Last Thursday, I sat idling in my car, waiting for a photographer colleague to finish an assignment. An SUV pulled up in front of me. A middle-aged white woman, with a no-nonsense haircut, dressed in a puffy coat and big sunglasses, opened the car door. She leaned out of the driver's seat and stared at me for a while. I realized she was trying to decide if I was an ICE officer.
I took the large press badge sitting on my dashboard and raised it for her to see. She waved and got back inside her car. A moment later, a woman who looked Latina stepped out of the passenger side, and walked to the house across the street.
I saw my first ICE vehicle in Minneapolis at the very start of the new year. It passed in front of the car I was in with my husband, and entered an alley a few blocks from my home, the slogan Defend The Homeland written on its side. Later, the vehicles would rarely be marked.
I ate arepas that night with friends at a restaurant where, a month earlier, immigration agents without a signed judicial warrant were turned away. The restaurant's owner was praised for knowing her rights as a business owner.
Over the course of the last three weeks, I have had the experience of being a member of this community while also reporting on it, alongside local reporters: Minnesota Public Radio, Sahan Journal, The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Minnesota Reformer, and others.
I cover criminal justice nationally for NPR, and I live in Minneapolis. For the last year, I have been reporting occasionally on the massive immigration enforcement campaign across the country, sticking mostly to the moments it intersected clearly with my beat. Late last year, for instance, I reported a story on shuttered prisons — almost all owned by private prison companies — reopening as immigration detention centers across a dozen states. But in early December, the Trump administration announced a surge in immigration enforcement in my city.
On Jan. 7, news began to circulate that an ICE agent had shot a woman a short drive from my house. I quickly interviewed two witnesses by phone. One told me she watched as Renee Good received conflicting orders from multiple officers before she tried to leave. Another said she saw people eventually pull Good from her car and carry her by her limbs to a snowbank. "She had red on her," the witness told me.
When I arrived at the intersection a few hours after the shooting, I was surprised to see Good's car was still there, smashed into another vehicle, a bullet hole clearly visible through the windshield. A protester showed me a photo on his phone of a bright splash of blood on the white snow. You could feel the weight of the crowd's growing anger, like ice cracking underneath a boot.
The next Saturday, observers stopped a group of ICE agents outside my home. I filmed from my front porch, as one observer yelled, "murderer, murderer, murderer." He asked if the agents would shoot him too. In the video, my dog Leo whimpers at the sound of whistles.
Five days after Good was shot, I arrived at a volatile scene a few blocks from where she was killed. Immigration officers had rear-ended a man's car. The driver and his wife, both U.S. citizens, told me and my colleague, Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, that they were on their way to a mechanic. The man said he made eye contact with the immigration agents. Then, he said, they started chasing him, rammed into his vehicle, and asked about his immigration status.
A crowd formed. First, more protesters. Then, more immigration agents. Honking. Whistling. Yelling. Eventually, tear gas. I was standing pretty far back, but close enough for it to burn my eyes and throat. I drove the five minutes to my home. I took a shower and washed residue off my glasses. I wrote a story about what I had seen. My husband and I made miso salmon (very good, by the way) and watched the new Naked Gun (very funny, by the way).
A few days later, I described the day – the juxtaposition of the very normal and the very not normal – to my colleague Kat Lonsdorf, who has covered the war in Ukraine. She told me that sounded like Kyiv to her. Some days, you're interviewing people about the horrors they've seen. Other days, you're eating arepas at a restaurant. Life more or less continues, until it doesn't.
Many of my own national colleagues are here now, reporting on the city. Kat traced the throughline of neighborhood support all the way from the 2020 murder of George Floyd to the present moment. Jasmine Garsd told the story of a 12-year-old girl who got her first period while afraid to leave her home, and the network of volunteers who worked together to provide her with her first menstrual pad.
My own experience has been one of blurred lines between the professional and the personal. When my colleagues arrived from Texas and Washington and New York, I wanted to tell them about all the great things in Minneapolis: Here are the restaurants I love. Here are the parks and museums. I love this place. Please love it too.
The lives of nearly everyone I know have been disrupted: They're raising money to cover rent, medical bills and legal fees for immigrant families, buying and delivering groceries to people afraid to leave their homes, organizing and giving rides to people afraid to go out alone, standing guard outside schools, daycares and immigrant-owned businesses, adding whistles to their key chains. One family told a friend that, in their native country, they had helped neighbors during COVID when they didn't have food. They never imagined they would be in a place of needing the same.
As I drove around the city, interviewing parents patrolling outside of schools and watching as observers whistled at immigration officers, I wondered if those officers were making note of my license plate when I showed up to report on their actions.
My dog still demanded his daily walks. Our neighborhood is filled with dog treat bins set on stoops and outside stores, and he knows where every single one is within a mile radius. Every walk is a negotiation for which we will visit. Now, many stores are keeping their doors locked. Outside the door of our local butcher shop, he sat looking up at me, wondering why he couldn't get a treat anymore.
I filed a news spot on a press conference where state officials said the FBI took over the investigation of Good's killing, and state authorities no longer had access to evidence in the case.
A friend who lives in the suburbs called to say immigration officers blocked her car and approached her vehicle from both sides. They told her they were "out doing checks" and she was free to go. It left her feeling terrified.
Another friend, a pediatrician who has known my husband since high school, told me about a fifth grader he saw, who is now anxiously picking his skin until it bleeds.
I wrote a story explaining the Insurrection Act, which President Trump has threatened to invoke. It would give him sweeping powers to deploy the military here without the state's consent.
A friend who works for a local labor union texted me to say several of their members were detained. They're good people, he said. But my journalist brain is now calibrated differently: Were the officers violent? Is being detained by federal authorities enough to make the news?
My husband and I have seven nieces and nephews in the Twin Cities. For their birthdays, our tradition is to take them somewhere fun. We took our 9-year-old nephew to an indoor mini golf place, which was surprisingly crowded. I gave him my phone to see the photo of himself posing after his hole-in-one. He scrolled backward, and saw a photo I had taken while interviewing people at a protest — a person holding a sign that said "F*** ICE." That's a bad word, he said. Yes, I told him, people are upset and sad. I didn't tell him they are also afraid.
I interviewed a woman and her 8-year-old daughter inside their apartment, with the blinds drawn. They haven't been outside in a month.
My best friend, a woman I lived with in my early 20s, told me about an exchange with a Native American man she knows who works at a nearby shop: He told her he now carries his federal tribal license around. My friend, an Asian woman, flashed her passport. They agreed to look out for one another.
On Friday, my colleagues went to cover a protest and sent me quotes from people there, for a story on the rally's massive turnout in downtown Minneapolis, despite the subzero temperatures.
On Saturday, I was putting on my winter coat to head to the gym, when a text came from a friend: They shot another person outside Glam Doll Donuts.
Then a barrage of other texts:
Everyone doing ok?
Do you need help?
When will this end?
I love you.
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