Chapter 1: What is the current situation in Minneapolis regarding federal agents?
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It was just over a week ago that Donald Trump announced to the world this. Sometimes you need a dictator. He's made a dictator joke before, but this was no joke. It was a simple statement of how Trump views democracy and the rule of law as hindrances to asserting his own will over the nation and the world.
Trump made the dictator remark at the World Economic Forum in Davos as he was threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark and end the post-war order. But back home, we were looking at quite another side of the same coin, an American city, Minneapolis, seemingly in a state of siege.
Federal agents were going door to door, demanding identification from people on the street and detaining those who got in their way. Renee Good, a poet, had already been killed and others had been wounded, but that did nothing to moderate their tactics. Then Alex Preti, a nurse, was shot and killed in a hail of bullets after he came to the aid of a protester.
The administration did what, frankly, a dictatorship does. They said that Preti, who had been carrying a licensed firearm that he never brandished, was in fact a terrorist, an assassin, and they justified the killing. We're going to talk about Minneapolis today and what it bodes for this country. Emily Witt and Ruby Kramer have been reporting from the city, and I spoke with them this past week.
They're both staff riders for The New Yorker. Emily, you reported on the protests in Los Angeles last summer, and now you're in your hometown of Minneapolis. How have the ICE strategies changed from L.A. to Chicago to what we're seeing now in Minneapolis?
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.
And what was the difference in atmosphere, if any?
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Chapter 2: How did the murder of George Floyd impact Minneapolis politics?
straight-up summary of the reality behind the fraud investigations, which seems to be a source for the administration's hostility, especially to the Somali immigrant community.
Yeah, so since the pandemic, there was a widespread fraud in Minnesota's social benefits network, especially one nonprofit in particular called Feeding Our Future. And that fraud has been under investigation by federal prosecutors for a couple of years. They've convicted more than 60 people. A majority of those people have come from the Somali American community.
The person that prosecutors described as the mastermind of the thing was not a small American. She was a white lady from Minnesota. But Trump has made this fraud an immigration issue, even though an overwhelming majority of small Americans all across the country are American citizens, either by naturalization or birth.
So he's turning something that was just some bad actors into an immigration story and using it as an excuse to come here to Minnesota in particular.
Trump is often invoking the name of Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman, a Democrat, obviously, and trying to make her a central figure in this conflict somehow. Just the other day, She was attacked while speaking. Somebody took out a syringe and squirted some unknown fluid at her, which was certainly scary in the moment. What does Ilhan Omar have to do with this directly?
Well, I think it's pretty clear that the president likes to go after certain people he feels he can other in some way or another. So Omar's been elected. She's in her fourth term. She's seen as a as a leader here. You know, obviously her constituency supports her and he is part of his party.
He wants Minneapolis to turn against people in their community that they see as their neighbors and their leaders and their fellow residents of the city. He wants them to turn against them. And you see that with his going on about the fraud.
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Chapter 3: What changes have been observed in ICE strategies in Minneapolis?
You see that with his attempt to demonize Ilhan Omar. He wants to divide the city against itself, and the city is refusing to accept that narrative.
I'm speaking with staff writers Emily Witt and Ruby Kramer. We'll continue in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
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We're talking today about the overwhelming federal force in Minneapolis. The repressive tactics, the violent results, the administration's response. It's all been described as an immigration enforcement surge. Surge. That resonant military term is hardly inappropriate.
The operation, ordered up by the president and carried out by heavily armed, often undisciplined federal agents, is ostensibly an immigration operation. But it also seems intended to intimidate an entire American city. The spectacle, the dark reality, is of Minneapolis under siege.
I've been speaking with Emily Witt, who wrote The Battle for Minneapolis for The New Yorker, and Ruby Kramer, who wrote The Mayor of an Occupied City, about the city's mayor, Jacob Fry. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, recently said that she wanted access to Minnesota's voter rolls and its welfare data And if she got that, maybe she'd pull out some forces, some ice forces from the state.
What do you make of this?
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Chapter 4: What insights did Mayor Jacob Fry share about the city's challenges?
I mean, we're feeling lots of things, but we're very careful not to cross lines. Yeah, I would agree. This is not you know, they they the people out on the street are really there to observe the actions of ICE. They're not trying to get into a skirmish with federal agents. They might be yelling things at them, but they're not trying to start fights. They're not breaking windows for the most part.
You know, it is what I'm seeing on the streets here is a calm, determined action. Anger, real anger.
And there are no outliers. There are no people that are particularly provocative among the protesters in your experience?
No. I mean, I think one thing is Minneapolis saw how its anger at what happened to George Floyd was turned against it in the national political narrative. And I think there's a sense they're not going to play... Into any narrative that and they're being called domestic terrorists and agitators and professionals, all this stuff. And they're refusing to present themselves that way.
They you know, I really haven't seen exceptions to that when I'm out in the streets.
Ruby, there's a relatively new chief of police in Minneapolis. His name is Brian O'Hara, and he started in 2022. His position is, needless to say, excruciating. Let's listen to a little of your conversation with him about dealing with the influx of federal agents.
It doesn't appear that there's much effort to deescalate. You know, we come into chaotic situations and the training for several years has been to be proportional, to be professional, try and slow things down. You come into a situation where You know, there's some minor offense that may be offensive to you.
As a professional, you're not supposed to take things personally, even if someone's yelling something at you. But the problem is, especially with some disorderly conduct, if you step in as a cop and you start up here and they don't comply, there's nowhere else to go but up.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How do local law enforcement and federal agents interact in Minneapolis?
It was horrible. And then the bathroom I was brought to was covered in urine. Toilet paper was wet. There was no soap. Yeah, and I get how many thoughts, like, this is how they're treating me, a U.S. citizen, white passing man. I can only imagine what's causing all these people to be sobbing and screaming and begging.
Emily, how long was he in detention?
About eight hours.
What about the accounts of the time in detention was most surprising to you?
I was very surprised that the person we just heard from was interrogated as if he were not just a person out exercising his right to observe and protest, but someone who was part of an organized network of bad actors. He was just kind of baffled. I mean, both of the people I spoke with were angry.
Genuinely surprised that the people interrogating them believed their own narrative about who was doing this, I think.
Let's focus a little bit on those interrogations. Both Brandon and Patty, Patty O'Keefe, describe what those interrogations were like. Let's listen to them talking about that.
They also asked, do you know of any protesters that are planning any violent protests? or might be capable of planning violent actions. And I was like, well, what do you mean by violent actions? And they're like, well, say, creating maybe, or making plans to set off a bomb or potentially snipe ICE agents. And I just responded and I was like, a bomb?
Are you kidding me? I was like, you guys are way too afraid of us. Like, no, I don't know of anyone doing that.
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Chapter 6: What are the consequences of the federal presence on public safety?
He wanted the names of people. So that's what he wanted. He wanted the names of protest organizers. He wanted the names of undocumented people. And what he was offering me, he said, you know, if you have family that's out of the country that needs help getting in, we can help with that. I'm Hispanic. And at one point, yeah, I was like, so what is it exactly that you're offering me?
And at one point he was like, money. Yeah. which was surreal.
Surreal is the word for it. In this interrogation, according to him, he was being offered money, and at the same time he's being intimidated, and he's being offered immigration help for potentially some of his relatives. Was that surprising to you? Did you hear that elsewhere around town?
He's the only person that I heard that from. And I should say that the Department of Homeland Security said that no money was offered. But, you know, yeah, it is surreal and... And yet, I do think the federal authorities believe in this kind of story they're telling of an organized resistance to them that might be armed.
And I think you see that in the really trigger-happy response of the agents that are out in the streets.
I mean, there is a startling contrast between Minneapolis in the summer of Black Lives Matter and the murder of George Floyd. It just seems a markedly different approach to protest and resistance. Or am I getting that wrong, Emily?
No, that's totally correct. And I think it's just a really different situation. In that case, the city was expressing rage. You know, Minneapolis has longstanding racial inequalities, a long history of police violence against Black people. So the city in many ways was expressing rage against itself and its own institutions the only way it was able to. And this is such a different situation.
Why would you go around breaking the windows of your own city when it's being, you know, occupied from an external force, which is the sense of what's happening here? Right now, there's a sense of protection and mutual aid and kind of taking care of each other. And the anger is directed toward, you know, a much more external actor, right?
Rupi, are the police having to reconceive of their role at all? Apropos of your conversations earlier with the head of the police, how are they thinking about enforcement differently from the militarized forces on the ground?
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