Chapter 1: What happened in Minneapolis that led to increased ICE presence?
Some of this video coming out of Minneapolis is telling a story about the surge of ICE agents that started last week after Renee Good was killed.
Another controversial video has emerged of ICE. This time the agents are making an arrest and it turns out the people being arrested were U.S. citizens.
These are observers making sure that kids can walk home from school without being fucking taken apart by the fucking horrible Gestapo that we have here. A group of men approached a woman at a bus stop, pulled her aside, and then walked her into a vehicle. The polling is also telling a story. Support for ICE is dropping.
And more Americans than ever before, 46%, told Economist YouGov pollsters they want ICE abolished. Meanwhile, the messaging from the White House is that ICE has immunity.
Chapter 2: How are Minneapolis residents responding to ICE arrests?
So what does that mean for the people, some of them citizens, that ICE agents are dragging out of cars and workplaces and off of streets around Minneapolis? We have answers ahead on Today Explained.
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This is Today Explained. Madison McVan is a reporter at the Minnesota Reformer. She's been riding along with Minneapolis residents who are tailing ICE officers in their city to try and distract and disrupt enforcement.
Chapter 3: What does recent polling say about public support for ICE?
Madison, what's that been like? It's been intense. The idea is that if residents follow ICE and record them, that they can possibly prevent arrests from taking place at all. And is it working? The people I rode along with think it is working.
They basically say if we follow ICE and we record them, they're a lot less likely to get out of their cars and start asking people for their citizenship documentation and that kind of thing.
Tell me what you've experienced when you've been in the car with these people.
There's usually one person driving and then a second person manning the phones. And so the passenger is following along with a group chat. They're on a group call with other people in the neighborhood who are doing the same thing so they can correspond about where they're seeing ICE and notify each other when someone finds ICE and starts following the vehicle.
Chapter 4: How has the death of Renee Good affected community activism?
Where are they? Where are they?
They're in front of me. They're in front of me. Either I'm tweaking or that's them.
Are you taking a shot? Tornado, tornado!
This kind of plays out a pattern that I've seen over and over now, which is that the observers start following an ICE vehicle. The ICE vehicle starts, you know, basically identifies themselves as federal officers by checking to see if they're being followed.
They turn into a side street or they do a aggressive maneuver or they start weaving through parking lots, seeming to make sure they're being followed.
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Chapter 5: What legal challenges are being faced regarding ICE operations?
And then... At some point, they stop the vehicle. The observers stop behind them. The ICE agents get out of the car, surround the vehicle, and tell the observers to stop following them, that they're obstructing ICE operations, and that they may be arrested if they continue following.
So please be on your way and stop impeding or you will be arrested.
When I was riding along with a pair of observers, they were following an ICE vehicle and that exact thing happened. ICE officers got out of their vehicles, they surrounded the car, and one officer told the driver, stop following us. or we'll arrest you."
The observers decided to continue following the car and the ICE vehicle drove straight to the address of one of the observers that was in the car. So it seemed like they were doing some kind of looking up of the identity of the person who owned the vehicle and then driving to their home address.
Chapter 6: What is the significance of the federal investigation into the shooting?
The ICE vehicle stopped at the observer's home and then kept going. And so the observers decided to continue following the vehicles Two of the vehicles in the convoy split up and the observers decided to follow the third ICE car. As they were following that third ICE car, agents circled back to the observer's house that they had just stopped in front of and went and banged on the door.
The observer's wife was home. She was terrified and she pretended she wasn't home. And neighbors started coming out of their houses once they realized ICE was next door, blowing whistles. Some people stopped and honked horns and eventually the agents left. So we were planning on publishing this article about the ride along on Monday.
I had a call scheduled with those two observers, Patty and Elle, on Sunday night to just tie up loose ends and do a fact check before publication.
Chapter 7: How does ICE justify its actions in the wake of public outcry?
But Patty wasn't getting back to me. And she has an iPhone and I was texting her and the texts were green. So I started thinking maybe something was off. I started looking around on social media, and I saw a video from several hours prior that showed Patty getting her car window smashed in by an ICE agent.
Steve!
Steve! Steve! Steve! Steve!
She was pulled out of the car and handcuffed and taken to the Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling, which is where ICE is headquartered in the Twin Cities.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of federal immunity for ICE agents?
Three ICE agents that were in the car with me immediately started taunting me. The driver of the car said, you guys got to stop obstructing us. That's why that lesbian is dead.
She did get released on Sunday night without charges, along with the other observer that had been in the car with her that day. So I went and met up with her on Monday and talked to her about her experience being held by ICE. And then that became part of the story, too.
Much of the country was not paying attention to Minnesota before Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent last week. Was this going on before that?
There was an immigration enforcement surge starting in December. So that was when patrols really started ramping up. But even before that, people were organized in rapid response networks, starting when Trump took over for his second term.
The idea behind the rapid response networks was that if we see an ICE action taking place, we can notify a bunch of people in the neighborhood and the neighbors can respond to film ICE, to inform people of their rights, and to protest. But with this big surge in ICE agents arriving, they've kind of changed tactics. It seems like now the ICE agents are traveling in smaller groups.
They're conducting arrests quickly. They're really trying to get in and out before people have time to respond en masse and start protesting. So that's why the rapid response networks have shifted more towards a proactive approach following ICE agents in hopes of preventing raids or arrests before they even happen.
The Trump administration has suggested that the people doing this are organized activists who have, I don't know, possibly mendacious goals. You tell me about them, though. Who are these people? How did they get organized?
Well, I think this is where it's relevant to mention that Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, you know, less than a mile from where an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good. So this neighborhood has been organized before. They've mobilized en masse against police brutality before.
So I think that there's already a culture, particularly in the south side of Minneapolis, of organization and protest. The people who are doing this come from all walks of life. We're seeing churches get involved in this.
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