Tolkkinen: Who did ICE take from a Perham company? The agency wouldn’t tell me.

ALEXANDRIA, Minn. – If you have a hankering for Mexican food in greater Minnesota nowadays, good luck. As the kids would say, “Womp womp.”

The presence of secretive and sometimes aggressive ICE agents has driven owners and staff of Mexican and Chinese restaurants underground in many places.

On the windows of Casa Jalisco in Alexandria, near an apologetic CLOSED sign scrawled on notebook paper, community members have stuck a flurry of pastel notes bearing messages objecting to ICE.

“ICE, leave Minnesota!” said one.

“America is a land of immigrants!” said another, with a heart.

“We love you, Casa Jalisco!” said a third.

Restaurant closings are among the most visible signs that immigration agents are working in rural Minnesota. With some exceptions, notably in St. Cloud, most areas haven’t seen the clashes between ICE agents and protesters that have been witnessed in the Twin Cities.

The fear left behind, though, is palpable. One Spanish-speaking man I interviewed, aided by his bilingual school-age son, who was at home, said he was scared of what ICE might do. A U.S.-born white man told me that many people he knew were also afraid.

Just as ICE agents are operating under a cloak of secrecy, people in greater Minnesota, too, are finding secrecy necessary. They are unwilling for their names to be published for fear of what ICE could do to them or to their loved ones.

One Detroit Lakes woman asked that I not use her name because she doesn’t want to lead agents to refugees she has been helping who are here legally but too afraid to leave their homes. She said she wishes people around the state knew what was happening in west-central Minnesota.

“People are terrified out here,” she said. “It’s like living a novel back in the 1930s, the way ICE is. At the time the Nazis came to power and how they would take people from homes, that’s how I feel.”

It doesn’t surprise me that in rural Minnesota, people are trying to help. The population is slowly growing more diverse, and there have been local efforts to boost multicultural appreciation. Some protests here have drawn crowds that span multiple city blocks.

But that was more than 30 years ago. Maybe conservative Americans are once again ready for the heavy hand of government if it accomplishes their goals.

The ICE budget ballooned from some $10 billion in 2025 to $30 billion in 2026, even as most of the federal government shrank. ICE also more than doubled its workforce from 10,000 employees to 22,000 during that same time period. Whoops. Not “employees.” PATRIOTS. That’s what the Department of Homeland Security calls them: “New patriots on the team.”

Its supporters want ICE to remove the bad guys. They think liberals are goofy for trying to stop that.

Recently state Rep. Mary Franson, R-Alexandria, posted on Facebook a list of 19 people ICE has arrested with convictions that include child sexual assault, rape, assault and homicide. If the scant information is accurate, yeah, they’ve done some bad things. Certainly not the kind of guy I’d want to impede ICE from detaining. (Although God help their home countries.)

The problem is that ICE is cherry picking the data it releases. I asked the agency for information about the guy they picked up in Perham. ICE didn’t provide it. I asked about a guy detained in Detroit Lakes. Silence. Reports are that the agency has detained tribal members. Crickets.

There’s an online portal to find people being held by ICE. But you need to know their name, birthdate and country of origin. If the information is entered incorrectly into the system, well, again. Womp womp.

ICE is operating with a complete lack of transparency and accountability, both ingredients for abuse of power.

Thus the public relies on reports posted online by eyewitnesses. A recently posted video from Alexandria shows a visibly shaken, brown-skinned man outside El Loro Mexican restaurant. He was clutching his passport after an interrogation by masked men.

The men eventually left him alone. That tells me they weren’t at El Loro looking for a specific bad guy. They were on a fishing expedition, singling out people with brown skin who didn’t deserve to be hassled by masked men any more than any white Minnesotan.