MINNEAPOLIS — Thousands of people converged at a downtown park on Friday afternoon in the state’s biggest show of opposition yet to the Trump administration’s immigration operations in Minnesota, braving subzero temperatures and skipping work and school.
Hundreds of businesses in the Twin Cities closed for the day of action, an effort organized by faith leaders and labor unions amid continuing tensions over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in the state, including the fatal shooting of Renée Good by an ICE officer earlier this month.
On Friday morning, about 100 clergy members were arrested at a peaceful sit-in at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport protesting deportation flights. Labor leaders said more than 15,600 people had claimed tickets to the 2 p.m. march in Minneapolis — where the National Weather Service warned of minus-50 degree wind chill through Sunday morning.
Bundled in down coats, beanies and ski goggles, demonstrators chanted “What do we want? ICE out!” and held signs bearing slogans such as “No MN Nice for ICE” and “Leave Us Alone!” as they marched peacefully.
“This rally says it all. We’re fighting for truth and freedom,” said Mary Turner, a night-shift nurse in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, and a union member who joined the march.
Residents opposed to ICE’s actions in Minnesota say federal agents have gone far beyond their mission of removing undocumented criminals since starting operations there two months ago, instead detaining U.S. citizens, pulling people from their cars, appearing to stop people on the basis of race, and using chemical irritants on people demonstrating against or monitoring their work.
More stories out of Minnesota: US immigration agents detain two-year-old Minnesota girl: ‘depravity beyond words.’
Federal immigration agents detained a two-year-old girl and her father in Minneapolis on Thursday and transported them to Texas, according to court records and the family’s lawyers.
The father, identified in court filings as Elvis Joel TE, and his daughter were stopped and detained by officers around 1pm when they were returning home from the store. By the evening, a federal judge had ordered the girl be released by 9.30pm. But federal officials instead put both of them on a plane heading to a Texas detention center.
Irina Vaynerman, one of the family’s lawyers, told the Guardian late Friday afternoon that immigration officials had since flown both of them back to Minnesota and released the two-year-old into the custody of her mother. The father remains detained in Minnesota, she said.
“The horror is truly unimaginable,” Vaynerman said. “The depravity of all of this is beyond words.”
Court records and the attorney’s accounts paint a harrowing picture of the toddler and father’s detention and the frantic efforts that followed to get her released from custody and reunited with her mother. The detention came two days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained five-year-old Liam Ramos in Minnesota, in a case that has prompted international backlash and increased scrutiny of the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown in the region.
As the father and daughter were arriving home on Thursday, agents entered their backyard and driveway area, Kira Kelley, one of the family’s lawyers, wrote in a filing. The officers did not have a warrant, the attorney said. One agent then allegedly broke the glass window of the father’s car while the girl was inside.
The mother was by the door and stepped inside the house as the agents approached, Kelley wrote. The agents refused to allow the father to bring his daughter to the mother or other family members “waiting terrified inside the home”.
The two-year-old and her father were then placed in an immigration agent’s vehicle, which Kelley wrote did not have a car seat.
An update on the 5-year-old boy who was taken into custody with his father from MPR News: Witnesses say they begged ICE agents not to detain Minnesota 5-year-old after father’s arrest.
Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents refused to allow 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos to stay at his Columbia Heights home with family after being detained, observers said, despite people in the home, neighbors and school officials begging them to do so.
Those who saw the federal agents detain Liam Tuesday pushed back against claims this week by ICE and Vice President JD Vance that the child was abandoned by his family after the boy and his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias, were detained on their way home from school.
Neighbors and Columbia Heights school officials say they pleaded with agents to let the child enter the home to join his mother or to stay with a neighbor or school leader after agents took the father into custody.
They also say that they did not see Conejo Arias flee the scene and leave his son in the cold as ICE officials maintain.
“There was ample opportunity to be able to safely hand that child off to adults,” said Mary Granlund, chair of the Columbia Heights School Board who said she was at the scene and among those who offered to take Liam to his family or back to school.
“There was another adult who lived in the home that was there saying, ‘I will take the child. I will take the child.’ Somebody else was yelling … that I was there and said, ‘School is here. They can take the child. You don’t have to take them.’ And mom was there. She saw (through) the window, and dad was yelling, ‘Please do not open the door!’”
ICE officials say the father and son are together at an ICE residential family facility in Texas. Marc Prokosch, the lawyer representing Liam and his dad, said he had still not had direct contact with them.
ICE says the father is in the country illegally but Prokosch says that’s not the case.
The Ne
w York Times: Pepper-Sprayed While Pinned Down: A Searing Scene Provokes Outrage.
The deployment of thousands of federal agents to Minnesota to round up undocumented immigrants has yielded no shortage of indelible images in recent weeks.
There was the American citizen dragged out of his home in subzero weather in his underwear. And the detention of a 5-year-old boy wearing a Spider-Man backpack and a hat with floppy ears drew outrage from school officials.
But photos of a Border Patrol agent squirting pepper spray in the face of a man who was being pinned down by fellow officers on Wednesday searingly captured why the ongoing immigration operation has been met with furious resistance on the streets of Minneapolis.
Images of the episode drew millions of views online, made the front page of The Minnesota Star Tribune and elicited blistering condemnation from local officials.
“No one looking at this image can seriously claim this is about public safety,” said Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis. “It should alarm every American because if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.”
Gov. Tim Walz reposted the Star Tribune newspaper page on social media, along with a two-word comment: “Trump’s America.”
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, did not respond to an email asking about the confrontation and whether the use of force depicted in photos and videos taken by bystanders that day had violated use of force policies.
The identity and whereabouts of the man who was sprayed was unclear on Friday.
I hope he wasn’t blinded.
The New York Times: F.B.I. Agent Who Tried to Investigate ICE Officer in Shooting Resigns.
An F.B.I. agent who sought to investigate the federal immigration officer who fatally shot a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis this month has resigned from the bureau, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The agent, Tracee Mergen, left her job as a supervisor in the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis field office after bureau leadership in Washington pressured her to discontinue a civil rights inquiry into the immigration officer, Jonathan Ross, according to one of the people. Such inquiries are a common investigative step in similar shootings.
After the incident, several Trump administration officials described Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist,” accusing her of trying to ram Mr. Ross with her vehicle. But a video analysis by The New York Times showed no indication that he had been run over.
Senior Justice Department officials have repeatedly said there are no plans to follow the path normally taken in such situations and pursue an investigation into whether Mr. Ross, who fired multiple shots at Ms. Good, had used excessive force.
Federal investigators have also refused to cooperate with state and local prosecutors in Minnesota, complicating any efforts they might take to open their own investigations into Mr. Ross.
Trump has now sent his private army into Maine and Mainers are fighting back.
The Boston Globe: Hundreds protest against ICE in Maine as fear grips immigrant communities: ‘It’s like a manufactured crisis.’
PORTLAND, Maine — Hundreds of protesters gathered here Friday in the largest demonstration since a federal immigration sweep began in Maine earlier this week, decrying the ongoing operation as cruel and illegal, while widespread fear continued to paralyze communities across the state, bringing some aspects of daily life to a halt.
On a frigid evening, a crowd nearing an estimated 1,000 people demonstrated at the rally in Portland’s Monument Square before marching through the streets. The energy from the crowd — bundled in hats, scarves, and gloves — was reverberating throughout the city.
“People are afraid,” Portland City Councilor Pious Ali told the Globe after leaving a mosque following a Friday prayer service in the city’s Bayside neighborhood. “There’s fear, there’s anxiety. There’s a feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen next.”
Thirty-five miles north, the streets of Lewiston were quiet, with a few stragglers going in and out of businesses. Shop owners said they had never seen business this slow — and signs on their doors warned of ICE presence in the area. Several stores were completely shuttered due to the increase in ICE activity.
“We are temporarily closed until further notice. Sorry for the inconvenience,” a sign on one Somali-owned food market on Lisbon Street downtown read.
The Department of Homeland Security said Friday US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 100 in Maine this week as part of “Operation Catch of the Day,” the latest initiative that is part of President Trump’s mass deportation agenda. The operation started on Tuesday.
While other cities, such as Chicago and Minneapolis, have seen large-scale deployments of immigration agents swarming neighborhoods, the operations here seem to be quicker and more targeted: A few ICE vehicles will be spotted in a neighborhood. Immigrant advocates who are watching the agents will blow whistles and honk horns. But quickly, the agents move in to arrest one or two individuals. Within minutes, they are gone.
PBS: We’re being terrorized.’ What Mainers are seeing as ICE launches operation in the state.
Mainers are grappling with the increased presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their cities as the state becomes the latest target for President Donald Trump’s mass deportations agenda.
Details, though, about who is being targeted and in which communities are thin, state and local officials say.
“Why Maine? Why now?” Democratic Gov. Janet Mills said Thursday. “We’ve reached out, we’ve asked questions. We have no answers.”
The Department of Homeland Security announced the launch of its Maine operation, “Catch of the Day,” earlier this week, saying agents were focused on “the worst of the worst” in its arrests.
But Mills said in a news conference that the increased ICE presence in the state has been disruptive to schools and businesses, adding that it’s been difficult to know the operation’s full scope and justification because federal agencies aren’t providing those details.
I have no idea how long this post is, but I’m going to end there. We are truly in a crisis as a country. How long before Trump tries sending in military troops? Congress must act now! Democrats need to find their spines and stand up to Trump. This is really getting terrifying.
Take care everyone.
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The Guardian: German media likens US border patrol official’s coat to ‘Nazi look.’
A greatcoat worn by the senior US border patrol official Gregory Bovino, who has spearheaded aggressive immigration operations across the country, has raised eyebrows in German media with some commentators saying it resembled a fascist aesthetic.
Bovino has been an increasingly recognisable figure during the raids in Minneapolis for the brass-buttoned, calf-length olive green coat, which is unlike the fatigues and body armor worn by many of the federal agents.
Along with his close-shorn haircut, the media organization Der Spiegel suggested in a video feature that Bovino’s look recalled that of a Nazi officer.
Arno Frank, a writer at Der Spiegel, said in a separate article that what he described as the “authoritarian intervention” in the US was still establishing its “distinctive aesthetic”.
“No wonder, then, that figures like Bovino are resorting to tried-and-tested models,” he said. While the other federal agents seem to wear “whatever they have to hand”, he argued that Bovino “stands out from this thuggish mob, just as an elegant SS officer stands out from the rowdy SA mob. The dashing undercut is also spot on; all that’s missing for the perfect cosplay is a monocle.”
Another German media outlet, Süddeutsche Zeitung, made similar comments. “Other countries also had these coats, but Bovino’s outfits complete the Nazi look: a closely cropped haircut, as if he had taken a photo of [assassinated SA leader] Ernst Röhm to the barber,” it said.
The Washington Post: From Davos to Minneapolis to D.C., Trump is facing sharper pushback.
Anders Vistisen, a member of the European Parliament from Denmark, stepped up to the microphone this past week in the Parliament’s vast chamber, where matters of European statecraft and diplomacy are usually debated in solemn and often dry tones.
“Let me put this in words you might understand, Mr. President,” Vistisen said. “F— off.”
Vistisen’s sharp language reflected a trend that is increasingly noticeable, from the conference rooms of Davos, Switzerland, to the halls of the Federal Reserve to the streets of Minneapolis: President Donald Trump’s adversaries are pushing back against him with renewed force. The change is partly rhetorical and partly substantive, but underlying it is a sense that seeking to placate Trump has proved ineffective in the first year of his second term and that counterpunching is the better option.
That was evident this week in Davos, where the world’s financial and political leaders gathered under the cloud of Trump’s threat to take over Greenland, a Danish territory. European leaders, who have spent a year seeking to appease Trump in ways large and small, this time sharply criticized his Greenland gambit and threatened an array of aggressive trade moves in response. The president backed off his threat of military action and punitive tariffs — at least for now.
The shift has been clear in other venues as well.
When the Justice Department served Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell with subpoenas related to a renovation project, Powell responded with a defiant video emphasizing the importance of “standing firm in the face of threats.” Powell’s tone for much of the past year had been far more accommodating.
On Thursday, former special counsel Jack Smith vigorously defended his efforts to prosecute Trump, telling a congressional committee that the president “willfully broke the very laws that he took an oath to uphold.”
Mediaite: ‘Another Incredibly Idiotic Story’: Jake Tapper Can’t Believe Trump Officials Reportedly Told FEMA Not To Say ‘Ice’ Amid Winter Storm.
CNN’s Jake Tapper expressed disbelief that Homeland Security officials reportedly advised the Federal Emergency Management Agency to avoid using the word ‘ice’ as they continue to update the public on major upcoming winter storms, so as not to encourage comparisons to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, quipping, “Another incredibly idiotic story.”
The moment occurred during Friday’s The Lead With Jake Tapper, as CNN’s Gabe Cohen told Tapper that DHS officials under President Donald Trump asked FEMA to use the term “freezing rain” instead of ice in public messaging and social media posts about the upcoming winter weather event, in which the storm and ice track is forecasted to stretch over 2,000 miles across the East Coast.
“What they are worried about here is that by posting something like, ‘Watch out for the ice,’ that it’s gonna become an opportunity for a meme, for internet fodder, for public ridicule against the Department of Homeland Security,” explained Cohen, mentioning heightening anti-ICE protests in Minnesota after the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an immigration officer.
It is fucking crazy.