> At some point, the paranoia in Minneapolis had created its own reality. The furtiveness and randomness of the documented raids was very real, but now half of Minneapolis and an ever-expanding press corps were driving around looking for federal agents, too, prowling streets and parking lots in ways that resembled the agents themselves, creating their own layers of rumor and confusion.
>
> When I had first pulled into the apartment building’s parking lot, I saw an S.U.V. idling by the entrance, an iPhone visible against the windshield, filming me. When I got out and held up my press credential, the window rolled down to reveal two smiling white women who were out delivering food to people like the family in the apartment. “Sorry!” one of them said brightly.
>
> Leaving the building an hour later, I saw two more large S.U.V.s slowly circling the lot. Were they ICE agents? Were they people watching for ICE agents? Who knew? Earlier that day, outside a church that was distributing aid, I overheard a young man on his phone reporting a “confirmed ICE” vehicle. I looked around for it, until I realized he was reading off the license plate from my rental car.
…
> Jody Carr, a retiree from the exurb Chaska, looked on from across the street with her daughter, a nurse. “I am disappointed in the people who’ve gotten violent, because that is not what this is about,” Carr told me. She had attended recent No Kings protests in Chaska; this was her first demonstration related to the ICE deployment. “I’m proud to be an American, but I’m not proud of what our administration is doing,” she said. One of her daughter’s co-workers, an American-born woman of Kenyan descent, had been stopped a few weeks before by ICE and thrown out of her car, she said — “in her scrubs on the way to work!”
>
> Chaska sits on the far periphery of the Minneapolis metropolitan area, a politically mixed territory between the solidly Democratic metro area and Republican rural areas beyond. I asked Carr if there was disagreement about the deployment among the people she knew there, and she nodded.
>
> “My niece told me I was a threat to humanity,” she said.
AlexanderLavender on
This is an on-the-ground report from Minneapolis with good background and interviews
4 Comments
> At some point, the paranoia in Minneapolis had created its own reality. The furtiveness and randomness of the documented raids was very real, but now half of Minneapolis and an ever-expanding press corps were driving around looking for federal agents, too, prowling streets and parking lots in ways that resembled the agents themselves, creating their own layers of rumor and confusion.
>
> When I had first pulled into the apartment building’s parking lot, I saw an S.U.V. idling by the entrance, an iPhone visible against the windshield, filming me. When I got out and held up my press credential, the window rolled down to reveal two smiling white women who were out delivering food to people like the family in the apartment. “Sorry!” one of them said brightly.
>
> Leaving the building an hour later, I saw two more large S.U.V.s slowly circling the lot. Were they ICE agents? Were they people watching for ICE agents? Who knew? Earlier that day, outside a church that was distributing aid, I overheard a young man on his phone reporting a “confirmed ICE” vehicle. I looked around for it, until I realized he was reading off the license plate from my rental car.
…
> Jody Carr, a retiree from the exurb Chaska, looked on from across the street with her daughter, a nurse. “I am disappointed in the people who’ve gotten violent, because that is not what this is about,” Carr told me. She had attended recent No Kings protests in Chaska; this was her first demonstration related to the ICE deployment. “I’m proud to be an American, but I’m not proud of what our administration is doing,” she said. One of her daughter’s co-workers, an American-born woman of Kenyan descent, had been stopped a few weeks before by ICE and thrown out of her car, she said — “in her scrubs on the way to work!”
>
> Chaska sits on the far periphery of the Minneapolis metropolitan area, a politically mixed territory between the solidly Democratic metro area and Republican rural areas beyond. I asked Carr if there was disagreement about the deployment among the people she knew there, and she nodded.
>
> “My niece told me I was a threat to humanity,” she said.
This is an on-the-ground report from Minneapolis with good background and interviews
[Gift link ](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/magazine/minneapolis-trump-ice-protests-minnesota.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HFA.reMd.kVc_ZQyps4XH&smid=url-share)
swap minneapolis for tehran, ice for the basij, trump for the ayatollah, and immigrants for dissedents, and the article reads nearly identical