The searing first-hand account below by Carin Mrotz of what’s happening on the streets of Minneapolis is a horrifying and necessary read. More than 2,400 heavily armed federal agents have flooded the Minneapolis area since early January — one of the largest federal occupations of an American city in U.S. history. The Department of Homeland Security is conducting the operation over the objections of every level of state and local government, with whom it has made no effort to coordinate even as convoys of masked agents with assault rifles and combat gear descend on quiet residential streets.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has called the deployment “wildly disproportionate” and a massive waste of taxpayer dollars, noting “at times, there are as many as 50 agents arresting one person.” City Council President Elliott Payne put it succinctly: “This is a military occupation, and it feels like a military occupation.”
Thank you to Carin Mrotz, Minneapolis resident and Senior Advisor in the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, for providing this powerful account of what she’s witnessing:
“A post for my friends and family outside of Minneapolis. There is a lot of misinformation flying around and I want to share my perspective if it’s useful or compelling or helps cut through the clickbait and profiteering.
Over the past several weeks, thousands of ICE agents have been deployed to the Twin Cities and more are expected this week. There are currently more ICE agents than local law enforcement in the metro area. In some places they are visiting businesses that are likely to employ or serve immigrants looking for people to arrest. In some places they are camping out in cars on highway exit ramps and pulling over drivers they believe look like they could be immigrants.
In neighborhoods like mine that are primarily residential with few business corridors, they are staging targeted raids of homes. But they mix it up, yesterday they were driving around the neighborhood and a neighbor reported that an agent pulled over and asked her husband, who was out walking the dog, if he was a US citizen.
Yesterday morning I received a text in my neighborhood group chat that more than a dozen agents were staging outside of a house a few blocks away, legal observers were needed. I put on boots and drove over to a home near our middle school and found the street full of SUVs and men in militarized but not standardized gear with big “POLICE” labels all over them. These men were carrying big guns.
Several of my friends had already been maced and one of the agents was spraying mace into a crowd of observers as casually as a dad might spray his lawn with a hose in the summer. The agents brandished their guns at us a warning, or a threat, maybe both. Neighbors stood on the front lawns and blew whistles or banged on drums and asked to see the agents’ warrant. ICE is not supposed to be able to enter a home without a judicial warrant, which is a warrant signed by a judge. If you are a law and order person, that might mean something to you.
Yesterday, after a few minutes of arguing with neighbors, 10-15 agents mustered and broke down the door of the single family home. They entered and after a few minutes, they re-emerged with a tall Black man in a tee shirt, shorts, an unzipped hoodie, and rubber slides. They led him to their vehicle. It was about 15 degrees out. His wife stood on the front lawn, begging to know why they took him. Behind her the front door stood broken, offering no security to a house full of family members, including children.
Several of us observers asked to see the warrant, and I took a picture. I will not share it out of concern for the man’s privacy, but it was an administrative warrant, signed by an ice agent, not a judge. If it matters to you that residents follow the law in engaging with our occupying agents, this should matter to you. If you are a law and order person, you might consider that what I witnessed was an abduction, not an arrest.
Across the Twin Cities, raids like this continued all day. On the southside, ICE agents surrounded a legal observer in her vehicle, broke the windows, and dragged her and her passenger out of the car and detained them. Everyone I know knows someone who has either had a relative (or multiple relatives) taken or has been a witness to one of these abductions. The pace of the operations has been relentless, manic, and the agents are acting with remarkable brutality.
Yesterday, as one of my neighbors attended to another who’d been sprayed with mace, pouring clean water in her eyes on the icy sidewalk in below freezing temps, her mother stood nearby on the phone with MPD, asking them to send someone to help. I don’t know if their decision not to was strategic or just simply about capacity, no local law enforcement has been present at any of the operations I’ve witnessed.
If you are someone who believes that you should absolutely just do whatever law enforcement tells you to do and you will be safe and respected, I would ask if you’ve ever had big guns drawn on you by someone yelling orders at you, those orders sometimes conflicting and unclear. And what if they were also spraying you with chemical irritants in 15 degree weather. If someone maced you for blowing a whistle at them, how confident are you in their ability to calmly follow procedure and not shoot you?
This summer our House Speaker Emerita and her husband were murdered in their home by someone impersonating a police officer. How confident are you that you could make sense of the meanings and markings of a uniform under stress? If armed men filled your street and broke down your neighbor’s door without a warrant, how confident are you that you could stay calm? These are questions we are asking ourselves constantly.
I have a lot of opinions about why this is happening, why Minnesota has been targeted and why our elected leaders are making the decisions they are and what will happen next, but this post is primarily to level set and let you know what’s going on. Because I also want you to know how we are responding.
First, I want to say that my experiences are those of a white professional who is not at risk for deportation. Immigrants and people afraid of being mistaken for immigrants are having a different set of experiences. ICE has been putting detainees on planes and sending them to places like Texas before their families can even hire lawyers or find out where their loved ones have been taken.
People are afraid and avoiding leaving their homes, even to get groceries. After ICE tear-gassed parents and school staff at a local high school last week, our public schools closed and have now re-opened with hybrid learning so that parents who are afraid to send their kids to school have an option.
Neighbors are organizing to protect and care for each other. We observe and document raids. We show up at schools at dropoff and pickup time, we pick up groceries for those who are staying home. Some of the muscle memory of the neighborhood watches we formed during the uprising 5 and a half years ago has reengaged. The Twin Cities is connected and resilient and pissed off and will continue to protect each other.
That is the important thing to know right now: Our cities are under occupation and we are being attacked by our federal government. And we are tenacious and we love each other and we will continue to protect each other. We will continue to blow whistles and bang pots and pans to alert our neighbors that ICE is nearby. We will continue to argue with them and waste their time knowing that someone else will have 15 more minutes to get away. We will continue to share videos of them slipping and falling on their asses on the icy walks and we will laugh hard at them. We have legal tools to fight them and we also have our long history of organizing and resistance.” — Carin Mrotz
In addition to these acts of local solidarity and resistance, on Monday, the state of Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to halt the “unprecedented surge” and declare it unconstitutional, alleging warrantless arrests, excessive force against bystanders, racial profiling, and raids on sensitive locations including schools and hospitals.
The lawsuit also alleges the operation is politically motivated retaliation against a Democratic state, citing a January 9 interview in which Trump “essentially claimed that Minnesota is ‘corrupt’ and ‘crooked’ because its officials accurately reported election results and those results did not declare him the winner.”
–> Here’s how to take action against the militarization of U.S. cities: Congress must fund the Department of Homeland Security by January 30, and spending bills require 60 votes in the Senate — meaning Democrats have leverage to demand restrictions on ICE. Call your Senators at (202) 224-3121 and tell them: No vote for DHS funding without serious guardrails on how ICE operates and accountability for agents who use excessive force.
To help those working on the ground in Minnesota to protect the Constitutional rights of immigrants, you can support the critical work of the Immigrant Defense Network at https://immigrantdefensenetwork.org/
For a new report from The New York Times on the aggressive tactics being used by federal agents occupying Minneapolis, visit https://www.nytimes.com/…/ice-videos-minnesota-trump…
For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, “Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change,” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364
For books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history that will help them appreciate how precious democracy truly is, visit our blog post “The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426
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