ICE invades Minnesota and Minnesotans fight back – The Verge

Will Stancil, man of the people or just an annoying guy?

2026-02-19T14:51:36-05:00

Will Stancil | Photo by Jack Califano / The Verge

I met Will Stancil two days before he got booted from his neighborhood Signal chat. We were at the Uptown Minneapolis VFW at an event hosted by Rep. Ilhan Omar, a thank-you party for Minnesotans who fought ICE in ways big and small. There were tacos and drinks, and dancing, though I never saw Stancil dance, which is not to say it never happened. A friend of mine who knows of Stancil from his work on school desegregation was surprised I knew who he was. She had no idea he was a combative, divisive online personality. She didn't know about his arguments with leftists on Bluesky or his fights with white supremacists on X, or about the fact that …

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A powerful tool of resistance is already in your hands

2026-02-13T17:56:08-05:00

In an eyewitness video analyzed frame by frame by The New York Times, Alex Pretti raises one hand and holds a phone in the other. Federal agents tackle him, and one appears to find and remove a gun holstered on his hip. Then, an agent shoots - and a second follows. They appear to fire nine more shots as Pretti lies on the ground.

The Trump administration has claimed Pretti was shot because of his legally carried gun - that the agents, later identified in records viewed by ProPublica as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer Raymundo Gutierrez, acted in self-defense. But the tool he was visibly holdin …

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ICE moves out to the suburbs

2026-02-13T10:07:22-05:00

Queen Anne Courts mobile home park where there ICE activity has been reported in Lakeville, MN on February 5th, 2026. | Photo by Jaida Grey Eagle / The Verge

We sat in a parking lot and waited. We watched, knowing we were being watched in return. Two men, masked and presumably armed, idled in a gray SUV. "They're all on this fucking street now," Lety, a lifelong resident of the Minnesota suburbs, told me. ICE had been spotted at a gas station and a mobile home park, and they were here with us now, in a strip mall that was home to a dispensary, an auto parts shop, and little else. I stared straight ahead as Lety monitored the Signal chat on her phone. We didn't speak. A knock on the passenger-side window startled us both. Earlier, Lety had shown me dashcam footage of a pair of ICE agents pulling u …

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DHS announces the end of its ‘surge operation’ in Minneapolis, but not entirely

2026-02-12T12:21:28-05:00

The government's siege of the Twin Cities is reportedly coming to an end. "I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude," border czar Tom Homan announced Thursday.

This isn't the first time Department of Homeland Security officials have claimed that Operation Metro Surge, its massive campaign in Minnesota, was slowing down or ending altogether. Homan teased a "drawdown" in late January, and a few days later, President Donald Trump said he had ordered the withdrawal of 700 agents from the state. But an estimated 2,000 agents remained, and residents reported that raids continued.

Even by Homan's ow …

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ICE is pushing Minneapolis underground

2026-03-10T15:19:28-04:00

Minneapolis was not the war zone I expected to find. Depending on who you are and where you live, things can seem, for a few fleeting moments, almost normal, like a few blocks or neighborhoods over people aren't being tear gassed or rounded up by ICE or, in two tragic cases, being gunned down by federal agents. Even now some people walk their dogs, run errands and buy groceries, meet friends for dinner and drinks. Daily life has become sinister in its banality, because Minneapolis remains a city under siege. ICE and CBP agents roam the streets, though their tactics have shifted as of late: No longer acting like an occupying army, the Departm …

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This whistle fights fascists

2026-02-12T19:02:36-05:00

Whistles for Minneapolis and beyond.

Kit Rocha and Courtney Milan have a knack for drawing attention to a cause. The bestselling romance novelists helped raise half a million dollars for Georgia voting rights in 2020. Now, their cause is whistles, because whistles let neighbors alert each other when they see ICE agents abducting people. They've helped create a group that's shipped a half million free 3D-printed whistles to 49 US states - 200,000 of them in the first week of February alone.

Even I print whistles now. It's the first thing I do each morning after dropping kids at school, and the very last before bed. Usually, I squeeze in a hundred more after dinner.

I print wh …

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‘I was detained by federal agents in Minneapolis’

2026-02-05T09:24:26-05:00

Whipple detainee anonymous portraits | Photo by Jack Califano / The Verge

In late 2025, the Department of Homeland Security zeroed in on the Twin Cities in Minnesota, supposedly in response to fraud allegations made by a right-wing influencer. In the months since, thousands of immigrants have been swept up by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. In January alone, two American citizens were killed while documenting ICE operations in the city. Two Customs and Border Protection agents deployed to Minneapolis fatally shot protester Alex Pretti on January 24th, triggering another wave of protests throughout the city - and another DHS crackdown.

One local who was arrested while protesting at the site of Alex's killin …

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Slopaganda goes West

2026-02-03T17:23:09-05:00

After right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley's viral video alleging fraud at Minnesota daycares he said were operated by Somali residents, Donald Trump's administration responded by flooding the state with federal immigration agents and freezing funding for childcare services. (A judge ruled that the federal government must continue funding childcare subsidies, at least temporarily.) Now Shirley is back loitering outside daycares again, this time in California.

Over the weekend the 23-year-old posted a photo of himself with the caption "Hello California I've arrived." Like with his last video, which featured a "source" later identified by The Int …

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‘No more Minnesota nice, Minneapolis will strike’

2026-02-02T11:56:23-05:00

It was too cold to take off my mittens and check Google Maps, so I put my faith in the trickle of bundled-up people ahead of me. All of them were carrying signs and wearing whistles around their necks on top of layers and layers of winter clothing. At first there were dozens of us walking toward Government Plaza, across the street from Minneapolis City Hall, and within a block it was hundreds. By the time I arrived it was thousands. Some reports said 5,000 to 10,000, but on the ground, it felt like a single vibrating mass that was too large to count.

I made my way through the throng, repeating "excuse me" and "pardon me" despite the din be …

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Don Lemon has been arrested for covering an anti-ICE protest

2026-01-31T11:47:25-05:00

Don Lemon speaks onstage during Telling the Truth in an Age of Misinformation at the 2025 Blackweek Conference on October 07, 2025 in New York City. | Getty Images

Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor turned independent journalist, was arrested on Thursday night by federal agents in Los Angeles, who alleged that he had violated federal law while covering an anti-ICE protest in Minnesota.

Notably, Lemon was not the only journalist targeted by law enforcement for their presence at the Minnesota protest. On Thursday night, local independent journalist Georgia Fort told her followers that the FBI had come to arrest her for being at the protest, livestreaming as agents were demanding she open her door. Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed Fort's arrest the next day, claiming that she, Lemon, and others were part …

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