Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Meet the Moms of Cedar-Riverside
If you live in the Cedar-Riverside area of Minneapolis, several groups of moms have your back. In this really sweet story from Sahan Journal, reporter Binta Kanteh chats with mothers who are doing the important work of keeping tabs on their neighbors, making sure people are safe and informed.
There’s the patrolling “Mamas of Cedar,” who each spend five or more hours a week roaming key residential areas, keeping an eye out for ICE and educating people on their rights. Another group focuses on providing safe rides to appointments and delivering groceries, and yet another brews tea each morning as a neighborly way to check in with people.
“We raised our children here. We have families here. We see that people are showing up for us from different communities. We have to mobilize ourselves,” says one mom. “Each morning, you’re keeping in mind: Who have you seen? Who is missing? Who have we not heard from?”
Without a Trace
We’ve heard the whistles and we’ve seen the videos of our neighbors being snatched off the streets. But what about the “untold number of immigrants [who] have been arrested without the whistles and cameras—plucked out of their lives in an instant?" That’s what Madison McVan asks in a necessary story for the Minnesota Reformer today.
McVan discusses one such case, of a man grabbed from a south Minneapolis bus stop. The incident happened to be caught by a homeowner’s security camera. “Less than five minutes passed between the time the agent got out of the vehicle and when the man got in the backseat,” McVan writes.
McVan also shares a story from immigrant rights org Unidos MN’s Luis Argueta Jr., who encountered two boys found “shaking and crying.” Argueta tells the Reformer, “Their mother dropped them off at Mercado Central with some money to get haircuts while she walked a short distance to cash a check. … She never came back.”
No matter how bad it looks out there for Latino and Somali Minnesotans right now, it’s worse than we know.
Here’s Something the Governor Can Do
On Wednesday Gov. Tim Walz gave a speech about the occupation of Minnesota, advising us what we could do to resist. But maybe you’re wondering if there’s anything that he can actually do as well.
The Minneapolis City Council has an idea. City Council unanimously passed a resolution on Thursday asking Walz to issue an eviction moratorium, which would prevent landlords from kicking tenants out for unpaid rent.
Countless community members are justifiably afraid to go to work these days, and they’re likely short on funds. For them to be evicted right now would be disastrous. As City Council Member Robin Wonsley stated, “No family should have to choose between keeping a roof over their heads and risking being kidnapped by ICE.”
This is an action that only the governor can take, and he needs to.
Welcome to the Resistance, Old Man Winter
It’s gonna be cold for the next week or so, and Minnesotans are here for it, because folks know ICE agents gonna struggle while Minnesota observers are just gonna throw on some YakTrax and thrive.
“I want it to get cold,” says protestor/military vet Chris Foreman, who tells Julie Bosman for the New York Times that he’s been hanging out at the Whipple Building for the last six days. “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.”
The resistance is also using ice to fight ICE, with folks throwing water on their stoops, sidewalks, and ICE-trafficked streets. “These degenerates are getting away with WAY too much,” right-wing nuisance Nick Sortor exclaims at footage of a car sloshing water onto a road carrying ICE vehicles. A DHS rep recently told Fox News that these acts amount to "federal crime."
But ICE officers don't need our help falling on ice, and footage of agents slipping and sliding has gone viral across the internet. Gizmodo has a nice roundup of some of the greatest hits on social media. Though a word of warning: AI slop bots have begun generating this genre of post—even the algorithms know it's funny stuff.
