The ordinary people trying to stop the immigration agency’s arrests and violence.
When Renee Good was shot by an ICE officer last week in Minnesota, it brought attention to the robust effort to combat US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Twin Cities. Residents of Minneapolis and the surrounding areas are joining decentralized networks of activists who are committed to alerting their neighbors to ICE presence on their blocks.
Madison McVan, a reporter for the Minnesota Reformer, rode along with some of those activists to observe their tactics. The activists patrol their neighborhoods looking for ICE officers. When they find them, they alert their networks and tail the officers so their neighbors know where ICE is in the city. These patrols have led to tense standoffs with ICE officers and have drawn accusations of “domestic terrorism” from the Trump administration.
McVan spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about what she experienced while riding along with activists and how these networks sprang up in the first place. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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You’ve been riding along with Minneapolis residents who are tailing ICE as a form of resistance. 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 arrest 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.
This kind of plays out [in] a pattern that I’ve seen over and over now, which is that the observers start following an ICE vehicle. The ICE vehicle identifies themselves as federal officers by checking to see if they’re being followed. They turn into a side street or they do an aggressive maneuver, or they start weaving through parking lots — seeming to make sure they’re being followed. 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.
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.
