The Minneapolis Siege Is Even Worse Than the Videos Show

“Operation Metro Surge,” an ongoing sweeping federal immigration enforcement action centered around Minneapolis and St. Paul, has been marked by aggressive tactics and strong local opposition. Tensions reached a fever pitch earlier this month after an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent killed 37-year-old Renee Good, which sparked widespread protests from both residents and demonstrators nationwide. But even before the killing, anti-ICE Twin Cities residents had absorbed lessons from other cities the Trump administration has targeted, and had formed communities that track federal agents, warn their neighbors of enforcement actions, and document what’s going on around them. Viral clips of detentions and rough tactics have rocketed around the internet, helping to galvanize opinion against the government’s tactics.

Minnesota resident Will Stancil is a lawyer, policy researcher and one-time candidate for the state’s House of Representatives, who has long been a voluble progressive presence on X and Bluesky. Over the past week, Stancil has become a mainstay of citizen patrols, tracking ICE agents around the city in his Honda Fit and sharing his experiences to his 100,000-plus followers. On Friday, I spoke with Stancil about what he has witnessed over the past few days.

Can you describe what conditions are like on the ground right now? 
In my neighborhood, what you saw in the days after Renee Good’s shooting was an explosion of extremely aggressive militarized ICE and DHS action. Many, many, many guys in masks. You’d drive down the street, and you’d see an out-of-state car – you’d look up and it’d be two guys in masks or four guys in masks. Big convoys of three or four dark SUVs with guys in masks. Abductions were happening. At busy intersections, they’d jump out in force and grab someone. I saw a time they chased a guy down an alley and tackled him, dragged him to a car — that sort of thing was happening all over. Very often, they get out and essentially take up a fight with the people, because they’re very unpopular. So they were antagonizing people, and then launching tear gas in the city streets. I got tear-gassed twice in 36 hours.

It’s too early to say what this means, but the last couple days have been very quiet in my neighborhood. I’ve tracked a few ICE cars through, and other people have as well. But they aren’t getting out of the cars nearly as much. So it’s possible that they are simply not able to function with the sort of level of community vigilance that we have right now, and have moved to somewhere else in the state or the city. But they could come back — they tend to move in waves.

The federal government has deployed more than 3,000 DHS agents into the Twin Cities, far outnumbering the amount of local law enforcement in the region. What is an average resident seeing on an average trip out of the house?
They primarily drive rented civilian cars, mostly SUVs. So, if you’re driving through traffic and you’re just staring at the sky, you may not notice anything for the most part. But if you start looking at occupants, you realize they’re everywhere. They’ve kind of stopped wearing masks and uniforms because it was too obvious, especially in my neighborhood. They literally couldn’t make it 40 feet without picking up 20 cars and people blowing whistles and just causing chaos. It seems like they sort of have changed up their strategy a little bit. But for a few days, it felt like you were under military occupation. It was terrifying.

The first time I saw them, it was so rattling. This is sort of what got me into the ICE Watch thing. I joined this rapid response chat, and someone said, “Oh, they’re out of the car.” I can’t remember the exact address, but it was right next to where I was. So I went running over there, and there’s all these guys standing in the street with assault rifles and a very rapidly growing angry crowd. It’s not clear at all what they’re doing. It was so weird to see them there. No local cops in sight — just like this military deployment. And then later on, I was like, “maybe I’ll go follow these guys around.” I started looking and it didn’t take a lot of careful detective work. You just find a busy intersection, park on the side of the street, and you’d watch and 20 minutes later, a caravan full of heavily armed border patrol guys would roll by. So their presence was very obvious.

The other thing I’ll say is that no one in the city wants to talk about anything else. Every single store has anti-ICE signs. Every single intersection has anti-ICE graffiti. Go into a restaurant, and there’s five tables that have people at them, and all five tables are probably talking about ICE. Go to the grocery store, the grocery store clerk is talking about ICE. Their presence is comparable to if a military force had occupied the city in terms of public attention and focus on it.

Do the videos we’ve seen — of violent arrests, of agents deploying flashbangs and tear gas on bystanders — capture the full extent of what’s happening?
No. In the private rapid response channels, people will share many, many videos, and they don’t want to bring them public because they don’t want to be identified. People are worried. So there’s lots and lots more private stuff that is never circulating. The other thing is I think it’s really difficult to capture. The last few days have been calmer. But for the first week or so, it was really hard to convey the unrelenting pace of this stuff. I had a journalist come ride along — he just published an article about it. I had been talking about how crazy it was, and I could tell he was a little bit skeptical. He thought, okay, maybe we’ll see an ICE car. In a two-hour ride, we chased four ICE convoys onto the highway, saw someone violently abducted alive in front of us, and then saw a separate ICE convoy tear gas a major commercial intersection for no reason at all. In two hours. 

We have these rapid response channels. I mean, I got to the point where — and this is very difficult to do — -but I got to the point where I mute them or turn them off or leave them when I come home in the evening, because getting the constant updates — as much as I want to be informed of my community, if I’m not out there and can’t do anything about it, I am a raw nerve all day and night. I come home and I just have to lie on the couch and just shut everything off and shut my brain off because you’ll go insane hearing about what all they’re doing.

What has struck me from the news coverage is how many residents appear to be taking part in a demonstration or community aid in this way for the first time.
I think seeing it has been galvanizing. When you see a video of somewhere that you shop every day getting tear-gassed or someone getting abducted from the main commercial strip in your neighborhood, it is galvanizing. People are angry beyond description. The other thing is seeing your neighbors do it makes it easier. I’ve probably had 20 people come to me because I’ve been public about this and say,  “Help me get into the rapid response stuff. I want to do it too.” I’ve had neighbors come to me, and many of them have never engaged in any kind of activism or advocacy. Some of them are just wealthy older folks who are like, “I want to help.”

The Trump administration has defended the agents as conducting law enforcement actions. How much enforcement do you see them actually doing?
It’s ludicrous. I mean, you take 20 guys with assault rifles and pepper balls, put them in a convoy, they’re all in masks and uniformed armor. They pull up at the main intersection of my neighborhood where there’s a McDonald’s, where I walk by every day. They jump out, and they’re tear-gassing people in the crowd. They grab one woman off the street, whose name they did not get. She’s walking alone. No one knows who she is because she’s just walking on the street. She’s a Black woman. You stuff her in a car, you continue to shoot tear gas and pepper balls into the crowd and then you pile into your convoy and you tear off. That is obviously an atrocious thing to witness and to do. But the other thing is, it has no utility whatsoever as an immigration enforcement action. They don’t even know who they grabbed. They didn’t get her name. No one there knew her, so how would they know her? And it took 20 guys and four cars and like a half million dollars worth of weapons. Even if you agreed with the notion that we needed aggressive immigration enforcement, and I don’t — but if you did — this is an incredibly inefficient way of doing it. So much so that the idea that that’s the goal is completely laughable.

I was here in 2020 and it was, in some ways, a similar environment. The whole city was focused on one thing. It didn’t feel safe on the streets. The businesses were all under threat, and there was this kind of paranoia. It was frightening, but it wasn’t clear who to blame. It wasn’t like there’s an external force doing this to us; it was like the civil order had just collapsed. But this time, this is being done to us. We are being attacked. One of the things I actually think that is striking a little bit is I know outside of Minneapolis and Minnesota, people say, “Oh they need to be better trained.” But when you see it up close and you see what they’re doing, the scale of it and how little interest they have in effective immigration enforcement, you realize that it’s not like they overstepped or are badly trained. They are attacking us. We are under occupation. And you’ll notice that the mayor and governor are saying the same thing.

How has it been seeing this response from your community? Were you surprised by how universal it seems?
I would say honestly I’m not that surprised because I know Minneapolis and I know that this is how this community functions. But the scale of it is still overwhelming sometimes. The way that you’ll go down a street and there’s someone watching on every corner. Every single pedestrian is keeping an eye out, and every single person in every store is keeping an eye out. It does make you feel so connected to your community when this is happening, because we really are all in together. I’m just one guy. I can follow a few cars a day. The reason this works is because there are so many people doing it. There’s so many people out there who are doing it so well, relentlessly, all hours of the day and night. Most of them will be anonymous pretty much forever, and I think they’re all heroes. I can’t even put into words how much admiration and respect I have for all of them.

It’s clear that ICE is just being suffocated by it. They stopped wearing the uniforms, and they stopped wearing the masks because they get identified too fast. If they do get identified, they get immediately trailed. Today, I trailed a few different cars. One was confirmed ICE, and he used a tactic they like: They photograph your car and then they lead you back to your home. He stopped in front of my apartment and pointed at it. It was very funny because once we were heading towards that area, I was like, I know where he’s going. So we were laughing in the car. And then the other one we’re pretty sure was ICE — he actually just did a slow loop. It was two guys in the car and they led us through the Renee Good Memorial and then the George Floyd Memorial. But it’s turned into this thing where they come to the city, and the only things that happen is either they’re getting chased out by 20 cars honking, whistling and all that, or they’re just going to lead people all around town for hours and waste both of our days. So I just don’t see how they could conceivably operate in these conditions, especially given how they want to operate.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.