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Donald Trump’s most profound break with American democracy, evident in his words and actions alike, is his view that the state’s relationship with its citizens is defined not by ideals or rules but rather by expressions of power, at the personal direction of the president. That has been clear enough for years, but I had not truly seen what it looked like in person until I arrived in Minneapolis, my hometown, to witness what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge.
On Jan. 14, at 7:44 p.m., eight hours after I got to town, the City of Minneapolis’s official X account announced that there were “reports of a shooting involving federal law enforcement in North Minneapolis.” “Federal law enforcement,” as everyone by then knew, meant one of the 3,000 immigration agents fanned out across the metropolitan area, which Minneapolitans invariably called “ICE”: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the vanguard of the surge.
They had been there since December, ostensibly in relation to a fraud investigation that fell well out of their departmental purview and settled instead for what appeared outwardly as a more indiscriminate pursuit of potential immigration violations. The Minneapolis metro area is not big: Hennepin and Ramsey Counties — home to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, respectively, and many of their suburbs — are together less than one-fifth the size of Los Angeles County, the target of the administration’s first such immigration crackdown last year.
It is also home to a population of urban progressives who had thrown themselves into the task of tracking federal agents. The city had become a giant eyeball, every exercised citizen’s smartphone a sort of retinal photoreceptor for the optic nerve of neighborhood channels on the encrypted messaging app Signal, scanning public spaces for signs of ICE.
In the heightened atmosphere of the moment, the lines between documentation and confrontation had grown blurry. ICE officers, when they stuck around anywhere for more than a few minutes, were likely to be met by not just one or two camera-wielding observers but many, and observation inevitably turned into protest. The latent combustibility of these encounters was visible in the footage that bystanders had captured of an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, fatally shooting a resident, Renee Good, in her car on a snowy street in South Minneapolis on Jan. 7. That combustibility would be visible again in the fatal shooting on Jan. 24 of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old V.A. hospital registered nurse, by Border Patrol agents.
Shock over the violence of the deployment quickly gave way to redoubled anger. Within minutes of the city’s X post on Jan. 14, a crowd of perhaps a hundred people from all over the metro area had assembled at the location, in the Hawthorne neighborhood on Minneapolis’s north side, where, according to an F.B.I. agent’s affidavit, an ICE agent had shot an undocumented immigrant in the leg after being attacked with a broom during an arrest. When I arrived, several blocks were cordoned off with crime-scene tape, and milling around in the darkness beyond it were federal agents in balaclavas and tactical gear, most of them identified by their patches as members of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations unit.
The agents, in their masks and military-style kit, suggested a fierce omnipotence, but ICE and the other agencies have just as often been visibly unprepared to handle the policing situations their presence created in the city — or even the weather. Across the intersection, an agent slipped on the icy pavement and then fled, leaving an unsecured magazine full of live ammunition on the street, to the jeers of the crowd. Nearer to where I stood, an unmarked black Jeep Grand Cherokee was struggling to get clear of the crowd, escorted by a few officers on foot. “Get out of my [expletive] street!” someone yelled.
A woman in a fur-ruffed parka swung a plastic post at the rear windshield of the vehicle, which shattered with a dull crunch. It was not long before the air was alive with smoke grenades and sting balls and thick with tear gas. Faces peered out of second-floor windows along what had been, less than an hour earlier, a quiet residential street. “You killed Renee Good!” a man bellowed.
The atmosphere was strange and unstable for a street protest, missing some important steps of the usual choreography, and it took me a moment to realize why: I saw no police officers. I had passed a Minneapolis Police Department cruiser parked some distance down the street, but here, where the agents were clashing with the crowd, they were nowhere to be seen. The federal agents themselves looked more like a platoon of soldiers navigating a hostile foreign capital than conventional law enforcement in an American city.
For weeks, these agents had been actors in a kind of theater of power, meting out various forms of state force and violence, framed by the smartphone cameras they carried, providing a steady stream of content for the Trump administration’s various social media platforms. What was clear in person, seeing the scene outside of the frame, were the limits of this performance of power. The agents had no capacity to maintain order or much apparent interest in doing so. Their presence was a vector of chaos, and controlling it was not in their job description. All that was holding the crowd back, as far as I could tell, was the knowledge that an officer like these shot a woman a week earlier and that another shot a man up the street an hour ago. I left the scene that night, certain it would happen again.
‘Take Out That Phone and Hit Record’
Tim Walz, Minnesota’s embattled governor, appeared live on camera from his official residence on the night of the second shooting and clash. He described the federal deployment to his state as an “occupation” and “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”
In his remarks, Walz implicitly affirmed what has been widely understood in America since at least the civil-rights-era confrontations over integration in the South, which is that the tools state governors have to formally resist the imposition of federal power in real time are extraordinarily limited. What Minnesota and every other state did have, though, was plenty of personal electronics. “Carry your phone with you at all times,” Walz advised the state’s residents. “And if you see ICE in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record.” The aim, he said, was to “create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans — not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
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Federal agents stormed the city
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