A journalist reports on heightened ICE presence in Minneapolis, detailing personal observations of ICE operations, encounters, and community impact. The article highlights detentions, potential overreach, and community anxieties surrounding immigration enforcement.
An observer is detained by ICE agents after they arrested two people from a residence in Minneapolis on Jan. 13. Last Thursday, I sat idling in my car, waiting for a photographer colleague to finish an assignment.
An SUV pulled up in front of me. A middle-aged white woman, with a no-nonsense haircut, dressed in a puffy coat and big sunglasses, opened the car door. She leaned out of the driver's seat and stared at me for a while. I realized she was trying to decide if I was an ICE officer. I took the large press badge sitting on my dashboard and raised it for her to see. She waved and got back inside her car. A moment later, a woman who looked Latina stepped out of the passenger side, and walked to the house across the street.I saw my first ICE vehicle in Minneapolis at the very start of the new year. It passed in front of the car I was in with my husband, and entered an alley a few blocks from my home, the sloganI ate arepas that night with friends at a restaurant where, a month earlier, immigration agents without a signed judicial warrantOver the course of the last three weeks, I have had the experience of being a member of this community while also reporting on it, alongside local reporters: Minnesota Public Radio,I cover criminal justice nationally for NPR, and I live in Minneapolis. For the last year, I have been reporting occasionally on the massive immigration enforcement campaign across the country, sticking mostly to the moments it intersected clearly with my beat. Late last year, for instance, Ion shuttered prisons — almost all owned by private prison companies — reopening as immigration detention centers across a dozen states. But in early December, the Trump administration On Jan. 7, news began to circulate that an ICE agent had shot a woman a short drive from my house. I quickly interviewed two witnesses by phone. One told me she watched as Renee Good received conflicting orders from multiple officers before she tried to leave. Another said she saw people eventually pull Good from her car and carry her by her limbs to a snowbank."She had red on her," the witness told me. When I arrived at the intersection a few hours after the shooting, I was surprised to see Good's car was still there, smashed into another vehicle, a bullet hole clearly visible through the windshield. A protester showed me a photo on his phone of a bright splash of blood on the white snow. You could feel the weight of the crowd's growing anger, like ice cracking underneath a boot.Police tape surrounds Renee Good's car after she was shot and killed by an ICE agent during federal law enforcement operations in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. The next Saturday, observers stopped a group of ICE agents outside my home. I filmed from my front porch, as one observer yelled,"murderer, murderer, murderer." He asked if the agents would shoot him too. In the video, my dog Leo whimpers at the sound of whistles.a few blocks from where she was killed. Immigration officers had rear-ended a man's car. The driver and his wife, both U.S. citizens, told me and my colleague, Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, that they were on their way to a mechanic. The man said he made eye contact with the immigration agents. Then, he said, they started chasing him, rammed into his vehicle, and asked about his immigration status. A crowd formed. First, more protesters. Then, more immigration agents. Honking. Whistling. Yelling. Eventually, tear gas. I was standing pretty far back, but close enough for it to burn my eyes and throat. I drove the five minutes to my home. I took a shower and washed residue off my glasses. Iabout what I had seen. My husband and I made miso salmon and watched the newA few days later, I described the day – the juxtaposition of the very normal and the very not normal – to my colleague Kat Lonsdorf, who has covered the war in Ukraine. She told me that sounded like Kyiv to her. Some days, you're interviewing people about the horrors they've seen. Other days, you're eating arepas at a restaurant. Life more or less continues, until it doesn't.who got her first period while afraid to leave her home, and the network of volunteers who worked together to provide her with her first menstrual pad. My own experience has been one of blurred lines between the professional and the personal. When my colleagues arrived from Texas and Washington and New York, I wanted to tell them about all the great things in Minneapolis: Here are the restaurants I love. Here are the parks and museums. I love this place. Please love it too. The lives of nearly everyone I know have been disrupted: They're raising money to cover rent, medical bills and legal fees for immigrant families, buying and delivering groceries to people afraid to leave their homes, organizing and giving rides to people afraid to go out alone, standing guard outside schools, daycares and immigrant-owned businesses, adding whistles to their key chains. One family told a friend that, in their native country, they had helped neighbors during COVID when they didn't have food. They never imagined they would be in a place of needing the same. As I drove around the city, interviewing parents patrolling outside of schools and watching as observers whistled at immigration officers, I wondered if those officers were making note of my license plate when I showed up to report on their actions. My dog still demanded his daily walks. Our neighborhood is filled with dog treat bins set on stoops and outside stores, and he knows where every single one is within a mile radius. Every walk is a negotiation for which we will visit. Now, many stores are keeping their doors locked. Outside the door of our local butcher shop, he sat looking up at me, wondering why he couldn't get a treat anymore.A friend who lives in the suburbs called to say immigration officers blocked her car and approached her vehicle from both sides. They told her they were"out doing checks" and she was free to go. It left her feeling terrified. Another friend, a pediatrician who has known my husband since high school, told me about a fifth grader he saw, who is now anxiously picking his skin until it bleeds.A child's drawing reads"This is what the city would look like if no ice," inside of Our Saviour's Lutheran Church in Minneapolis on Jan. 11.A friend who works for a local labor union texted me to say several of their members were detained. They're good people, he said. But my journalist brain is now calibrated differently: Were the officers violent? Is being detained by federal authorities enough to make the news? My husband and I have seven nieces and nephews in the Twin Cities. For their birthdays, our tradition is to take them somewhere fun. We took our 9-year-old nephew to an indoor mini golf place, which was surprisingly crowded. I gave him my phone to see the photo of himself posing after his hole-in-one. He scrolled backward, and saw a photo I had taken while interviewing people at a protest — a person holding a sign that said"F*** ICE." That's a bad word, he said. Yes, I told him, people are upset and sad. I didn't tell him they are also afraid. My best friend, a woman I lived with in my early 20s, told me about an exchange with a Native American man she knows who works at a nearby shop: He told her he now carries his federal tribal license around. My friend, an Asian woman, flashed her passport. They agreed to look out for one another.Participants in a singing vigil leave St. Paul's-San Pablo Lutheran Church in Minneapolis in memory of Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 11. On Friday, my colleagues went to cover a protest and sent me quotes from people there, for a story on the rally'sOn Saturday, I was putting on my winter coat to head to the gym, when a text came from a friend:Meg Anderson is an editor on NPR's Investigations team, where she shapes the team's groundbreaking work for radio, digital and social platforms. She served as a producer on the Peabody Award-winning series Lost Mothers, which investigated the high rate of maternal mortality in the United States. She also does her own original reporting for the team, including the series Heat and Health in American Cities, which won multiple awards, and the story of a COVID-19 outbreak in a Black community and the systemic factors at play. She also completed a fellowship as a local reporter for WAMU, the public radio station for Washington, D.C. Before joining the Investigations team, she worked on NPR's politics desk, education desk and on Morning Edition. Her roots are in the Midwest, where she graduated with a Master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.After second Minneapolis killing, San Diego elected officials say ‘Rubicon crossed’ and ICE is ‘executing American citizens’KPBS keeps you informed with local stories you need to know about — with no paywall. Our news is free for everyone because people like you help fund it.
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