS spokesman tells reporter Matt Sepic that, “The Trump administration is more than prepared to handle the legal caseload necessary to deliver President Trump’s deportation agenda for the American people.” Oh, great.
Twin Cities journalist Georgia Fort provides a first-hand account of her DHS abduction in the New York Times today. Writes Fort: “The charges I face for reporting on an event of significant public interest and concern—involving well-known Minneapolis leaders, as well as an individual apparently employed by ICE—concern not just me. They raise a far more serious question: whether journalism is still protected under the Constitution.”
Speaking of the Gray Lady: The New York Times produced a heartbreaking five-minute video on the pregnant Minnesotans who are afraid to leave their homes while ICE rampages. Twin Cities midwife Fernanda Honebrink takes reporters around town, showing them how her job has turned into a clandestine operation to help expecting mothers who don't have supplies and can't get to OB appointees. Many are even reconsidering their birth plans.
Kyle Wagner, 37, an apparent fringe wackjob, was detained this week over threats he allegedly made to immigration officials. Photos of Wagner’s arrest show him shouting while wearing an "I'M ANTIFA!" hoodie; “Antifa is short for ‘anti-fascist’ and is a loosely organized left-wing movement or ideology,” according to a generous CBS News definition. Due to his very existence, Wagner will lend ammo to MAGA acolytes who want to brutalize all protesters.
Kids really do say the darndest things:
From Mankato to Willmar to St. Paul and beyond, Minnesota refugees and immigrants are hiding in—pick your grim metaphor—"the shadows" and/or "a prison of fear." Harrowing stuff from Strib reporters James Walsh and JP Lawrence, plus photographer Elizabeth Flores.
Savvy local media-watchers may’ve noticed that our buddy Andy Mannix, a longtime investigative reporter at the Star Tribune, recently got called up to the big leagues by ProPublica. To further torture this metaphor, we’ll go ahead and say the flame-typing journo… went 1-0… against… Team Creeping Authoritarism… in his… debut with his new club? Which is to say: Read Mannix’s co-bylined piece from Thursday that examines whether local law enforcement have a “moral obligation” to arrest and prosecute federal agents who violate little things like the Constitution and law.
Unsurprisingly, the PP team discovered such incidents of upholding law/order are rare when the feds are the suspected perps. “Local police and the state have gotten a free pass,” says Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago who directs the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project. “Residents have every right and should be demanding that, ‘Hey, state authorities, police, local police: Protect us. Arrest people who kill us, who batter us, who point guns at us and threaten and assault us without legal cause to do so.’”
Dogged MPR News reporter Jon Collins authored an essay in Nieman Reports, the journalism industry publication from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Writes Collins:
Faced with a dearth of credible information from the federal government, my local colleagues and I have been covering the story from the ground up. We’ve written about observers being threatened by federal authorities. We’ve chronicled the terror people have felt seeing their neighbors dragged away in handcuffs, or their family members disappeared into an opaque immigration system. We’ve documented how people are patrolling outside schools or escorting their immigrant neighbors to work. And we have used available court filings and documents to try to get a clearer picture of what is actually happening to people in our state. Most importantly, we have not let the federal government’s narratives stand without scrutiny. Our reporting has shown that most of the immigrants arrested have no criminal records, and that even those who do have largely been taken from state and county jails, not during the random street sweeps that make up the majority of the federal agents’ actions in Minnesota.
Shoutout to Dustin Nelson of Bring Me the News for compiling this mega-list of Twin Cities businesses that are throwing fundraisers amid the terror of Operation Metro Surge.
Does this footage depict the ravings of a fine-tuned brain that’s in peak working order? We’ll let you decide.
Racket reader Carl Elliott tipped us to a benefit concert/protest livestream this Saturday from local country band the Gated Community. All donations will be given to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota; get streaming deets here.
Outdoor visual art around the Minnesota State Capitol keeps improving! We lost the likeness of bumbling, genocidal Italian oaf Christopher Columbus in 2020, and on Thursday morning contributing Racket photog Chad Davis captured a wonderful sculpture addition:
WEDNESDAY 2.4
Citing cooperation from an “unprecedented number of counties” resulting in a “safer environment” for immigration raids, White House border czar Tom Homan told reporters Wednesday that Operation Metro Surge would immediately see the removal of 700 federal agents. That still leaves around 2,000, but hey, we'll take any good news we can get. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey feels the same way, calling the reduction “a step in the right direction” but stressing the need for a complete DHS withdrawal.
Meanwhile, a coalition of local labor and faith leaders blasted Homan’s drawdown talk as a “political stunt.” They write in a just-released joint statement: “This sudden shift in language is not accidental. It comes as federal agencies face budget negotiations and mounting public scrutiny. Rebranding mass enforcement as ‘prioritized’ enforcement is an attempt to preserve funding, not to protect communities.”
How valuable has independent reporter Ken Klippenstein been through this whole ordeal? He’s back today with another indispensable report, this one about the fed stockpiling 35,000 (!?) weapons in Minneapolis. Someone leaked a homeland security munitions inventory to Klip who, naturally, published the table on his website. “Fucking overkill,” a homeland security official says of the arsenal. “I’ve never seen this amount of shit being used.” Doesn’t bode well for that drawdown… Guess this is just what happens when a department’s funding gets bumped up to $27.7 billion, as ICE’s has—that’s larger than most of the world’s militaries.
Is it… bad when the federal government repeatedly attacks a free press? I recall that being bad, historically speaking. Anyway, below you’ll see clips of the dumbest evasive ICE maneuvers imaginable captured by independent journalist/filmmaker Ford Fischer in Minneapolis, and a tweet from the official ICE account chastising him for “stalking” agents. In response, Fischer writes: “Neither myself nor any other journalists I work with would ‘stalk’ nor impede or obstruct any type of law enforcement activity. Following and filming federal agents or any type of police from a safe distance is our journalistic and American duty under the First Amendment."
After analyzing incident reports and studying 70+ hours of bodycam footage, Unraveled has identified two members of a U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) who've "been recorded repeatedly attacking people with chemical weapons in both Chicago and Minneapolis." The portrait that emerges of Michael Sveum (EZ-2) and Edgar Vazquez (EZ-17)? Much more Marco and Leonel Salamanca from Breaking Bad than you like to see.
Henry Redman, a reporter for Minnesota Reformer's sister publication in Wisconsin, filed a report on the protest scene outside of Minneapolis's Whipple Federal Building. There's a growing consensus the building is an active concentration camp, Redman writes. “I came to see the horror for myself,” says one onlooker. Adds U.S. Navy and U.S. Postal Service retiree Tom Edwards of West St. Paul: “You can’t stand by and watch. This is the groundwork for fascism.”
Remember Jake Lang, the pardoned J6 loser who makes a living embarrassing himself on social media? We (more or less) rode him outta town on rails last month, but Lang resurfaced this week inside West St. Paul’s BLVD Kitchen & Bar. Things… didn’t go well for the right-wing agitator. Enjoy this clip. We certainly did.
A Minneapolis City Council committee voted 8-5 Tuesday to delay a decision on whether to renew the liquor licenses to two Minneapolis hotels—Canopy by Hilton and Depot Renaissance Hotel—that've housed federal immigration agents, the Star Tribune reports. (One council member who opposed the delay called protesters “agitators,” but the Strib curiously doesn't name them. It was Pearll Warren of the 5th District.) Amy Lingo, the city’s manager for business licenses, said both hotels can keep slingin' hooch (our term, not hers) until the matter is resolved. The public is invited to discuss the license renewals at a future public hearing. Radio guy Jason DeRusha didn't waste time weighing in, tweeting: "Minneapolis City Council never misses a chance to give businesses the middle finger. So frustrating." Won't somebody please think of the hoteliers!
ICE is terrorizing the suburbs, reports Jon Collins of MPR News, but suburbanite ICE watchers are holding strong. “I think they’re getting angry that we’re winning and the country is rallying around us,” says one observer named Elizabeth. “We’re so organized and we act with such integrity. They don’t want to admit they feel threatened by us.” Even if we feel (and, in fact, are) threatened by them—Collins connects with one guy who thought the feds were “trying to run me off the road.”
Spotted by contributing Racket photographer Chad Davis…
Target Corp. leadership might be made up of lowly, belly-dragging cowards. But the workers? They're built different. Writing for the American Prospect, Sarah Lazare introduces us to the Target workers who walked out against ICE.
As we reported below, not a single Republican attended Tuesday’s congressional forum in Washington, D.C., that showcased the victims and victims’ families of DHS violence. That’s not stopping the word from getting out. Hear their powerful pieces of testimony below.
Lil Liam Conejo Ramos is finally free after federal agents abducted him last month from Columbia Heights. (See blurb below.) We salute the rabbit-hatted tot. And we salute the New York Times for assembling this video featuring the brave classmates of Ramos reading their letters to ICE. “You are scaring schools, people and the world,” one Valley View Elementary student writes. Writes another: “I think you should make friends with the world. Love, a Valley View student.”
At the risk of editorializing, what a complete and total piece of shit:
TUESDAY 2.3
Terrifying stuff from KARE 11’s Heidi Wigdahl. Thi Dua Vang, a St. Paul woman who’s legally allowed in the U.S., was detained by ICE for almost two weeks; no reason was given. "I'm worried that if I'm the only one that goes, my kids will still be in this country and if I go, how am I supposed to live? That's what I think about," she tells KARE. Since her release, federal agents have returned to her home three times. Vang says she lost her job due to the detainment, and she’s afraid to go outside. You can support her via this GoFundMe.
Speaking of insane overreach from masked, gun-toting federal thugs: We have the story of Minneapolis man Garrison Gibson, who was detained by immigrant agents, shuttled to Texas, returned to Minnesota, and then detained again. He, too, has a GoFundMe.
Twin Cities lawyer/activist Nekima Levy Armstrong talks to the New York Times about the Trump administration doctoring her arrest photo with AI. “Reducing my image to some scared crying woman was just so degrading, and it just shows how far the office of the president has fallen,” Armstrong tells the Times. “The presidency, the White House is supposed to symbolize the world’s greatest superpower, but instead they acted like a $2 tabloid.” Here's where we'll make a vein pop on your forehead by sharing what a White House PR hack, Kaelan Dorr, told the newspaper in response: “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”
Don’t bring a finger gun (!!!) to an ICE fight:
“Effective immediately we are deploying body cameras to every officer in the field in Minneapolis,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Monday via Twitter. (Naturally, she also kissed the president’s ass and praised “the most transparent administration in American history.”) Immigration agents strapped with bodycams would satisfy one of the key demands from Democrats, and President Trump thinks the tech would “would help law enforcement.” Here where I’ll be an obnoxious killjoy and parrot the great lefty media criticism podcast, Citations Needed. Its hosts recently argued that body cams do little more than further entrench the government surveillance state; additionally, there’s no real oversight over how DHS would edit, distribute, and possibly manipulate the footage (see: Nekima Armstrong’s story above). Anyway!
Speaking of that creeping surveillance state: Minnesota Reformer's Brian Martucci assembled this unsettling overview of the many ways ICE is seizing on new tech to spy on us. Facial recognition, "human analytics" apps, classic phone snooping—Sting-style, they'll be watching you.
Friend of Racket Dan Suitor, Esq. with some trenchant legal analysis. (Also, Paul Blume? Never stop tweeting LIKE THAT.)
Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt wants to work with the feds on their Minnesota detainment blitz, but she tells CBS News she’s feeling "scapegoated." Boo hoo.
Damn! Almost 30,000 ICE-skeptical Minnesotans have become trained constitutional observers, with representatives from 77 out of 87 counties. “The scale is unimaginable,” the Immigrant Defense Network's Edwin Torres Desantiago tells MPR News. “We have rapid response around the clock, seven days a week. We are actively responding to a case every six minutes across the state of Minnesota.”
How about some (extremely relatively) good news? The Pentagon has ordered 1,500 active duty soldiers from Alaska's 11th Airborne Division to stand down, two U.S. officials with knowledge of the situation confirmed Monday. Previously, President Trump had toyed with using the Insurrection Act to send Army forces into the streets of Minnesota.
We can’t verify any of this, but take a look:
Reporting from the Obvious Lie Desk: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared Monday on The Ingraham Angle to discuss... well, just hear from him. "We had a massive fraud going on all through Minneapolis, all through Minnesota, and suddenly it turned. It turned almost on a dime, and it became suddenly all about ICE, all about getting ICE out and how horrible ICE was doing. [We had] very strong pushback when we raised our hands and said ‘stop,’ so, yes, we have multiple investigations going on." Due in part to Blanche being an idiot, it's kinda hard to decipher what that means. Fox News is framing it as a "massive underground fraud network" pivoting on a dime to, um, fuel anti-ICE sentiment? We don't need any fueling, buddy—the hatred is all above board.
Republican U.S. Reps. Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, and Michelle Fischbach introduced a bill Monday that would aid President Trump in his quest to pry voter rolls away from Minnesota. The so-called Minnesota Voter Integrity Act of 2026 would grant the White House power to withhold federal election funding unless Minnesota forked over that data,” Bring Me the News reports. Previously, Attorney General Pam Bondi (more or less) said Operation Metro Surge will continue until the private voter information was shared, which Secretary of State Steve Simon described as "an outrageous attempt to coerce Minnesota." Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed he won Minnesota three times (famous lie guy).
And while we're on the subject of the Trump administration's habitual lying, take a look at this compendium of Operation Metro Surge lies compiled by Bring Me the News co-owners Joe Nelson and Adam Uren. In any other time, it'd be staggering to behold. Here in Hellworld? Par for the course.
The Chicago Sun Times and WBEZ profiled Marimar Martinez, a woman who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent last fall in Chicago. “I just saw the light getting brighter and brighter,” Martinez remembers. “In my head, I was like, ‘I’m losing this battle.’ I wasn’t scared… I don’t know how to explain it. But I wasn’t in pain." Reflecting on Renee Good and Alex Pretti, she says, “I am their voice. I am here for a reason." Martinez echoed that sentiment while testifying before a congressional forum Tuesday in Washington, D.C. (see clip below). Not a single Republican showed up to hear Martinez, Renee Good’s brothers, and others testify, The New Republic reports.
It’s unoriginal to point out that our fractured, siloed media ecosystem means two Americans with different news-consumption habits might, ostensibly, live in two separate worlds. But! An example of this that includes Sebastian Gorka deploying phrases like "ultimate pincer movement" and "triple encirclement" while discussing how the Chinese Communist Party bankrolls anti-ICE Minneapolis protesters? Still seems kinda instructive.
The ongoing federal terror campaign has been bad for the local arts scene, Alex V. Cipolle reports for MPR News.
Reporting for Rewire News Group, Racket contributor Seth A. Richardson looks at how parents and teachers are navigating "on the fly how to tell their children about and protect them against armed federal agents, who are occupying the city and ripping people haphazardly off the street."
Pop star Lorde is donating the merchandise proceeds from her recent Minneapolis shows to the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee and the Immigrant Defense Network, the Strib's Zoe Jackson reports. (Critics weren't into Lorde's latest, last summer's Virgin, but I really loved it, FWIW.) The Kiwi singer-songwriter raked in those $204,000 merch bucks during back-to-back sold-out Armory concerts last October, and her Instagram post Tuesday announcing the donations looked a little something like this:
Brace Belden of the great lefty conspiracy podcast TrueAnon filed this report from Minneapolis.
Public radio’s media reporting program, On the Media, spoke with Brandy Zadrozny of MS Now "about the informal network of far-right content creators traveling to anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, and why the right-wing narrative is losing power in the face of an outpouring of bystander footage." Me? I enjoyed listening to it during last evening's dog walk.
We’re obligated to inform you that, over the weekend, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey received a glamor photoshoot from the New York Times before or after appearing on The Interview podcast. My brother-in-law reports that host Lulu Garcia-Navarro hit him with some weird, bad-faith, right-wing talking points.
Confident Al’s Breakfast can and will survive this:
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.
Turns out folks are crammed “shoulder to shoulder" amid overflowing toilets and provided one-sandwich-per-day meals; one cell reportedly held so many people that, to rest at night, they'd have to take turns laying down; requests for medical care have been denied; and U.S. Rep. Kelly Morrison (D-MN) reports no real medical infrastructure or systems exist.
"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.”
The sadistic response a DHS spokesperson sent to the Strib? “This is the best healthcare [that] many aliens have received in their entire lives.”
We could probably start calling Whipple a concentration camp.
Eons ago, when Operation Metro Surge began, I'd agonize over the yawning ideological disconnect between how the party of small government, states' rights, and the Second Amendment could bow before the federal government as it terrorizes an entire state, kills its residents, and claims the lawful gun owner its agents shot to death shouldn't have been carrying a gun. But I don't do that anymore. These worms never had real convictions.
Possibly in that spirit, 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. They only heard back from three lawmakers—state Sen. Jim Abeler (R-Anoka), state Rep. Elliott Engen (R-Lino Lakes), and state Rep. Dave Baker (R-Willmar). (Abeler, to his credit, recently wrote to Border Patrol czar Tom Homan about the appalling conditions inside Whipple.)
The soul-deadening levels of bootlicking those nonresponsive politicians felt comfortable posting via social media and saying to other publications? Sahan cataloged those. It's already important to start thinking about the historical record.
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.
