Life in a City Occupied by ICE
How Minneapolis residents are coping after their own government declared war on them
After being told that school was canceled for two days because of ICE, my elementary school-age daughter replied, “That makes sense, it’s really slippery outside.”
I’ve told that anecdote a few times already this week, along with another very recent exchange when the school reopened, albeit with heavy community safety patrolling by parents. After saying a quick hello at afterschool pick-up, followed by a pregnant pause in its truest elephant-in-the-city way, another parent asked me sardonically, “So, how’s the occupation going for you?”
These simple exchanges capture both the enormity of the experience of living under this new modern form of domestic occupation in Minneapolis-St. Paul and the day-to-dayness of having to navigate it.
I don’t say “navigate” in a passive way, as if it’s an imposition that I could somehow opt out of, but in more of a manner of incorporating the reality—the potential extended reality—of doing all the things that we do in the Twin Cities while trying to resist an authoritarian military takeover.
That is to say that, along with elementary school dropoffs, many residents are also now participating in community safety alert systems and patrols.
That is to say that, along with figuring out what to have for dinner, residents are seeing which restaurants are even still open, and which restaurants in crisis can we support with our dining-out dollars.
That is to say that, along with planning a night out, residents must figure out which venues will still have their shows, which will be donating to additional causes, and what we will do if a venue is attacked by ICE mid-show.
All of these actions represent our new normal in response to the cosplaying Proud Boy thugs with military weapons who are going neighborhood to neighborhood, store to store, school to school, door to door, to assault and kidnap our neighbors with total impunity.
That’s how the occupation is going.
To be very clear: how the occupation is going for someone in Minneapolis varies greatly.
I’m a married, straight, white father of two kids who happens to live in the middle of an up-and-coming south Minneapolis neighborhood. We’re close to the mighty Mississippi River. We’re also close to the highest concentration of Somali-Americans in the country, and the Little Earth Native American residential community. We have great coffee shops, an incredible repertoire movie theater and a community gem second run movie theater. We have one of the coolest indie bookstores in the country. (We could use more sandwich shops though.)
My family happens to live on a street two miles from where George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police in 2020 and eight blocks from where the MPD’s Third Precinct was burned down in protest.
The occupation for me has been, as any occupied group will attest, very disruptive, physically and mentally. And I will say immediately that compared to those on the receiving end of ICE’s orders for harassment, intimidation, assault, and kidnapping, the occupation has been comparatively much, much easier for myself and my family than many of my neighbors.
I know that I’m not going to be a victim of one of ICE’s blatantly racist Kavanaugh stops. I’m not the friend of a home builder who was captured, flown to Texas, told that his visa had been canceled last week, and then given five minutes to call his wife and two-year-old daughter before being deported. I won’t have my family scrambling to file a missing persons report only to find out I’ve been shipped off by ICE. I’m not the 17-year-old Target employee, Jonathan Aguilar Garcia, who was beaten up by the ICE goon squad during his shift, driven eight miles away, and dumped in a random parking lot covered in blood.
There are hundreds of similar examples from this occupation—and tragically it gets more violent. I’m not the person shot in the leg fleeing from an ICE abduction. I’m not the family in North Minneapolis on their way home who got caught in a crossfire with ICE that sent six children to the hospital with flash-bang burns.
I’m not Renee Good, who we all saw murdered in cold blood by a long-time ICE agent.
But even for me, the physical machinations of the occupation are nearly impossible to avoid. ICE stops people randomly on the street. It rams cars, sometimes through intersections, and sometimes pulls someone out and leaves the car right in the street. It threatens observers, sometimes with death verbally or with guns in their face. ICE’s leadership lies about all of it in social and legacy media. Sometimes, in universal karma, ICE also occasionally slips on the actual ice because this is, after all, Minnesota in the dead of winter.
Roosevelt High School, where ICE deployed tear gas and roughed up teachers and school staff, is our neighborhood high school. Hence the last minute reactive closure of our children’s schools for safety and planning. (Much loved former Minnesota governor, former actor, pro wrestler, Roosevelt student; and current heavily bearded public critic, Jesse Ventura, returned to his school to denounce the assault and reminisce in his trademark gravely voice.)
As ICE has surged, so has Minneapolis-St. Paul.
Now that the kids are back in school, neighbors in neon vests dot the neighborhood with pops of color, to the credit of neighborhood civic involvement. Information-sharing networks have been built. Residents have connected with organizations like non-profits and churches to deliver food to people who are locked in their homes out of fear. Resistance designs and signs are everywhere. My wife’s phone constantly receives community updates.
While my kids had their schools close for safety, I have not (yet) been threatened with abduction. But despite the recency of the surge, it has still been all around us.
In addition to parenting, I’m also an Adjunct Faculty member at Augsburg University, where many students are first generation higher education students, and where ICE agent mobilizations, even before the surge, threw the end of the Fall 2025 semester into chaos. Right before finals, classes moved to either partially or entirely online; I had students abruptly stop attending for fear they would be kidnapped or because they were needed as full-time support for their families who were now unable to leave their homes—whether they are citizens or not. As the Spring 2026 semester approaches in a few days, there’s still campus discussions on safety and whether classes will need to be partially or entirely online.
Along with the in-person effects, the occupation is also impossible to avoid emotionally and morally.
Social media delivers nonstop clips of ICE violence in our own city and they carry a heavy weight. At my much-needed haircut last week, everyone in the small shop grappled with the dangerously slippery refreezing snow and with the gravity of the occupation—and the need to stand up to armed forces kidnapping people out of their cars and workplaces. One stylist couldn’t help himself from watching another angle of Renee Good being killed by ICE less than a mile from the store.
Many people have rhetorically asked, “If you were given a chance to fight back against the fascists, what would you do?” Many people in Minnesota have answered with organizing and observing. To their credit, hundreds of experienced and newly minted activists and some City Council members have been on the front lines trying to channel people’s frustrations and fears into action. Council President Elliot Payne and state representatives from Northeast Minneapolis have been on the daily beat. So has Council Member Jason Chavez, who had his uncle abducted by ICE, and Council Person Robin Wonsley, who has called on the governor for an eviction moratorium to keep people in their homes and out of ICE’s hands.
Other elected officials, not so much. Mayor Frey, a moderate Democrat who took heat for dropping an F-bomb in a press conference, has been moderate on his public calls against ICE, including the presser around Minnesota suing the federal government for invasion, saying, “We are not asking ICE not to do ICE things.” Such a statement at this unprecedented time and lack of bold action has many residents, even small businesses, dropping their own F-bombs towards him and the Police Department. The MPD police chief, Brian O’Hara, has used his media appearances, including the New York Times’ The Daily podcast, to talk unironically about the toll ICE has had on law enforcement. Similarly, Gov. Walz has used his national spotlight to, in his signature folksy, “Minnesota nice” affect, ask ICE to leave the state.
Earlier I mentioned that our modern occupation is still nearly impossible to miss. On the cancellation of school, my mother-in-law sprang into action and helped take my kids and me to an indoor rock climbing location. (When it’s too cold or too icy in Minnesota, physical activities and distractions have to move indoors. Look up curling.) When we checked in at the desk, the 20-something young man joked, “Skipping school today?” My son informed him that school was closed for the day and an older person near us with a much more indignant and direct tone followed up with, “All the schools are closed because of ICE! It’s crazy!” The climber backpedaled quickly.
The enormity and the day-to-dayness of the modern occupation of Minnesota can also be seen in the divergent media coverage of what’s actually happening. The surge in troops has demonstrated that the current administration—the clicktatorship, as it were—is trolling for its base by claiming these actions are to police dangerous “illegals” and crack down on “Somali fraud.”
The right-wing talking points, the disgusting social media comments cheering on the violence, the expected milquetoast both-sidesism of legacy news media have all contributed to a surrealness around the actual events on the ground and questions from folks out of state.
My dad, who lives in the media desert of North Dakota, in his own way of caring, has sent text messages to make sure my own penchant for defying authority—and not gladly suffering the levels of foolishness on display with ICE officers—does not deliver me to a similar fate as Jonathan Garcia or Renee Good.
Much in the same way that Darnelia Frazier’s video of violent racist Derek Chauvin slowly killing George Floyd provided the truth about the incident, and much in the same way national actors spent years creating alternative realities around it, the video of Renee’s murder and the killer’s crass “fuckin’ bitch” has shown the unquestionable realities of ICE interactions with Minneapolis-St. Paul residents even as national actors—including conservative news outlets, Kristi Noem, and the president himself, with his quickly diminishing faculties—have tried to manufacture their own realities.
The discourse has not been improved by any of the legacy media coverage. Minnesota media institution Esme Murphy of WCCO even went so far as to give DHS Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino an open platform to spew disinformation without challenge, correction, or pushback—for an unwatchable 14 straight minutes.
Watching either Bovino or Noem’s counter-reality bombast also takes its emotional toll. All this disarray, all these threats, all these untrained and hot-headed deplorables in uniform causing chaos for what? The dumbest, most distracting, and easily disprovable white supremacist political talking points for the ultra-right’s chronically online base? Are we “domestic terrorists”, as national government officials allege, because we’re pushing back with as much non-violent community support as possible?
It’s very hard not to point out, as so many already have, that American conservatives have employed a bad-faith rhetoric around the public’s right and need for military-grade weapons in order to strike back against government tyranny. Now that tyranny is here and in plain accessible view, Minneapolis-St. Paul has seen exactly zero “freedom fighters” and their AR-15s fighting back against Washington, D.C.
But those of us in Minneapolis-St.Paul and throughout the state have, in clear conscience, no choice but to resist through activation and observation—distractions to our daily lives be damned.
The growing community safety support in the Twin Cities not only includes parents and neighbors providing meal delivery and monitoring ICE vehicles approaching, it includes the contemporary versions of old school telephone trees to share much needed information. It’s also observers bearing witness to the actual violence and disregard by ICE.
It’s those of us who live here, whether natives to Minnesota or first-generation immigrants, or recent to the state in search of a better and more protective community, who will be the difference between a brake on or the acceleration toward domestic military police state (a surge by any other name).
That’s how the occupation is going for me.
An earlier version of this article was first published in Liberal Currents.
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Great to see that ICE's illegal excesses are spawning an expanded resistance to all those who would defy our laws and defile our democratic norms. The time will come when they will regret that.
Can't those in danger either flee over the border into Canada, or cross thew bridge in to Wisconsin, or is the bridge guarded by ICE?