ICE invades Minnesota and Minnesotans fight back

I met Will Stancil two days before he got booted from his neighborhood Signal chat. We were at the Uptown Minneapolis VFW at an event hosted by Rep. Ilhan Omar, a thank-you party for Minnesotans who fought ICE in ways big and small. There were tacos and drinks, and dancing, though I never saw Stancil dance, which is not to say it never happened. A friend of mine who knows of Stancil from his work on school desegregation was surprised I knew who he was. She had no idea he was a combative, divisive online personality. She didn’t know about his arguments with leftists on Bluesky or his fights with white supremacists on X, or about the fact that some of Stancil’s erstwhile opponents have, in light of his new proclivity for chasing and getting tear-gassed by ICE, begrudgingly accepted him as a sort of antihero.

When I approached Stancil, who is almost shockingly boyish-looking in person, he was talking to former New York City comptroller Brad Lander. He had flown to Minneapolis that day to learn about the local response to a federal occupation. Stancil offered to let Lander tag along on one of his ICE patrols — a practice locals now call “commuting” — and said I could join them if I wanted. It’s this openness to media attention that got Stancil kicked out of the Signal group, where many commuters are wary of press, hoping to not draw too much attention. Stancil has talked to, and in some cases been joined by, reporters from CNN, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Economist, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Minnesota Reformer, Racket MN, Mpls. St. Paul Magazine, the Toronto Star, and now The Verge.

In an eyewitness video analyzed frame by frame by The New York Times, Alex Pretti raises one hand and holds a phone in the other. Federal agents tackle him, and one appears to find and remove a gun holstered on his hip. Then, an agent shoots — and a second follows. They appear to fire nine more shots as Pretti lies on the ground.

The Trump administration has claimed Pretti was shot because of his legally carried gun — that the agents, later identified in records viewed by ProPublica as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer Raymundo Gutierrez, acted in self-defense. But the tool he was visibly holding in the seconds before he was killed is the one the Trump administration seems truly afraid of — and the one it’s fought harder to control.

We sat in a parking lot and waited. We watched, knowing we were being watched in return. Two men, masked and presumably armed, idled in a gray SUV. “They’re all on this fucking street now,” Lety, a lifelong resident of the Minnesota suburbs, told me. ICE had been spotted at a gas station and a mobile home park, and they were here with us now, in a strip mall that was home to a dispensary, an auto parts shop, and little else. I stared straight ahead as Lety monitored the Signal chat on her phone. We didn’t speak. A knock on the passenger-side window startled us both. Earlier, Lety had shown me dashcam footage of a pair of ICE agents pulling up in front of her, getting out of their car, and threatening her with bear mace. This time, the figure on the other side of the glass was friendlier: not an ICE agent, just the manager of the auto shop. We were blocking a loading zone, he said, and he was fine with us loitering in the parking lot, but could we move our car up a bit?

Lety was out watching ICE, which she tries to do a couple times a week. Eventually the ICE agents left and we did too. Lety led us to Sunny Acres, the mobile home park 20 miles south of the Twin Cities where there had been rumors of ICE activity earlier that morning. We ran into another patroller and he and Lety exchanged pleasant, cautious hellos, addressing each other by their respective Signal codenames. He hadn’t seen ICE yet, but he worried it was just a matter of time.

The government’s siege of the Twin Cities is reportedly coming to an end. “I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude,” border czar Tom Homan announced Thursday.

This isn’t the first time Department of Homeland Security officials have claimed that Operation Metro Surge, its massive campaign in Minnesota, was slowing down or ending altogether. Homan teased a “drawdown” in late January, and a few days later, President Donald Trump said he had ordered the withdrawal of 700 agents from the state. But an estimated 2,000 agents remained, and residents reported that raids continued.

Minneapolis was not the war zone I expected to find. Depending on who you are and where you live, things can seem, for a few fleeting moments, almost normal, like a few blocks or neighborhoods over people aren’t being tear gassed or rounded up by ICE or, in two tragic cases, being gunned down by federal agents. Even now some people walk their dogs, run errands and buy groceries, meet friends for dinner and drinks. Daily life has become sinister in its banality, because Minneapolis remains a city under siege. ICE and CBP agents roam the streets, though their tactics have shifted as of late: No longer acting like an occupying army, the Department of Homeland Security now operates like secret police. They do their best to blend in, to look like the people they terrorize, and in this, they often fail. Everyone knows that they’re there, that they’re watching. But they aren’t everywhere — not at once. The fear is that they will arrive at any moment, that they will take someone, that they will arrest or attack or kill anyone who gets in their way.

These fears have been realized. Children and parents have been snatched off the street while walking to school. People have been taken from their jobs and grabbed mid-commute, their empty cars left on the streets, hazard lights still flashing. And so those who are most vulnerable — immigrants at risk of deportation, US citizens who have learned that DHS will, depending on the color of a person’s skin, detain first and ask questions later — have retreated into their homes.

Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan have a knack for drawing attention to a cause. The bestselling romance novelists helped raise half a million dollars for Georgia voting rights in 2020. Now, their cause is whistles, because whistles let neighbors alert each other when they see ICE agents abducting people. They’ve helped create a group that’s shipped a half million free 3D-printed whistles to 49 US states — 200,000 of them in the first week of February alone.

Even I print whistles now. It’s the first thing I do each morning after dropping kids at school, and the very last before bed. Usually, I squeeze in a hundred more after dinner.

In late 2025, the Department of Homeland Security zeroed in on the Twin Cities in Minnesota, supposedly in response to fraud allegations made by a right-wing influencer. In the months since, thousands of immigrants have been swept up by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. In January alone, two American citizens were killed while documenting ICE operations in the city. Two Customs and Border Protection agents deployed to Minneapolis fatally shot protester Alex Pretti on January 24th, triggering another wave of protests throughout the city — and another DHS crackdown.

One local who was arrested while protesting at the site of Alex’s killing talked to The Verge about his harrowing experience in custody at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building and how the community is fighting back. We’ve anonymized his identity due to safety concerns.

After right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley’s viral video alleging fraud at Minnesota daycares he said were operated by Somali residents, Donald Trump’s administration responded by flooding the state with federal immigration agents and freezing funding for childcare services. (A judge ruled that the federal government must continue funding childcare subsidies, at least temporarily.) Now Shirley is back loitering outside daycares again, this time in California.

Over the weekend the 23-year-old posted a photo of himself with the caption “Hello California I’ve arrived.” Like with his last video, which featured a “source” later identified by The Intercept as a far-right onetime political candidate and lobbyist, Shirley seems to have had a local tour guide: Amy Reichert, a San Diego right-wing activist who unsuccessfully ran for local election. She said on X that she spent two days with Shirley “checking out learning centers” in the city. An accompanying image appears to show the two of them — a tripod-mounted phone in tow — outside a business.

It was too cold to take off my mittens and check Google Maps, so I put my faith in the trickle of bundled-up people ahead of me. All of them were carrying signs and wearing whistles around their necks on top of layers and layers of winter clothing. At first there were dozens of us walking toward Government Plaza, across the street from Minneapolis City Hall, and within a block it was hundreds. By the time I arrived it was thousands. Some reports said 5,000 to 10,000, but on the ground, it felt like a single vibrating mass that was too large to count.

I made my way through the throng, repeating “excuse me” and “pardon me” despite the din because the people here are above all else unfailingly polite. Someone offered me a “Fuck ICE” pin. Someone else offered me a chocolate chip cookie. Another offered me a red vuvuzela. All three declined to be named or interviewed.

Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor turned independent journalist, was arrested on Thursday night by federal agents in Los Angeles, who alleged that he had violated federal law while covering an anti-ICE protest in Minnesota.

Notably, Lemon was not the only journalist targeted by law enforcement for their presence at the Minnesota protest. On Thursday night, local independent journalist Georgia Fort told her followers that the FBI had come to arrest her for being at the protest, livestreaming as agents were demanding she open her door. Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed Fort’s arrest the next day, claiming that she, Lemon, and others were part of a “coordinated attack” on the church. Bondi said two other people had also been arrested, including Jamael Lundy, a candidate for the Minnesota State Senate.

Last Saturday, I received an email from the Children’s Theatre Company of Minnesota. They explained that they were canceling the weekend’s performances of Go, Dog. Go! “for the safety of our patrons, staff, and artists.” Earlier that morning, federal agents had killed Alex Pretti in the streets, about nine blocks away from the theater’s doors.

The tickets were a Christmas gift to my four-year-old daughter from her grandparents. She has never been to the theater before. In the ever-expanding list of consequences from ICE’s violent occupation of the Twin Cities metro area, this disappointment hardly merits a mention. But it still made me sad, because — as any parent could probably tell you — all I want for my kid is joy, and so much of the world that surrounds her right now is confusion and fear and pain.

I was tear gassed by the government for the first time in July 2020 at one of the many Black Lives Matter protests that broke out all over the country. The feeling is excruciating, like your lungs are trying to kill you from the inside out. The sting in your eyes is painful, too. But oddly, after you’ve been tear gassed enough times, you mostly just resent the inconvenience of having to stand around and involuntarily gasp and sob. That summer, I learned the art of walking out of a cloud of tear gas — briskly, but not too briskly, lest you lose breath control and take in a huge huff of aerosolized pain.

I thought about this five years later, as I watched Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi appear on Fox News after Customs and Border Protection agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. “How did these people go out and get gas masks?” she asked, incredulously. “These protesters — would you know how to walk out on the street and buy a gas mask, right now? Think about that.”

The day Alex Pretti was shot 10 times in the street by federal agents, I was delivering a eulogy for my grandfather, who died the way we’re supposed to: old, asleep, surrounded by family. Because it’s my job to coordinate visuals for this website, I locked myself in a bathroom stall, watched a video of the shooting twice, and emailed a photographer, asking if he could get onto the streets and start documenting what was happening in Minneapolis.

As I reviewed photos of protesters and tear gas in the wake of his death, I didn’t realize, in the hours before his name was released to the public, that the man millions of people had seen lying facedown on the pavement from multiple angles of eyewitness video was my childhood best friend.

Shortly after federal agents killed Alex Pretti Saturday morning, the Department of Homeland Security began to run with the story that the dead man had been armed and dangerous. He had a gun, DHS said. (A Bellingcat analysis of the video concludes that Pretti was unarmed when he was shot.) He had approached the agents holding the gun, DHS said. (He was holding a phone, The New York Times reports.) Pretti died on his knees, surrounded by armed Border Patrol agents, with shot after shot unloaded in his direction.

America’s Second Amendment is beloved by conservatives. Minnesota allows open carry with a permit. Pretti lived in a city where people are regularly being assaulted and even killed by the masked and armed men he was busy observing. So why has so much ink been spilled over the minutiae of his behavior? Why is it so normal for law enforcement — those who are supposed to be keepers of law and order — to kill Americans? And why is the only question at the end of the day how much their victims deserved to die?

Americans do not like masked secret police. There is really no other way to put it. The reasons why are manifold: accountability, trust in law enforcement, and just plain overall vibes. More concretely, not being able to tell who’s a cop and who’s not is dangerous. An assassin masquerading as law enforcement killed Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband last year. How is anyone supposed to tell whether they’re being dragged out of their home in their underwear by ICE or by mere amateur thugs?

Last year, California passed the No Secret Police Act, which restricts masking for federal law enforcement, alongside the No Vigilantes Act, which requires law enforcement to wear some form of identification. The Department of Homeland Security immediately sued to enjoin the law on constitutional grounds; a judge has not yet ruled on whether to grant a preliminary injunction.

Steven Garcia, as told to Gaby Del Valle:

I was in the middle of a frozen lake when I got the notification from The Minnesota Star Tribune that there had been a shooting. I was on assignment at a pond hockey event, and someone who was supposed to play later that evening said he probably wouldn’t be able to make it — they knew there would be protests and demonstrations happening.

Editor’s note: We’ve decided to make this story free for all readers. We hope you’ll support this reporting by sharing it.

I live in Minneapolis. I grew up not far from here, in a suburb of St. Paul; after stints on both coasts, my wife and I settled here to raise our daughters in a freezing state that had always welcomed us warmly. As the ongoing occupation by over 3,000 ICE agents stretches into its third week — with no clear end in sight — I’ve received a steady string of messages from increasingly concerned friends across the country. They all start the same way: Uh… is this really as bad as it looks from the outside?

As masked and armed men in combat armor swarmed throughout the Twin Cities, Gov. Tim Walz took to primetime television to ask Minnesotans to film ICE. The videos, he said, would “create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans — not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”

While the feds besieged hospitals and school bus stops and Targets, Walz imagined a future with something akin to the Nuremberg trials. His speech emphasized the legal system and the ballot box, a promise of peaceful regime change and a process of accountability. And it was as much emotional solace for his constituents as it was a demonstration for the courts. Minnesota is not in insurrection, Minnesota is not in revolt, Minnesota will follow the law — so, will the law now protect Minnesota?