Escalation Weekend: Three Days of Confrontations Between ICE and Protesters in Minnesota
Our partner Ford Fischer reports from the ground in Minneapolis, where tensions continue to rise
After protester Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week, freelance videographers poured into the city. Toward the weekend, many left town, but our partner Ford Fischer – with whom we’ll be talking live on today’s America This Week – stuck around covered the continued escalation. He’s following a convoy of protesters and ICE agents at this writing.
Donald Trump and Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem had already dispatched 2,000 ICE agents to Minnesota before Good’s shooting in what was called the “largest immigration operation ever.” After the shooting, he sent at least “hundreds” more, with those officers arriving this past weekend.
“You’re tripping over feds now,” Ford says.
The hour-long montage above is a compilation of six scenes between Friday and Sunday. Only one, from Saturday, is what Ford calls “a traditional march, people walking around Ilan Omar speaking from the back of a truck,” i.e. “your standard First Amendment activity.”
The other protests have a more complex character. “What’s more fascinating to me is the people who are directly trying to follow around what ICE is doing, and their purpose is basically to make a ton of noise everywhere that ICE goes, in order to warn people around them.”
These protests exist in a gray area. As you watch the tape you see ICE agents — to the extent you can see them, given how much face-covering they wear — scrutinizing protester behavior, here and there determining it’s crossed a line. Ford has been trying to monitor where that line is and talk to anyone he can about the status of these confrontations, which were tense to start and grew more so as the weekend progressed.
A catalogue of this weekend’s heated events:
