loading . . . MINNEAPOLIS — On Friday, legal observers on an encrypted group call in Minneapolis received a desperate plea. A fellow observer was following federal agents who’d just loaded her friend into an unmarked vehicle. Now, she herself was boxed in.
“Please help,” the woman said, again and again, her voice rising to a scream.
Then, her pleas stopped.
By the time support arrived, the observer was gone. All that remained was an empty SUV, engine running, abandoned in the middle of the city’s snow-lined streets.
Referred to locally as abductions, it was at least the fourth such disappearance of the day — the third in a span of less than 30 minutes.
The observers call themselves commuters. They are locals who have organized to resist “Operation Metro Surge,” a massive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol campaign targeting Minnesota’s undocumented population, by monitoring federal operations in the Twin Cities. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both agencies, has called the incursion the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.
> “She was so scared. The terror in her voice was really, really horrible.”
Three days before the commuters were taken, the new head of Metro Surge, Trump administration border czar Tom Homan, announced a “drawdown” of 700 federal officers and agents. The president had tapped Homan to head the mission a week earlier, appointing the former ICE acting director to take over from Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, whose heavy-handed tactics culminated in three shootings in three weeks, including the killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Homan has vowed to take a more “targeted” line of attack in Minnesota. His announced drawdown has fueled speculation that the civil rights abuses and unlawful arrests documented in viral videos and court filings during Bovino’s tenure may be coming to an end. On the ground, the feeling is quite different.
In a message circulated among commuters Friday, the community group Defrost MN, which uses crowdsourced data to track federal immigration operations, warned residents of an “uptick in abductions” — which refer to arrests of both immigrant community members and legal observers — following Homan’s takeover and an increase in the number of government personnel and vehicles involved in those operations.
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“National attention on Minnesota has waned with the departure of Bovino and rhetoric by Homan that things are de-escalating,” the group noted, but recent data and reports from commuters in the field did not support those conclusions. Despite orders to the contrary, the group continued, “Agents continue to draw their weapons and deploy chemical agents against observers.”
Meanwhile, the deportation pipeline out of Minnesota continues to flow, with 66 shackled passengers loaded onto a plane the night of Homan’s address — the highest total in nearly two weeks — according to evidence collected at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport.
Friday’s midafternoon disappearance of multiple commuters in quick succession provided visceral evidence that, despite the change in leadership, the struggle between President Donald Trump’s federal agents and residents continues.
Commuter Kaegan Recher was among those who hurried to the scene of the observer who disappeared while on call.
“She was so scared,” Recher told The Intercept. “The terror in her voice was really, really horrible.”
## **Response to a Siege**
In Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as the surrounding suburbs, tens of thousands of immigrant families are relying on churches and mutual aid for food and financial support. People have not left their homes for weeks. Local schools have reverted to Covid-era online measures to support immigrant students too terrified to come to class. Those students who still attend in person are transported by U.S.-born neighbors and family friends. Campuses at all grade levels are patrolled by volunteers in fluorescent vests, an effort aimed at deterring federal agents’ practice of targeting parent pick-up and drop-off sites.
Read our complete coverage
## Chilling Dissent
Conservative estimates from local healthcare providers suggest emergency room and clinic visits in the Minneapolis area are down by 25 percent. City leaders report local businesses are losing upwards of $20 million a week. Immigrant-owned businesses have been devasted, with revenue losses hovering between 80 to 100 percent and many closing their doors for good.
These are the conditions commuters respond to. Their focus is two-fold: to document and alert. Some participate on foot, others by bicycle, many by car. They patrol neighborhoods, reporting suspicious vehicles, the license plates of which are run through a crowdsourced database of known or suspected Department of Homeland Security vehicles. When confirmations are made, commuters follow, honking their horns while observers on foot blow whistles at the passing vehicles. The Intercept has observed several such interactions in recent weeks.
Typically, federal agents try to lose the tail. If they are traveling in a caravan, one vehicle may drive slowly ahead of a commuter, allowing others to speed away. If commuters outnumber the agents, the maneuver can be difficult. Unable to shake their noisy entourage, agents will often head for the highway and, if the pursuit continues, retreat to federal headquarters.
Most commuters are careful to keep a distance between their vehicles and those of the agents. Sometimes, the authorities will pull over and stop. The commuters will stop behind them. Both vehicles will sit idling, waiting for the other to move, then carry on.
## Related
### Federal Agents Keep Invoking Killing of Renee Good to Threaten Protesters in Minnesota
Occasionally, agents, heavily armed and frequently masked, will exit their vehicles and warn commuters to cease their pursuit. Some commuters do; others don’t. Sometimes, commuters come upon agents at a home, a business, or an apartment complex. Given the heated state of affairs — two Americans dead, immigrants living in terror, children unable to attend school, and sweeping social and economic impacts — the encounters are often raw with emotion. Nearly everything is recorded, by agents and commuters alike.
As these interactions have become a familiar, legal experts have noted that following and filming law enforcement is protected under the Constitution. With the federal government asserting sweeping and highly contested immigration authorities, they say those efforts are more important than ever.
The Trump administration has taken a different view. Officials argue Minnesota is infested with “agitators” impeding law enforcement. Mounting evidence suggests they are mobilizing resources to put their resistance down.
## **Homan’s** Takeover
Much of the recent media attention surrounding Metro Surge has focused on Homan’s reduction in forces, a move the border czar has linked to Minnesota expanding ICE’s access to jails, thus reducing the number of federal personnel needed to meet the administration’s immigration arrest quotas.
With some 2,000 officers and agents still on the ground, the current federal contingent is still 13 times larger than the agencies’ normal footprint, outnumbering the Minneapolis Police Department three to one.
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### While Minnesotans Rejoice Over Greg Bovino’s Ouster, His Replacement Is a Deportation Hard-Liner
While reducing the number of federal agents dominated headlines, it isn’t the only talking point Homan has driven home since taking over.
Homan spent much of a press conference last week describing how ICE’s full withdrawal hinges on the public acquiescing to the agency’s mission, which, he stressed, is to achieve the president’s promise of “mass deportations.” The immediate goal in Minnesota is a complete federal drawdown, Homan explained, “but that is largely contingent on the end of the illegal and threatening activities against ICE and its federal partners that we’re seeing in the community.”
In the past month, Homan told reporters, 158 people have been arrested for interfering with federal law enforcement, a crime for which penalties range from one to 20 years in prison. Of those cases, he claimed, 85 have been accepted for prosecution. The rest are still pending.
In most cases, people arrested for interfering with ICE are taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, a seven-story edifice that is part of Fort Snelling, the historic site of a government-run concentration camp during the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862.
Typically, commuters and other legal observers are held for around eight hours before being released. During that time, U.S. officials collect a range of identifying information. With ample evidence that the Department of Homeland Security is amassing a growing catalogue of the president’s critics, and with Homan himself advertising his desire to include people who follow ICE’s activities in a government “database,” community concern is running high over what, exactly, the Trump administration is doing with its information on U.S. citizens.
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In his address last week, Homan described an evolving effort by federal officials, including creation of a “multi-agency surge task force” and a new “unified joint operations center” that will allow the agency to “leverage joint intelligence capabilities to effectively target threats.” He emphasized that there would be no reduction in security elements — often militarized tactical teams — assigned to guard deportation operations against “hostile incidents, until we see a change in what’s happening with the lawlessness in impeding and interfering and assaulting of ICE and Border Patrol officers.”
Homan reminded the press that he’s long warned that the “hateful extreme rhetoric” of the president’s opponents would lead to bloodshed. Now, he said, “there has been.” Without acknowledging whose blood had been spilled, or by whom, Homan implored local leaders to urge calmness and “end the resistance.”
## **“One Warning”**
Recher, the commuter who responded to Friday’s observer disappearances, has been in the streets monitoring ICE’s operations since early January. His busiest week was after Homan took over. He’s since noticed that agents have been less prone to immediately jump out of their cars with guns drawn — a welcome change — but that a similarly unsettling directive appears to have gone out regarding ICE’s engagement with the public.
A video he shot Friday appeared to confirm as much, with a deportation officer telling Recher that he and his colleagues have been ordered to give commuters a single warning before taking them into custody.
“You just got one warning, that’s it,” the officer said. “What we’re told, that’s all you need.”
> “I hear more and more about abductions of observers.”
Recher heeded the officer’s warning. He received the panicked and disturbing call for help from the vanished commuter soon after.
“I hear less and less about successful abductions, which I’m glad,” he said. “But I hear more and more about abductions of observers.”
For Recher, like so many others following ICE’s operations in Minnesota, the point of commuting is the thousands of immigrant families living in hiding across the Twin Cities. It is an effort to push back against the pervasive fear at the heart of the Trump administration’s occupation.
“How do you justify terrorizing an entire community?” he asked. “It is the most un-American thing I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”
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_IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT._
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**_IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING_** year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
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**_I’M BEN MUESSIG,_** The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.
We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.
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