Charles Homans

I'm curious what you think it says about sort of Minneapolis right now that a shop like this is kind of on the front lines of the community response to the situation.

What should we do?

Should I park on the other side of the road from him so that he doesn't feel that we're obstructing?

Well, the official Trump administration explanation is this fraud scandal that's been sort of building for a while that does implicate a number of members of the Somali community of Minneapolis.

And it's been a little hard to keep track of why they're here because they've thrown out a number of other reasons since then having to do with the immigration crackdowns in general that we've been seeing, which are

I've spanned Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, other cities.

But if you're the Trump administration and you're looking to just arrest a lot of undocumented immigrants, Minneapolis is an odd choice because it's still a largely white city that doesn't have the sort of numbers that you would have in California or Texas or many other states, which has made it pretty clear that a lot of the context of the decision here likely has to do with other factors.

Minnesota is the state of Tim Walz, the vice presidential candidate in 2024, who Trump does seem to truly hate and vice versa.

It's also a very liberal city in a state that Trump has not ever won.

He's claimed that the election here has been stolen from him several times without any evidence.

And it is just sort of a state that embodies in many ways ideas and people that he has really staked his second presidency against.

That's right.

Minneapolis was very deeply affected by what happened here in 2020.

Minneapolis is a very liberal city, and a lot of people here were extremely outraged over the murder of George Floyd and broadly sympathetic to the protests.

But they were also very directly affected by the rioting that followed some of these demonstrations and often lived in neighborhoods where they saw people showing up in masks to burn a police station and things like that.

So it's left all of these kind of divisions within what is really like broadly a white liberal city.

And, you know, when I've come back here in years since then, you really see the kind of long shadow of 2020 in Minneapolis.

But what's been very interesting being here over the past week is that.

You also see a lot of the legacy of that in these kind of community structures and just kind of an ethos that is being applied to the current crisis in Minneapolis.

A lot of the same relationships and organizing ideas that people used to respond to what was happening after George Floyd.