How Native communities pushed back as ICE operations escalated
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations continue in Minnesota after more than two months of detention, arrests and community resistance. In mid-February, Tom Homan, the U.S. border czar, announced that the so-called "Operation Metro Surge" in Minneapolis was ending.
Over the course of two months, more than 3,000 federal immigration agents were deployed by the Department of Homeland Security as Minnesota became the center of President Donald Trump’s deportation push.
In January, federal immigration agents shot three people, killing two ICE observers.
Since the surge began in December, ICE and Border Patrol agents have detained immigrants, many of whom were in the country legally, demanding identification from immigrants and U.S. born citizens alike.
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Native Americans are among the people stopped and sometimes detained by federal immigration agents.
Shawntia Sosa-Clara captured the moment her nephew was dragged from her car by ICE agents on her cell phone.
"I just bear-hugged my nephew, and I tried to keep him from taking him. They were just yanking on me. Then one of the agents reached over, he punched my shoulder, and a female agent grabbed me from behind, pulling me away,” recalled Sosa Clara about a week after the incident. “Then they got my nephew out of the car, and — and then they just let me go.”
Sosa-Clara's nephew, a U.S. citizen of Mexican heritage and Native heritage, was arrested by ICE on Jan. 8. He was held at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis and released later that evening.
During ICE’s surge, Native American organizers and activists organized to support their community and their neighbors.
Artists were some of the first to organize through theater performance and pop-up artmaking events. Tribal governments answered the call of their urban members and offered tribal IDs as reports of ICE stops circulated on social media. Safety patrols joined their neighbors in observing ICE operations on the street.
A day after Shawntia Sosa-Clara posted her cell phone video, Native American activist Rachel Dionne-Thunder was stopped while patrolling her south Minneapolis neighborhood. She says ICE agents boxed her in with their cars.
"They said, ‘Open the door, roll your window down.’ And I was just shaking my head — no. And at that point, I saw him have a window breaker in his hand, and he was gearing up to pop my window.”
Dionne-Thunder refused to roll her window down. Within minutes, other patrollers arrived to help her, and ICE agents drove off.
“But thank goodness I was in a location that was close to Pow Wow Grounds where our community patrollers have been stationed,” Dionne-Thunder said.
‘Protection and power'
Later that day, Dionne-Thunder, vice president of the Indigenous Protectors Movement, the Native American Community Development Institute and a half-dozen community organizations, called a news conference to announce the opening of a community hub.
“What I experienced in that moment was protection and power,” said Dionne-Thunder.
To fight back against ICE and the Trump administration, Indigenous people drew on their long experience mounting protests and legal campaigns designed to expose and confront government injustice.
For more than 50 years, Native activists have organized in south Minneapolis. The American Indian Movement, a Native civil rights organization, opened its first office out of storefront on Franklin Avenue in the late 1960s in response to police violence, with the AIM patrol later re-forming briefly in the 1980s.
During the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, Native residents and activists formed two large community patrols to safeguard the neighborhood along Franklin Avenue. In protest of the ICE surge in January, the Indigenous Protectors Movement quickly repurposed their patrol to observe ICE and provide support to fellow observers.
Nikki Love, executive director of the Tiwahe Foundation, represented the Metropolitan Urban Indian Directors at the news conference. Love announced that a Native legal advocacy group had jumped in to help.
“There are legal defense funds. There are local funders that are funding that right now, right we have numbers. I think that's maybe the next thing we can do is start connecting our families to those resources too,” Love said.
She gave out a hotline number for the Native American Rights Fund, a national legal advocacy group based in Boulder, Colo.
Jacqueline De León, a senior attorney there, says her organization began helping to educate Native people about their rights.
“We created guides, and we held a training with folks to try that and give them sort of the basics around how they can and should operate around ice legally,” said De León. “Although I will say that even during the time of the training, we were alarmed because it appeared as if ICE was not operating within the legal confines of the law.”
The federal government denies that ICE has racially profiled Native Americans during recent immigration enforcement operations.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem issued a statement to tribal officials from federally recognized tribes on Feb. 12.
“ICE's mission is singular and clear: to apprehend and remove individuals who are unlawfully present in the United States. ICE does not target, and will not target, Native Americans or any U.S. citizens based on appearance, ethnicity or community affiliation,” read the statement.
At a busy intersection in Minneapolis, a community hub for Native people and their neighbors buzzed with activity throughout January and into early February. People arrived in waves to donate supplies and to pick up essentials.
Bob Rice, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and his staff began making frybread in early January.
“Couple thousands of pieces, give or take,” Rice said. “We're working on 400 gallons of soup. We've done about 600 gallons of coffee.”
Rice is the owner of Pow Wow Grounds, the small coffee shop that, along with the All My Relations Arts gallery, became part of the community hub. It’s been a place where community members who felt besieged by ICE could find a bit of relief.
"Get some coffee, visit with people, maybe pick up a few supplies as you're here. Go out and continue your day,” Rice said.
Marcella Torres works for the Native American Community Development Institute. She worked two days a week organizing donations atop folding tables in the gallery.
“Socks, gloves, hats, scarves,” Torres said. “We get whistles donated. A lady stopped by today, she and her son that make these 3D whistles, and they're going make more for us and bring them in.”
Many activists and neighborhood residents volunteered as ICE observers, looking for federal agents and blowing whistles as a warning.
A history ‘hits close to home’
While Indigenous activists organized in Minneapolis, tribal officials raised concerns directly with the Department of Homeland Security.
J. Garret Renville, the chairman of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, a tribal nation in South Dakota, drove to Minnesota to check on a tribal member who had been arrested by ICE. The tribe provided the member a tribal ID just a week before.
“So had we not gone that week, I’m not sure if that member would not have had a tribal ID. I think it was just maybe good timing that we were able to move so quickly as a tribal government and be able to offer that service,” Renville said.
The young man was arrested by ICE held for several hours before he was released. For him, the use of the Whipple Federal Building as a holding facility was alarming.
The Whipple building is located in the historic footprint of Fort Snelling. More than 1,600 Dakota Indian non-combatants were interned at the military fort during the U.S. Dakota War a century and a half ago.
"That's definitely a tough part of our history as Dakota people, and it's definitely for me, my family. It’s one of those that hits close to home,” Renville said.
Renville’s great-great-great-grandfather, Gabrielle Renville, was jailed in Fort Snelling’s stockade in the winter of 1862-1863.
"We fast-forward 160 years almost, into what's going on currently on the ground there. It almost seems not believable that tribal members were going through some of those things, modern day,” Renville said.
Like J. Garret Renville, Kelly Sherman-Conroy can also trace her family back to Dakota people in Minnesota.
Sherman-Conroy, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, is an associate pastor at All Nations Indian Church in Minneapolis. For her, the U.S.-Dakota War proved to be a source of resilience.
"Being able to say, ‘Look. Look at how history is playing out again with the forced removal, the forced separation, the state violence, the killing of people, the separation of families, the imprisonment of people.’”
Sherman-Conroy has drawn on the long history of Native resilience to protest the treatment of people held at the Whipple Federal Building.
On Feb. 6, Sherman-Conroy helped lead a protest march of several hundred people along several hundred feet of fence line just across the street from the Whipple Federal Building. They were there to protest ICE detentions at the holding facility.
“There was a time in this country when everything about Native people was illegal. Our languages were illegal. Our prayers were illegal. Our gatherings were illegal. Our children were punished and were punished for remembering who they were. Their goal was erasure,” Sherman-Conroy said. “But we survived.”
The marchers threaded 4,000 red, black, yellow and white prayer ties into the fencing by the Whipple Federal Building. Each tie is understood as a tangible prayer to call for healing, a remembrance of the dead, protection, and a release of grief. One prayer tie was attached to the fence for each person who is thought to have been detained there.
"What our federal government is doing is not making us safer. It does not make anyone safer,” Sherman-Conroy said. “What it does do is reveal how fragile power can become when it is confronted by a moral conscience. That is why we are here.”
This story comes from the Upper Midwest Newsroom, a public media collaboration between Wisconsin Public Radio, South Dakota Public Broadcasting, Prairie Public in North Dakota and Minnesota Public Radio News made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
