Indigenous-led demonstration serves ICE symbolic 'eviction notice'
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Indigenous activists held a demonstration on Saturday to bring attention to the number of people apprehended and detained at the Henry Whipple Federal Building by U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.
The ‘Not on Native Land Rally’ was organized and led by Indigenous clergy from Minnesota.
Jim Bear Jacobs, program director of environmental justice with Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light, began by pointing out that Minnesota’s first Episcopal Bishop, Henry Whipple for whom the federal building is named was an advocate for the rights of Dakota people during the U.S. Dakota war.
Jacobs said it was more than 150 years ago when Whipple travelled to Washington D.C. to appeal to President Abraham Lincoln to grant clemency to Dakota men charged with crimes during the war.
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“So many broken treaties and promises by the federal government, what does that sound like?” said Jacobs.
As a part of an action to symbolically evict ICE from the state, Jacobs read a statement from Craig Loya, the current Bishop of the Episcopal Church of Minnesota.
"It is both a both a painful irony and a bitter scandal that the reckless state-sanctioned oppression that he spent is life opposing is now being carried out in a building that bears his name,” said Jacobs as he read from the statement.
Hundreds of people listened to Jacobs and others on a stretch of snow laden grass across the street from the federal building.
Samuel Torres, a member of Kalpulli Yaocenoxtli, a group of traditional Mexica-Nahua dancers, welcomed people to the rally.
“We are going to be here to outlast ICE. We’ll be here to outlast the occupation,” said Torres.
Kate Beane, public historian and executive director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, also made connections between the ICE holding facility and the stockade at Fort Snelling that interred Dakota people in the winter of 1862. Beane said the majority of Dakota people had never ceded the land on which the federal building is now situated.
“When we say ‘No one is illegal on stolen land’... the United States government is illegal on stolen land,” Beane said. “This land was never given up.”
Kelly Sherman-Conroy, an Associate Pastor at All Nations Church in Minneapolis, spoke as a “descendant of Dakota families who were imprisoned where we are standing.”
Sherman-Conroy called on protestors to “Pray, Honor, Defend,” in solidarity with those held inside the 7-story block-shaped facility.
“There was a time in this county when everything about Native people was illegal,” said Sherman-Conroy.
Led by Jacobs, Beane, and Sherman-Conroy, protestors marched several hundred feet to a place along the fenceline just across from the federal building. Those who participated threaded 4,000 red, black and white prayer ties into the chain link fencing separating protestors from the street.
“What our federal government is doing is not making us safer. It does not make anyone safer,” said Sherman-Conroy. “What it does do is reveal is how fragile power can become when it is confronted by a moral conscience.”
Correction (Feb. 7, 2026): Story has been updated with Kelly Sherman-Conroy’s correct name.
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