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 2.9
Welcome to the resistance… Glamour? Over the weekend the fashion and beauty mag published a tremendous feature about “the women holding Minneapolis together,” the ones patrolling and defending schools from ICE agents or coordinating donation drives in their neighborhoods. As Christine Harb, a physician with a network of providers who are caring for patients sheltering in place, tells Glamour’s Anna Moeslein, “Women play an instrumental role in every movement. The vast majority of the people I work with are women and queer people.”
If you don’t care about the moms of the movement, perhaps you’d rather read about the punks? For Rolling Stone, Evan Minsker caught up with members of the local music scene, including Matt Jones of Rubberman and Buio Omega, to hear how DIY is fighting ICE. Minnesotans tell the mag you’d be hard-pressed to find a member of the music scene who’s not somehow involved in the resistance.
Minneapolis-based New York Times reporter Ernesto Londoño has the latest on the Trump administration’s shenanigans as it attempts to cover up the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The upshot? Prosecutors started investigating Renee Good’s killing; FBI director Kash Patel told them to stop. Now several top prosecutors have resigned in protest, leaving Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office “severely understaffed and in crisis.”
“Minneapolis VA hospital employees by the hundreds filled a chapel, crowded into spillover space, and peered at a livestream feed this week to mourn the loss of one of their own to gunfire from federal agents on a city street,” writes the Star Tribune’s Paul Walsh in this moving report from the early February VA memorial service honoring Alex Pretti.
During this ongoing federal invasion, it has been inspiring to watch folks use their existing platforms to fundraise or protest, seeing wild success in the process. Case in point: Ben Hanson from MinnMax teamed up with the gaming company Giant Bomb to host a late January livestream that raised $250K (!) for rent aid, reports MPR’s Harshawn Ratanpal.
You’ve simply gotta check out the #Comics4Liam hashtag on Instagram, where comics creators around the world are sharing art inspired by 5-year-old Minnesotan Liam Conejo Ramos and other children in ICE detention.
Hope you enjoyed that brief feel-good story! Now for a heartwrenchingly feel-bad story: Propublica has collected letters from the children detained at ICE’s facility in Dilley, Texas. “I miss my school and my friends I feel bad since when I came here to this Place, because I have been here too long,” writes 9-year-old Susej F. Other children drew pictures of their families, and you can even hear 14-year-old Ariana V. V. read her letter.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein tells The Majority Report that ICE is demoralized and lying about arrest totals to meet quotas. What won’t these fuckin’ goons lie about?
Speaking of which: Legal observers and officials tell the AP they’re seeing more federal agents “impersonating construction workers, delivery drivers, and in some cases anti-ICE activists.” Here’s reporter Jake Offenhartz:
For days, Luis Ramirez had an uneasy feeling about the men dressed as utility workers he’d seen outside his family’s Mexican restaurant in suburban Minneapolis.
They wore high-visibility vests and spotless white hard hats, he noticed, even while parked in their vehicle. His search for the Wisconsin-based electrician advertised on the car’s doors returned no results.
On Tuesday, when their Nissan returned to the lot outside his restaurant, Ramirez, 31, filmed his confrontation with the two men, who hide their faces as he approaches and appear to be wearing heavy tactical gear beneath their yellow vests.
“This is what our taxpayer money goes to: renting these vehicles with fake tags to come sit here and watch my business,” Ramirez shouts in the video.
Aliya Rahman, the U.S. citizen who was photographed being violently dragged from her car on a way to a doctor’s appointment last month, appeared on the Democracy Now! podcast to talk about her traumatizing arrest and subsequent detainment at Minneapolis’s Whipple Federal Building. “I was taken out of that place unconscious,” Rahman says. “What I saw in that detention center was truly horrific.”
Is watching videos of ICE violence good for your mental health? Hell no, report Larissa Hjorth and Katrin Gerber for The Conversation. But they do so thoughtfully, discussing how the rise of body cam footage, surveillance tech, and social media are all leading to an increase in phenomena like “affective witnessing,” wherein the distance between participant and the observer collapses, and “political grief,” or the collective loss felt by communities facing systemic injustice.
