Dispatch

When I ask my friend Ginny to describe an ICE kidnapping she witnessed, she sends me a New York Times Instagram reel with 11.1 million views, “I was at this one.”

As ICE has escalated its presence in the Twin Cities, my cyber window back to Minneapolis has widened from texts and calls, to international news and viral documentary clips. Aware of the dynamic city beyond the 9:16 video frames, I asked my friends in MN to share their first-hand accounts of the ICE-occupied state that may not reach national streaming.

What wasn’t shown in Ginny’s NYT video were the swarms of people gathering to record and stop traffic, who were struck by pepper ball projectiles simply for witnessing what they had seen. Also not captured was the brevity of the attack: ICE agents made two arrests within ten minutes of arriving and leaving the scene. That it was documented at all can only be attributed to the immediate action of passersby. Feeling shocked and useless in the aftermath, Ginny started to walk home, noticing that within a block radius of the site, city life seemed to continue on with its regular program.

Julia is a student at the University of Minnesota, and reports that the university switched to a short-term hybrid model with established checkpoints at major building entrances. The university president, Rebecca Cuningham, sent a word-salad email encouraging students to stay “calm” and “peaceful,” all while ICE agents boarded at the Graduate Hotel, central to UMN’s East Bank campus.

Justine shared that living in a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis feels alienating—though most local residents rely on the same news as national audiences and do not actually bear witness to firsthand violence, there is an all-encompassing miasma of hopelessness and intimidation hovering over the area. As a K-12 teacher, Justine is acutely aware that she has her students’ lives in her hands. Attendance has dropped by 30% at metro schools, classes are hybrid, teachers must attend preparatory training for ICE raids, and all staff members wait at the bus pick-up to ensure every student boards lest they be abducted.

Despite the dark cloud, the neighborly camaraderie and lasting community systems built in Minneapolis during the 2020 BLM protests prepared the city for organized resistance. Mutual aid groups deliver food to families in hiding. Healthcare workers volunteer as street medics. Thousands of people coordinate in nested Signal group chats. ICE Watch is a coalition of volunteers that alert neighborhoods of ICE activity and act as security guards, while Rapid Response arrives at ICE sightings to prevent or document arrests and collect victim identities. Patrollers bike around town wearing neon vests that read, “LEGAL OBSERVER DON’T SHOOT.”

While evidentiary documentation and international news sharing are a crucial baseline, it has never been more clear that simply revealing information and doing to death the same recycled outrage is fruitless. What Minneapolis reveals is that organization, in physical space, with the people nearby, works. Minnesotans have repeatedly (2016, 2020, 2023, now 2026) shown up in massive numbers for event-based protests—impressive and inspiring, but the periodic nature of large-scale resistance efforts ultimately aligns with an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality where momentum dies as news coverage wanes. What’s missing is any meaningful collective call-to-action in response to the question: How do we kill the forces at bay in those interim periods that may not reach virality, before they coalesce into singular, increasingly horrific events?