This suburban dad’s rant became touchpoint of ICE opposition

On Jan. 14, the night a Venezuelan immigrant was shot by an ICE officer in north Minneapolis, a white guy in a puffer jacket gave a man-on-the-street interview to the online news outlet Status Coup as protesters and federal agents faced off nearby. It was an impulsive decision that would change his life — and get thousands of people looking to him for perspective.

The guy, bald and middle-aged, looked like he might have been driving into the city for a Timberwolves game, took the wrong exit and stumbled into a chaotic scene of flash grenades, chemical irritants and rubber bullets. “This is nuts!” he tells the interviewer. “What the [expletive] is going on? Dude, this is insane!”

The man then explains that he is, in fact, a first-time protester and unleashes a profanity-laced tirade against ICE. He says federal agents are unjustly detaining people and unnecessarily roughing people up, as if the city is under siege. And that compelled him to leave his cushy home, well beyond the melee, and advocate for civil rights.

“We’re all human beings here,” he says. “I don’t give a [expletive] where you came from, what color you are, this is [expletive] wrong.”

Based on appearance, the frowny-faced Mr. Clean, whose name is Chris Ostroushko, looks more like an ICE agent than someone opposing their operations. He does not identify as a woke youth, aged hippie or person of color; he’s not LGBTQ, a mom or a member of any group typically associated with protest movements.

His average, dad-on-the-soccer-sidelines identity stands in for a lot of folks who are comfortably insulated from ICE’s immigration crackdown, who don’t see themselves as activists. Maybe that’s why the so-called “Minnesota angry man” has inspired others like him to take to the streets.

“You’d never think my dad — a random suburban guy in construction — would go viral,” Ostroushko’s 20-year-old daughter, Paige, explained. “He’s just, like, a middle-aged man that just sits at home and watches football. But now that he’s out there, everyone else in the suburbs is like, ‘Wow, this person is out there. I need to get out there.’”

People now friend him on social media by the thousands, refer to him as “America’s Dad” and beg him to run for president. “They want to buy me a beer, buy me a gun,” Ostroushko said. “They call me the voice of this generation.”

Until a few weeks ago, Ostroushko had never stepped into a protest and limited his public screeds to Facebook. “My wife just got fed up with me sitting at home just scrolling and getting angry and arguing with people,” he said.

She urged him to come with her to visit Renee Good’s memorial, where Ostroushko started talking to other visitors. One man described how his friend had her car window smashed and was detained by ICE after she’d inadvertently driven into an area inundated with agents. Ostroushko had seen similar videos on social media, but said hearing about it from someone closely connected made it more real.

The couple decided to go to Whipple, where, from the edge of the crowd, they were sprayed with chemical irritants and hit by less-lethal rounds. Trying to learn more about what was going on, Ostroushko talked to a few people as they were released from custody. He said several looked like they had been beaten. Many were sent into the cold without jackets. A few said they’d had their cellphones taken and hadn’t been allowed to call anyone.

Ostroushko and his wife went back to Whipple several subsequent nights, more to observe than advocate. “I’m not the rah, rah, get-in-your-face, yelling-and-screaming type of person,” Ostroushko said. “I like to avoid trouble, even though I look like a person that may like to fight or something. That’s not me.”

Ostroushko says the nature of some ICE agents’ tactics hit home, due to his Ukrainian ancestors’ experience enduring Joseph Stalin’s oppression. His great-grandfather was sent to a Siberian gulag, and his grandfather lost a leg after being forced to walk through minefields.

On the night he was interviewed, Ostroushko was shocked by how north Minneapolis felt like a military zone. “It was something you would not think would be going on here in Minnesota,” he said. “We have a great state to live in. It’s constantly one of the top places to raise a family, and now we have this going on right here, and most people don’t even know it.”

Being white and American-born, Ostroushko says, protects him from being targeted by ICE. He hopes that others in his position will think beyond themselves. “I’m just like, if it’s affecting somebody, it does affect me.” (The operation could affect his wife and children, who are people of color and citizens.)

As he fielded interview requests from journalists and commentators including Don Lemon and Jen Psaki, Ostroushko mulled his options. He could retreat into obscurity and hopefully the social-media death threats would fade. (His wife took off for Florida for a few days.) Or he could leverage his newfound fame to try to increase the number of peaceful protesters.

After a second observer, Alex Pretti, was fatally shot by ICE agents on Jan. 24, Ostroushko and his daughter Paige brought their megaphone to the south Minneapolis intersection where Pretti died and posted videos on social media.