Emily Witt

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Well, the biggest difference is just the number of agents relative to the size of the population.

So in L.A., I don't know exactly how many people were deployed there, but L.A.

is an enormous city, and they were spread out all across L.A.

County, which takes hours to cross from one side to the other.

So it wasn't the same sense of really agents everywhere in the very heart of the densest part of the metropolis.

You know, the protests in Los Angeles were really concentrated around downtown L.A.

And the confrontations there were between local law enforcement and demonstrators.

And so even though there were people following around ICE agents, you didn't see the same face-to-face confrontation between just ordinary people and federal agents with the same degree of intensity that you're seeing in Minneapolis.

So he feels as if Minneapolis was in the midst of a renaissance, in his words, before this happened.

Crime in nearly every neighborhood in Minneapolis was trending downward.

And Fry, when he came into office, was a candidate who...

had a passion for housing.

Housing was his biggest issue.

And as you said, his first term became defined by something completely different, issues of racial justice, police reform.

And now he's in the midst of the very first weeks of his third term, which he said is going to be his last.

And he's dealing with a completely unprecedented situation.

I think he told me multiple times that

this is the first time anything like this has ever happened in an American city.

Yeah, and I think it goes to what Emily was saying about just the presence of the federal force, the occupying forces, he said, is so deeply and viscerally felt in the city because it's such a small city.