MN ICE Watch Jan. 12-16: Daily Updates on Trump’s Invading Troops

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. Feel free to contribute in the comments!

FRIDAY 1.16

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey "over an alleged conspiracy to impede federal immigration agents, an extraordinary escalation in the Trump administration's clash with Democratic leaders there, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News," reports... CBS News. We're certain it'll be a good-faith investigation that's free from frothing partisanship and petty grudges.

It's a good time to revisit this Atlantic feature from last summer, in which we learn about ICE's rush to "supersize" its ranks. That meant lowering age requirements to 18, showering new recruits with $50,000 sign-on bonuses, and requiring just 47 days of training because, we shit you not, Trump is the 47th president. “They’re opening it up to everyone who wants to get a badge and a gun,” one veteran ICE official tells the magazine.

Cool New York Times story on how protesters are using the icy elements—guerrilla warfare-style—against stumblin', bumblin' ICE oafs. “I want it to get cold,” Chris Foreman, a protester and military vet, tells the Times. “People know that a lot of these ICE guys are from the South. They’re coming into a different environment and they’re not used to it.” Killer main photo, amazing lede, no quotes from sore-assed ICE whiners—enjoy the gift link.

"Would your mama be proud of you right now?" Indeed. A chilling anecdote from the Star Tribune's Reid Forgrave:

ICE has arrested a member of the Minnesota Newspaper & Communications Guild, the union announced Friday. "He is a father, a husband, and a staff member at a Minneapolis non-profit organization," a press release reads. "He's a steward in our union and an advocate for all workers. And he is one of dozens of Minnesota union member who have been detained in recent weeks." The detained man's name is being withheld by the MNCG; he's currently "awaiting action on his petition for habeas corpus" inside an El Paso, Texas, ICE detention facility. (Full disclosure: All four Racket staffers are former members of the MNCG.)

As a PR stooge, Blois Olson is on this Earth to curry favor for his powerful clients—polluting utilities, pro-gambling lobbying groups, health-care conglomerates. However, through his influential daily newsletter, regular TV/radio appearances, and relentless posting, Olson has acquired an outsized voice in the debates and dialogues that shape Minnesota. So kudos to Minnesota Reformer Editor-in-Chief J. Patrick Coolican for taking Blois to the woodshed over his recent finger wagging directed at Minnesotans who loudly rebuke the current authoritarian invasion of our state. "Is he writing for Capitol lobbyists and upper-middle managers at UnitedHealth and Target, or for the ghost of Neville Chamberlain?" Coolican asks in his impeccable smackdown, which he even manages to punctuate with a glimmer of optimism.

We're pleased to see so many news outlets hammering home the corporate cowardice angle this week. Fast Company joined the firing squad Friday with a piece headlined: "We asked Minnesota’s biggest companies about ICE. None of them responded." The magazine reached out to several locally headquartered mega-corps for comment—General Mills, Target, Best Buy, Cargill, UnitedHealth Group, 3M, and Land O’Lakes. (Related: Minneapolis City Council Member Jason Chavez recently teed off on Target Corp.) Crickets. Meanwhile, FC notes, small shops like Mothership Pizza and Owamni have risen to the occasion, and this week's Racket feature highlights even more indie restaurants fighting back against ICE.

Meet the “Mamas of Cedar," courtesy of Sahan Journal's Binta Kanteh. As part of the Cedar Riverside Protection Alliance, the six moms, ages 36 to 60, patrol outside Minneapolis's Riverside Plaza apartment high-rise in neon vests. “We are American,” Fadumo Abdi explains. "We love our neighbors, and we want that message to be clear.” Together, the Mamas monitor for ICE agents, educate residents about their rights, and distribute food for the needy.

Minnesota Reformer reporter Madison McVan continues to deliver the goods with this powerfully written account of the ICE abductions that don't make headlines, the "untold number of immigrants… [who've] have been arrested without the whistles and cameras—plucked out of their lives in an instant."

Why have the menacing ICE thugs leaned so hard into the whole "menacing" approach? Jon Collins of MPR News has answers.

Riled up by the New York Post, right-wing freaks are threatening the small Minneapolis charter school attended by the late Renee Good’s son, Becky Z. Dernbach reports for Sahan Journal. "This moment has been painful but it has also brought us closer as a community," Southside Family Charter School leaders tell Dernbach.

ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good four times, per the just-released incident report compiled by the Minneapolis police and fire departments. Good had a "inconsistent, irregular, thready" pulse right after the shooting, but life-saving efforts from paramedics were unsuccessful. You can find more upsetting details—including snippets from 911 transcripts—here.

Take a bow, hero protester grandma with a pronounced Minnesoooooota accent: 

Getting the sense that ICE goons resemble “giant losers”? That’s by design, per this Salon piece that explores how dog-murdering Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem apparently lifted her agency’s recruitment strategies and culture from the neo-fascist Proud Boys. The wink-nudge white nationalist signifiers. The “reliance on deadbeats and losers as foot soldiers.” And, of course, the eagerness for violence. It’s all on display on the streets of Minnesota and sanctioned by the federal government, even if its roots trace back to the sludge pits of the internet. 

Judge: Pint-sized wannabe general Greg Bovino was "evasive,” "not credible," and "outright lying" when questioned under oath about DHS conduct during “Operation Midway Blitz” last fall in Chicago.

Tell 'em, New York Times opinion columnist and friend of the Doughboys podcast Jamelle Bouie:

Reporter Jon Collins, who has been doing the lord’s work covering the current ICE siege for MPR News, connected with The Intercept. “The national audience needs to understand this is not just unrest, this is not just protests… This is an invasion” he says. Hear lots more from Collins via The Intercept Briefing podcast. 

Speaking of the lord's work and MPR News! Over the past six weeks, south Minneapolis church Iglesia Dios Habla Hoy has distributed 12,000+ boxes of groceries to people in hiding. Hear senior pastor Sergio Amezcua describe how his parish became a hub for feeding immigrant families on Nina Moini's Minnesota Now. “They need help,” Amezcua says. “We still have a lot to do.”

NOT. FUNNY.

NBC News published its encapsulating “Operation Metro Surge” report Thursday, with one unnamed source telling its national audience, “It feels very much like a Nazi Germany situation to me. It needs to stop, and people need to know what’s going on.”

Rare declarative win for the “both sides”-hungry Star Tribune Editorial Board: “Minnesota is under siege. This cannot stand.” 

We have a terrifying update on the north Minneapolis family that sought urgent medical care after ICE barraged them with stun grenades and tear gas Wednesday. “My baby was completely unconscious, not breathing,” Destiny Jackson says of her six-month-old child. Adds her husband, Shawn: “From the side, the front and from behind me, it was nothing but ICE… It felt like our lungs was burning” EMTs eventually arrived and escorted the three youngest of the six Jackson children to the hospital. The family returned home Thursday; Shawn says he’s still not sure why immigration officials ambushed their SUV.

THURSDAY 1.15

The American Civil Liberties Union just sued the Trump administration over its immigration assault on Minnesota. Filed Thursday, the class-action lawsuit involves three U.S. citizens who were forcefully detained by ICE, and it alleges the agency violated their constitutional rights. The aim? To remove “thousands of masked federal agents with militarized gear and weapons [who] are terrorizing our city and our state," ACLU lawyer Catherine Ahlin-Halverson said at a press conference Thursday.

Homeland Security Investigations is hounding Minnesota businesses for employment records, immigration lawyers tell the Star Tribune. Hennepin Healthcare, the state's largest safety-net hospital, is among them. Minnesota Reformer's Max Nesterak obtained a memo Thursday from hospital leaders that alerts staff that the Department of Homeland Security has issued a subpoena for Hennepin Healthcare to turn over worker I-9 forms. “We are complying with this legal requirement," the memo reads. You could describe the subpoena as retaliatory, considering it arrived less than a week after elected officials joined HCMC staffers in telling ICE to take a hike. Hennepin County Commissioner Angela Conley chose that exact word at a press conference Wednesday where she said, “ICE agents have occupied our safety-net hospital for the last week… They have been asked to leave multiple times given that there has been no judicially signed warrant presented to hospital leadership.”

The complete and total spinelessness of Target Corp. won't surprise any Racket readers. Still, god bless the 100+ clergy members who staged a sit-in Thursday at Target HQ in downtown Minneapolis to demand the big-box retailer "stand up for [its] workers," several of whom have been abducted by ICE this month. "Target must be a corporate leader in ensuring that this hellfire does not continue to rain on this state or anyone else," St. Paul Rev. JaNaé Bates Imari said during a press conference, per Dustin Nelson of Bring Me the News. "The way that we do that is we defund this illegitimate agency that keeps harming us. Now is the time." Target's useless PR arm didn't respond to requests for comment from the clergy members or BMTN.

Our buddies at 404 Media have a deep-dive into how Palantir Technologies—the shadowy, Peter Thiel-founded data giant—helps ICE hunt people with its Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) app.

A Washington Post report from last month spurred weeks of speculation, but, no, a 500,000-square-foot Woodbury warehouse will not become an ICE Detention Center, Mayor Anne Burt confirmed Wednesday. Bring Me the News has the whole story.

We keep hearing a refrain of: What can I do to help? Well, Ashley Fairbanks recently launched a website, Stand With Minnesota, that's chock-full of resources. "Crazy that the website that I randomly decided to put together at 10 a.m. yesterday has had over 25K unique visitors in 24 hours," she writes via Bluesky. "Please keep sharing with your networks." Mutual aid resources, crowdsourcing campaigns, info about on-the-ground orgs—it's all there.

Or, simply channel this guy's energy:

Score one for the Unitarians! Religion News Service has a sweet profile of ICE-watching Rev. Ashley Horan, VP of programs and ministries at the Unitarian Universalist Association. Armed with her faith and a whistle, Horan has been patrolling Minneapolis's Central neighborhood since an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good there earlier this month. “At the center of my faith as a Unitarian Universalist are these twin beliefs that every human life has inherent worthiness and dignity, and that we are, whether you like it or not, radically interdependent with each other,” she says. “Therefore, there’s no option for me: My neighbors are under attack. Our babies are under attack. Each and every life matters, and it is my responsibility to care for my neighbors in this way.”

Readers flagged the interview below as pathetically softball, and having finally gotten around to suffering through shrimpy, spiky-haired henchman Gregory Bovino's chat with WCCO's Esme Murphy, we gotta agree. The U.S. Border Patrol commander glides through the conversation, acting as an unchecked explainer of fascist talking points while Murphy rattles off lazy prompts. (At one point, the veteran 'CCO reporter suggests residents might be worried about their "cleaning lady get[ting] deported.") Estimates Bovino: "90% to 95% of Minnesotans" support ICE's siege on our state. Get the fuck outta here, buddy. Literally.

The New York Times dispatched five (five!) reporters to Nisswa, Minnesota, to file yet another entry into the deathly tired news genre of: National Outlet Visits Rural Midwestern Cafe to Better Understand the Region's Yokels. Wanna hear what they're saying about Renee Good's killing at Ye Olde Pickle Factory? Go nuts, here's a gift link.

We 🫡 these hero patrons inside St. Paul's Cancun Mexican Grill & Cantina this past Sunday:

Things... aren't going great. Proof of that mounted Thursday morning when President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act because besieged Minnesotans won't stop "attacking the Patriots of I.C.E." Enacted in 1792, that federal law would allow the increasingly authoritarian president to deploy military and National Guard troops to our streets. (Here's a 2022 Insurrection Act primer courtesy of the Brennan Center for Justice, whose authors note that "the law, which has not been meaningfully updated in over 150 years, is dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse.")

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison responded this morning, writing in a statement...

For decades, my Republican colleagues have warned against tyrannical federal overreach. Well, it is now at their doorstep. I urge Minnesota Republicans to join me in speaking out against this dire threat of escalation from the federal government. Before any of us are Democrats or Republicans, we are Minnesotans. If ever there was a time to set partisan politics aside and do what is right for our state, our country, and our democracy, it is now.

“This is not sustainable,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said at a press conference Wednesday night. “This is an impossible situation that our city is presently being put in."

As protests swelled following Wednesday's ICE shooting in north Minneapolis, crowds turned on two empty vehicles that appear to have been straight-up abandoned by highly trained immigration agents, Minnesota Reformer's Max Nesterak reports. Locally based Mercado Media apparently discovered a trove of documents, eyebrow-raising trinkets, and other materials inside the SUVs. (Update: Face-evolving Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tells reporters, "I believe those vehicle were FBI vehicles, not DHS vehicles.") Elsewhere, one federal agent reportedly dropped and left a loaded gun clip in the area.

A father who reportedly wasn't involved in the protests tells Fox 9 that law enforcement lobbed a flashbang grenade at his vehicle, resulting in the hospitalization of his six children. "We expect that they are going to be OK," the Fox 9 anchor reports.

About that ICE shooting Wednesday night in north Minneapolis! Some non-DHS-curated details have emerged, with state Sen. Erin Maye Quade (DFL-Apple Valley) saying “ICE IS LYING” about its official, highly partisan narrative, which you can read below. Quade links to a video that appears to depict the shooting victim’s family panic-dialing 911 after ICE agents shot him in the leg outside of his home; he'd apparently fled from immigration agents following a traffic stop. “They [the person from the vehicle being chased] went into a house, the duplex in the middle of the block… I heard two shots before the area was just being swarmed by ICE immediately,” neighbor Clayton Kelly tells Sahan Journal. (MPD confirmed that immigration agents entered the home at one point.)

At a press conference late Wednesday, MPD Chief Brian O’Hara noted that a snow shovel and broom were discovered at the scene, but he couldn't say for certain whether they’d been used as weapons against ICE officers, as DHS claims; O'Hara said he heard "at least one person" may have assaulted federal law enforcement. (“Fearing for his life and safety as he was being ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired a defensive shot to defend his life," reads the DHS account that leads, inexplicably, with blaming ex-President Joe Biden.) The gunshot victim was treated for non-life-threatening injuries, according to the city of Minneapolis.

WEDNESDAY 1.14

Around 6:50 p.m. Wednesday, an immigration officer shot and injured a Venezuelan man following a "targeted traffic stop" in north Minneapolis near 24th & Lyndale, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (You can read the DHS account here, which includes details about two passersby assaulting a "law enforcement officer with a snow shovel and broom handle" as he wrestled the runaway driver to the ground, but obviously take it with a massive grain of salt.) Federal agents have attacked protesters at the scene with tear gas, Sahan Journal reports; independently confirmed details about this developing story remain sparse.

“Basically what we’re seeing is that immigration authorities are picking people up off the street based on race,” Anna Hall, a community defense lawyer with the Legal Rights Center, tells Sahan Journal's Shubhanjana Das. “My sense is that the tactic of ‘target brown person first, ask citizenship later’ is something that has really increased dramatically in the last two weeks." That's more or less echoed throughout Das's story on the rampant racial profiling being committed by immigration officers as they throughout Minnesota.

In this obituary-adjacent news story, Stribbers Kim Hyatt and Christopher Vondracek paint the most complete picture of Renee Good's biography to date. Before her "fresh start" in Minneapolis, Good grew up in a religious family in Colorado Springs. “She was an artist," says a friend who attended a teenage mission trip to Ireland with Good. "A gentle, gentle, gentle person.” We then get a broad-strokes trace through the slain mother's life, which included three children, two military husbands, a wife, a real talent for poetry, and no known extraordinary political expressions.

"Little is available online about the Goods’ time in Minnesota," Hyatt and Vondracek conclude, as they contrast the ugly characterizations made by Vice President JD Vance with the fond ones expressed by Minneapolitans who met her during her brief time here. “If the school needed help in any way from parents or field trips or anything, they were really great people,” teacher Rashad Rich says of Renee and her widow Rebecca.

The great independent reporter Ken Klippenstein dropped another bombshell Wednesday with this report on a trove of leaked ICE documents that outline the agency's overarching agenda. Marked “LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE,” the 15-page doc highlights 21 "major" ICE operations, many of which have stupid names—Operations Benchwarmer, Tidal Wave, Abracadabra, Dust Off, Fleur De Lis, etc. Here's Klippenstein on the bigger picture...

The media is telling a certain story about ICE, giving the blow by blow on the most public horrors but never quite seeing the bigger picture that it’s part of a larger war. As a military intelligence source told me, the ICE crackdown isn’t just about immigration; it’s about gathering intelligence in support of Trump’s war on cartels — as well as on Antifa, on the radical left, and those who are “anti-American,” and anyone else they consider terrorists. And since the administration has been so quick to label everyone, including Renee Good, terrorists, it’s no wonder they think they’re at war.

The Strib's Dee DePass reports that revenue is down between 50% to 100% at immigrant-operated businesses located along Minneapolis's Lake Street and St. Paul’s East Side. A staggering 80% of those businesses have closed out of fear over ICE, per DePass. “This is worse than COVID, because at least the federal government was on your side to help,” says Alma Flores of the Latino Economic Development Center.

You'd think principled conservatives would recoil at the notion of acting as yappy lapdogs to the state. You'd think journalists would never willingly arrive at the cruel inverse of "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." But you've never seen tongues meeting boot leather quite like this snitch campaign being orchestrated by Alpha News and Crime Watch, in which both debased orgs are crowd-sourcing “photos and videos of people interfering with ICE activities in Minnesota, which is a violation of federal law: 18 USC 111: Assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers or employees.” Vile. Pathetic. Par for the course.

MPR News program Minnesota Now gathered accounts from folks who've been terrorized and/or detained by immigration agents. The most horrifying anecdote came via Patty O’Keefe, who told host Nina Moini, "The ICE agent who had pepper sprayed into the vents of my car said ‘you guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,’ verbatim, speaking of Renee Good. Which filled me with absolute rage and shock that you could say that to one of her neighbors.” Exhibiting its typical bravery, ICE didn't respond to MPR's request for comment.

Bro...

Mother Jones caught up with two ex-ICE workers, as well as former officials from the Department of Homeland Security. The big takeaway? “They’re essentially operating now in a resource constraint-free environment and doing very dangerous things,” says former DHS suit Scott Shuchart, adding that violent interactions with the community are “sort of by design.”

Two New York Times reporters filed this encapsulating report from the streets of Minneapolis. “This is not the America I know,” fast-food customer Muna Ahmed tells the Times, reflecting on the hostility and violence exhibited by federal immigration officers. 

Wild visual reporting from Strib data aces Jeff Hargarten and Jake Steinberg...

"We have to make sure people are watching; we have to make sure we’re keeping track of our community members," self-employed Twin Cities software engineer Nick Benson tells 404 Media in this (relatively) uplifting piece about how he crowdsourced 500+ dashcams so locals can film ICE.

Can Metro Transit drivers deny immigration officers entry to their busses? Current protocol allows it, Amalgamated Transit Union 1005 President David Stiggers tells Isabela Escalona at Workday Magazine, adding that automatic light-rail doors would make denial... much trickier. It's unclear if drivers will seize on the right to block ICE over safety concerns, but we do know the union is pissed. Its members marched Wednesday morning in Minneapolis, with Stiggers calling the current ICE invasion a “throwback to the darkest times of human history, 1940s Germany." ATU 1005 is among the local unions promoting the de facto general strike you can read about below.

ICE agents are reportedly hitting Twin Cities hospitals and airports. 

Hell yeah, St. Paul students:

For MPR News, Chris Farrell issues the following credulity-oozing lede that'd be laughed out of the Racket newsroom: "Minnesota likes to think of itself as a place where big companies don’t just coin money—they make a difference in local society and culture. The embrace of capitalism with a conscience has had an unusually large impact since Minnesota is home to a large number of brand name headquarters, especially considering its small size." But Farrell quickly gets to his more cogent point about the cowardice and silence we're seeing from the state's corporate leaders as federal immigration officers kill, bully, and detain our neighbors. "The lack of voice right now, I think, is deafening," former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak observes. And credit to Farrell, who reached out to a who's who of non-responsive corporate giants—UnitedHealth, Best Buy, Ecolab, 3M, General Mills, U.S. Bancorp, Hormel, and Target. Elsewhere, the Strib has a story on businesses beginning to "feel heat" over the "difficult and sensitive situations" caused by ICE, while Rybak's kid, new Twin Cities Business editorial director Charlie, has this semi-related column about ICE hurting local biz prospects.

Beginning next month, President Trump says the federal government will cut off all funding to Minnesota. What does that mean, specifically? Is it even legal? A Fox 9 story from late Tuesday didn’t provide answers, though Trump is quoted as saying, "You'll see, it'll be significant. Minnesota is going to have to take care of itself for a little while." We've already been learning how to do that.

New polling from The Economist and YouGov suggests relentless visuals and accounts of ICE-spurred violence and chaos aren’t playing well with the public: 

What are you doing on January 23? A coalition of major Minnesota labor unions hope the answer is nothing at all, In These Times reports. To fight back against the Trump administration's assault on our state, they’re pushing for something resembling a general strike. Or, to hear JaNaé Bates Imari of Camphor Memorial UMC tell it at a press conference Tuesday, “a day when every single Minnesotan who loves this state—who loves the idea of truth and freedom — will refuse to work, shop and go to school. We are asking every single person, every family member, every teacher, every bus driver, every childcare worker, to come together, to be in community, to stand with one another.” Clear your calendar! 

One of the top questions we’re hearing is: What can I do to help? Justine Jones of MSP Mag has compiled a helpful list of options, ranging from food drives to fundraisers to training sessions. 

No notes!

TUESDAY 1.13

Goodnight, ICE.

Posting Tuesday morning via Truth Social, President Trump vowed that, "THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING" to Minnesota. Seems... really bad! News broke Monday that the Trump administration is sending an additional 1,000ish immigration officers to Minnesota, where they'll join the 2,000 officers and agents that already constitute ICE's “largest operation to date.”

The Nicollet Avenue Ace Hardware in south Minneapolis: comrades in the fight against ICE. (And also, as real heads know, home to sweetie-pie shop cats and, in the springtime, baby chicks.)

In an EXCLUSIVE report from People magazine, we learn that Renee Good's killer, ICE agent Jonathan Ross, reportedly lied to his Chaska neighbors about what he does for a living. "[Ross] said he worked with plants, as a botanist," one neighbor tells People. "[He said he] enjoyed border control... but loved plants... It really creeps me out that those are my neighbors—that that’s the kind of people I live next to.” Ah yes... enjoying border control? Right up there with "watching movies" and "playing sports" on the Family Feud tally of Things Normal People Enjoy.

Does locally headquartered Target Corp. give a shit about anything outside of its stock ticker? Recent history suggests: no. And now the mega-retailer finds itself in yet another "tough political spot" as immigration agents rampage through its Twin Cities stores, the Wall Street Journal reports. (On Monday the reliably unhelpful Target PR apparatus declined to comment to the Star Tribune.)

Heavens, no! The Daily Beast reports that a DHS whistleblower may have exposed the personal data of "thousands of Border Patrol and ICE goons."

Six federal prosecutors, including prominent Minnesota fraud investigation lead Joseph H. Thompson, quit Tuesday, the New York Times has learned. Their reason? "The Justice Department’s push to investigate the widow of a woman killed by an ICE agent and the department’s reluctance to investigate the shooter," reports locally based Times man Ernesto Londoño.

What's it like to be abducted by ICE? KARE 11's Jana Shortal caught up with two locals who endured nine hours of detainment.

A little after 10 this morning, immigration forces showed up on Park Avenue and 34th Street in south Minneapolis, just down the street from where ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Brown last Wednesday. Agents reportedly snatched a woman from her car after busting her driver's side window. They were then chased off by protestors. As has become customary, agents poisoned the neighborhood with teargas before retreating.

Oh, hell yeah: Meet the badass north Minneapolis security worker who dismissed ICE agents from the McDonald's on West Broadway Avenue. “You can’t come back here, bro,” Wooten says in video of the altercation. “I’m talking to your manager,” the agent shot back, to which Wooten responded: “No, you’re talking to security, I’m in charge.” ICE bailed after Wooten stood guard with “10 toes down,” as he tells North News.

“I was doing my job like I’m supposed to,’’ Wooten, 49, tells reporters David Pierini and Azhae’la Hanson. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. I just want to make my family safe because I’ve been here three years.”

Privacy advocates say federal agents are stealing data to track and intimidate Minnesota protesters, Jon Collins reports for MPR News.

The Minnesota Reformer's Madison McVan goes on a ridealong with the community patrollers determined to undermine ICE and Border Patrol agents. “If they know that somebody is watching, they’re significantly less likely to stop somebody,” Elle Neubauer tells McVan. “Often when they pull over and people hop on a whistle or on their horn, they’ll just leave.”

Christina Rank, a 25-year-old special education teacher in Inver Grove Heights, was detained at ICE's Fort Snelling detention facility for almost 12 hours, Kristi Miller reports for the Pioneer Press.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein obtained a trove of leaked documents showing immigration agents are "terrified" of the backlash their actions may create. “There is genuine fear that indeed ICE’s heavy handedness and the rhetoric from Washington is more creating a condition where the officers’ lives are in danger rather than the other way around," one high-level Department of Homeland Security official tells Klippenstein.

Oh, great: Right-wing influencers are flooding the Twin Cities to spew misinformation, WIRED reports.

Asks the New Yorker's Jay Caspian Kang in his latest "Fault Lines" column...

Do Americans still believe in mass protest? Or do we just not know of any other possible mechanism, outside voting, for achieving social change? When we take to the streets—which we still do, in great numbers—do we expect something to come of it, or are we out there simply because our understanding of American history tells us that this is what we are supposed to do next?

New York Times photographer David Guttenfelder filed this video essay about what they saw on the ground in Minneapolis.

ProPublica uncovered 40+ cases of immigration officials using banned chokeholds and other potentially deadly maneuvers. The policing tactics that led to George Floyd's murder six years ago "are back, now at the hands of agents conducting President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign," Nicole Foy and McKenzie Funk report.

"Operation Metro Surge" is spiderwebbing into Greater Minnesota as Rochester, Mankato, and Duluth deal with invasions of federal immigration agents, Brian Arola reports for MinnPost. Local reports are popping up about contentious City Council meetings in Mankato and Duluth.

Now that's journalism:

Union postal workers will rally to demand "ICE Out Of Minnesota!" this Sunday at 11 a.m. at Minneapolis's Lake Street post office (110 E. 31st St.), followed by a march to the site of Renee Nicole Good's killing at 34th & Portland.

Writes National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 9 Executive VP Chris Pennock via press release...

We don’t want postal workers to be associated with ICE operations. We deliver to every house, every day, and we want to maintain trust in the communities we serve. On top of that, we don’t want masked men in our streets acting with impunity, and quite literally killing people. We demand "ICE Out of Minnesota!"

MONDAY 1.12

In a lawsuit filed Monday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul accuse the Trump administration's "Operation Metro Surge," which has flooded the state with 2,000+ Department of Homeland Security agents, of being "unconstitutional and unlawful." “This has to stop; it just has to stop,” Ellison said at a press conference Monday. You can read the full lawsuit here; you can read a DHS PR hack's pissy response here. The state of Illinois filed a separate, similar lawsuit Monday as well.

Please (please!) enjoy this viral clip of an ICE agent sprinting toward a Twin Cities snow drift and slipping, cartoon-banana-peel style, on some ice, landing hard on his stupid ass, and then jogging, real-life-loser style, straight into the shameful cabin of a Chevy Suburban as protesters laugh at and mock him.

We're big fans of independent journalist Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day publication around these parts, and, as such, we recommend reading his on-the-ground report from ICE-infested Minneapolis.

Observes Broderick...

ICE agents are, simply put, fucking clowns. According to The Atlantic, they receive 47 days of training—in honor of Trump, the 47th president, naturally. Many of them, also, can barely read or write, apparently. The ones I spent the weekend following around didn’t even have proper uniforms, with some wearing sneakers. In Minnesota. In January. These dipshits are also wearing camo in the snow.

The New York Times chronicles how Somali refugees settled in Minnesota, and how the community they built here became villainized by the right. “Once I saw the video,” Minneapolis-based Somali writer Ahmed Ismail Yusuf tells the Times, referencing this lil shit’s propaganda schlock, “I was actually punched in the gut. I just knew something terrible was just on the horizon.”

The Wall Street Journal examines how Minneapolis residents are forming organized networks of “neighbors armed with whistles and cameras” to track ICE agents. 

In this nifty thread, local author Naomi Kritzer outlines ways you can help fight the fascist army in your backyard. 

The Athletic's Jon Krawczynski documents how Tim Phillips, a Minneapolis civil rights/criminal defense lawyer, was hassled Sunday night by Target Center security over his "ICE OUT" T-shirt.

Here, via Fox 9, are the scant details available on an apparently violent ICE raid at a St. Paul Speedway station. Wedge LIVE! posted video of the altercation, writing: “This is gruesome. That man is unconscious, needs medical attention, as they carry him off.”

“Did you not learn from what just happened?” a menacing ICE agent asks a driver in this video, which seems to depict a murderous threat. (This apparently isn’t the first cavalier threat of that nature.) Over in Rosemount, a TikToker captures video of an ICE agent (aka “one dumbfuck cosplaying Grand Theft Auto”) wagging his gun sideways at a motorist. 

American Indians, survivors of our federal government’s genocide on the native population, can’t catch a break in 2026, with the Star Tribune’s Susan Du reporting that four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe were recently detained by ICE.

In this clip, Napoleonic ICE commander Gregory Bovino receives a full armed escort out of a Twin Cities Target bathroom as community members taunt him. Bovino's chud army was busy pushing over peaceful protesters earlier today.

Appearing on the mega-popular New York Times podcast The Daily, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara called the killing of Good “predictable” and “entirely preventable.” “The number one is: You don’t place yourself in the path of the vehicle,” O'Hara explains to "HMM!"-spouting host Michael Barbaro. “That’s like traffic stop 101. You don’t do that.”

Two crowdfunding campaigns have been launched in support of Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renee Good last week in Minneapolis. One initially referred to “anti-American traitor” “Mayor Frey (who is Jewish).” Hmm! The “Stand With Our Brave ICE Hero” GiveSendGo campaign, which is being promoted by Alpha News’ Liz Collin, has raised more than $200,000 of its $300,000 goal.

On Monday afternoon, Border Patrol agents rampaged through Minneapolis's Lyn-Lake neighborhood with tear gas, reports Ford Fischer of News2Share.