Inside the organized resistance to ICE in Minnesota

Just before Friday prayer in south Minneapolis, Flannery Clark steered her family’s station wagon down congested E. Lake Street, seeking signs of federal agents.

Suddenly a full-size SUV with heavily tinted windows barreled alongside. She started tailing it, trying to decipher the license plate or determine whether the driver was wearing a face covering or tactical gear.

But when the SUV ran a red light, she had to stomp on the brakes.

ICE agents have been seen driving aggressively, going the wrong way down one-way streets and sharing a single set of license plates between two different cars, Clark said, to prevent people like her from tracking their movements.

“We’ve started to see some very tricked-out ICE vehicles,” she said. “They’re just driving in circles in neighborhoods, not interacting.”

When Clark patrols Lake Street, she does it for hours at once, linked to a Signal call with other activists roving the city. Their goal is to find arrests in progress and blast the information out to protesters who can amass at a moment’s notice.

In past raids, dozens of protesters linking arms and blasting whistles with their phones aimed at agents have succeeded in blocking arrests. Some of these confrontations have escalated, with protesters lobbing snowballs and agents dousing crowds with pepper spray that dyes the snow orange.

Clark benefits from knowing south Minneapolis like only a resident can. The block watches and neighborhood chat groups that proliferated after the fallout from George Floyd’s murder have now morphed into a large-scale mobilization aimed at defying the federal government’s immigration agenda by tracking ICE agents across Minnesota, documenting deportation flights and protesting at workplace raids.

It’s an increasingly sophisticated effort, buoyed by community nonprofits offering trainings and lessons gleaned from Chicago, where ICE cracked down earlier this year.

Protests are just part of it. The movement is also hiding immigrant families without permanent resident status from discovery, secretly ferrying immigrant children to and from school and delivering meals to families laying low at home. They stand guard outside mosques, collect cars abandoned after sudden arrests, locate people in immigration jail and help get them attorneys.

Local activists, elected officials and community leaders say the feds are sweeping up people who pose no danger to society. But Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin is adamant that its Minnesota operations are part of a mandate to “arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens to make America safe.”

“Those who are not here illegally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear,” she said in a statement.

Toward the end of her Friday shift, Clark stopped by the apartment of an Ecuadorian mother of two.

Clark is a notary, and another way she’s been contributing is by authenticating a form that immigrant families are using to assign custody of their children to someone else in case they’re arrested or deported.

The apartment was decorated for Christmas, with children’s school photos on the wall. Jennifer Arnold, executive director of Tenants United, a renter advocacy organization, was there to translate.

With tears in her eyes, the Ecuadorian mother said her family came to the United States in search of a better future, but now feels just as persecuted here as in her homeland. She and her husband have contemplated self-deporting, but worry if Ecuadorian gangs find out they’ve been to America, they’d extort them for money by hurting their children.

She knows from a friend, whose husband was detained, that immigration jails are overcrowded. She and her husband are still working to pay the rent, but they leave early in the morning and come straight home after, living what has become a sort of self-imposed house arrest.

In churches and school gymnasiums, direct action trainings are attracting hundreds of attendees each night. They teach people how to read judicial warrants, and contribute to a repository of data for legal challenges by recording agents’ conduct. Participants learn whistle codes for summoning crowds and receive links to rapid-response clearinghouses.

Comunidades Organizando El Poder y la Acción Latina (COPAL) launched its rapid response arm a year ago in response to President Donald Trump’s re-election, seeded by a $1 million grant from the Bush Foundation. More than 10,000 people have registered for its trainings, said Edwin Torres DeSantiago, manager of COPAL’s Immigrant Defense Network. Other organizations are offering variations.

While dramatic clashes between ICE and protesters have gotten the most attention, it’s the smallest aspect of a wider movement, Torres DeSantiago said.

“It is after, before and the prolonged support that we provide to families navigating these dark days,” he said.

For Amanda Otero, the mother of a Minneapolis public school student, Operation Metro Surge coincided with plummeting attendance at all grade levels. Soon, word spread that a second-grader’s father was taken.

ICE says it will not raid schools or target children. Regardless, neighborhood sympathizers — often marked by the colorful plastic whistles that many observers wear on lanyards around their necks — are keeping watch over schools with high immigrant populations.

“We’ve heard over and over again from the students themselves and the families how happy and grateful the kids are able to be in school, because being in school means two meals, it means social time and other supportive adults around you,” Otero said.

At a recent pop-up food shelf at St. Paul’s East Side Freedom Library, many of the volunteers had code names in ICE watch group chats — outgrowths of mutual aid networks dating back to 2020’s civil unrest — and were in various stages of rapid-response training. When ICE raided a home on Rose Avenue in November and approached the Centromex Supermercado two weeks ago, residents materialized en masse thanks to these connections.

All of a sudden, multiple phones pinged with word of a federal vehicle circling the block near the library. The mood immediately dampened.

People stay away from food shelves when ICE is on the prowl, said volunteer Patricia Enstad.

They pivoted to packing up the food and delivering it to neighbors too frightened to venture outside.

For weeks, the rumor circulating on rapid-response chats was of a large deployment of ICE and Border Patrol agents on its way to the Twin Cities. Despite the unconfirmed reports, immigrant businesses sit dark and desolate along E. Lake Street. Several have locked doors and hung signs telling prospective customers to ring the bell.

Two days before Christmas, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz accused the federal government of wreaking havoc in Minnesota and encouraged people to go out and monitor agents should they inundate the Twin Cities.

In a statement, DHS reaffirmed its right to arrest U.S. citizens who get in the way.

“Obstructing law enforcement is not protesting, it is a crime,” said McLaughlin. “There is a growing and disturbing trend of agitators and rioters obstructing the arrest of illegal aliens and assaulting our brave law enforcement.”

At a construction site in Farmington, housepainter Alex Cruz showed the Star Tribune a Spanish-language group chat that grew from about 50 members at the start of the month to more than 900 now. The message board is constantly abuzz with warnings of ICE sightings and stories of those detained.

With Jac Kovarik of the worker-advocacy organization Centro De Trabajadores Unidos En La Lucha (CTUL), translating, Cruz said the federal government’s emphasis on catching criminals doesn’t reflect reality. Latinos feel like they’re being targeted in the industries where they’re known to work: construction and factories. He said that everyone knows someone who has been deported without any criminal conviction.

Cruz is an El Salvadoran national applying for asylum, and working through the surge to afford his cost of living. But with no end in sight, those who have opted to stay home from work in recent weeks will face a hard decision when the operation enters a new month, and rent comes due.