MANKATO – More than 300 people gathered for a City Council meeting in Mankato wanting to talk about one thing: federal immigration enforcement in their city.
By the end of the night on Monday, Jan. 12, the council briefly walked out, protesters took over and residents complained about chemical irritants sprayed at a resident earlier that day by uniformed agents.
The raucous meeting laid bare anxieties about ICE and federal operations in Minnesota’s cities, with a lone, anonymous voice supporting the federal action.
Agents with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been working in Mankato since late December, when police noted proof of the agents’ credentials.
Observers and immigrant leaders said federal agents attempted to detain workers in at least two incidents in Mankato over the weekend. An ICE contingent was spotted along busy Madison Avenue, near Walmart. Another group of ICE agents was spotted at a house near Mankato East High School, according to activists.
“ICE agents have been terrorizing the community all weekend,” Ava Corey-Gruenes said at the meeting. She said she was hit by pepper spray from uniformed men in an incident that afternoon in Old Town Mankato. Corey-Gruenes’ allotted three-minute statement drew loud support.
Mankato’s mayor, Najwa Massad, said at the beginning of the meeting that as an immigrant from Lebanon, she believed there were real feelings of “fear, anger, confusion and pain” surrounding the presence of ICE in the city. But she asked for decorum.
“Conrad,” a conservative who used a nickname because he feared giving his full name to the public, said those in attendance were not representative of the larger Mankato community, and that others in the area also generally support ICE operations if they target violent criminals.
