Mailbucket #21: Minneapolis from the Inside

‘They’re setting them up for failure, and failure is what we’re getting.’

So from time to time, though not during the past 3.5 tempestuous months, we collect up all the cream from our bountiful email harvest & publish some of the better/longer/value-addingest ones here in a Mailbucket for all to enjoy. I’m afraid there’s a bit of a backlog now, so I’m likely to spend some of this frozen month doling out ‘Buckets by various themes. This one’s on all the tumult in Minneapolis.

I guarantee that after reading these insider testimonies you will be smarter about a highly contentious issue in the news, thanks to your fellow listeners. As importantly, you can have a more whole-body sense of what it feels like to experience such trauma in the city you call home. Thanks to our tremendous and thoughtful community for bringing us such brain and heart.

As ever, these are subject to some light editing/hyperlinking/harmonization, with any & all reactions appended in italics. Lessgo:

From: Samantha

Subject: Observations from a Minneapolitan

Date: Jan. 26, 2026

Hello, men. I’m not really a new subscriber, but I am new to the Chat, and boy has it been eye opening! I gotta say, my interactions with some who don’t see eye-to-eye with me on what I’m feeling and seeing in Minneapolis got the wheels turning about why I even care to engage (generally I don’t—I lack the time and mental capacity to argue with strangers online). So here’s a big long email instead, reflecting on the effects [that the] ICE activity is having on the Twin Cities area, as a person who’s lived in the boring flyover country of Minneapolis and greater Minnesota/ND for her entire life (fun fact: I was born in the blizzard Chuck Klosterman based Downtown Owl on). Of course, I wrote this all out and then Walz and Trump had a phone call and now it sounds like the ICE may be melting away, despite it being January. Still, my concern is the lasting effects on this city, and acknowledging just how disorienting it is to see your home plastered all over the news when you don’t live in a place like New York or L.A.

Also, my concern is, like, all it took to calm shit down was a phone call? Why didn’t this happen three weeks ago? Could have saved everyone a lot of trouble (not to mention lives, and, I guess, fingers).

There are now three intersections that have turned into massive memorial sites in Minneapolis, two of them over the last few weeks.

First, the obvious (notorious?) and most famous intersection: 38th and Chicago, also known as George Floyd “Square” (it’s not a square, but more of a dystopian roundabout to be avoided at all costs). This time around, the city has not seen nearly the scale of property damage that still scars Lake Street and the mess that is GF”S.” Driving through these areas breaks my heart with the memory of what it was, and how it became what it is now. It wasn’t even anything amazing before, but it was something I long for: normal. Before 2020, I would drive through 38th and Chicago regularly to see friends living on the other side of town. It was a mundane and pedestrian commercial intersection. Maybe a bit sketch, but nothing too out of the ordinary. Seeing Cup Foods on the front page of the New York Times will forever be a mind-altering experience for me. Little did I know it was just the beginning....

Enter (and exit) Renee Good at 34th and Portland, an even more nondescript residential intersection on a one-way taking you from downtown to south Minneapolis. I don’t have any specific memories associated with this intersection, but it is still one I can get to in a flash without the use of any sort of GPS. Back in 2012 or thereabouts, there was a house full of comedian dudes living down the street, known as “The Portland Emporium.” They’d host comedy shows in their living room sometimes, and it was a good time because it was before everyone went woke.

And over the weekend we now have Alex Pretti’s intersection of tragedy, 26th and Nicollet. Home to Glam Doll Donuts (with fun donut flavors like Caramel Apple Cheesecake), The Black Forest Inn (not an actual inn, but a restaurant), The Ice House (no, not to house agents, but rather, jazz); whatever iteration of the Eat Street Social is there now (it’s one of those corners that always changes hands but still has great cocktails), and a Cheapo my husband stopped by last month for some Christmas shopping (he gave me a vinyl of mid-century tiki jazz we put on for dinner most nights). I lived within a mile of this intersection for over 15 years, at one point residing a few blocks away on Pleasant Avenue.

I am one person out of a local population of over 400,000 (and beyond if you count weirdo St. Paul and the suburbs I ran away to after 2020). These are just my own small connections to the seemingly random spots in the city that have been featured on front-page national news for weeks, but most everyone here knows these intersections in different and even more intimate ways. This city is not that big. The thing that gets lost in the chaos of politics and protests and tear gas is the permanent mark these events have left on the places that regular people (not rioters, not protesters, just regular citizen people), call home. Seeing these hip, familiar, but otherwise non-exciting neighborhoods turn into war zones and then beamed all over the news with comparisons to the Middle East takes a toll. It’s weird. It’s alarming. It makes me feel very vulnerable. I can’t just go down to Nicollet and 26th without it being a “thing” now? That’s fucking insane. (I’m going for donuts with a friend on Friday. I have to. It’s still my city.)

I hope now that agents are “retreating” (what other word do I use here?), the lefties cool it, take a breath, and start picking up the pieces with the rest of us. The prospect of more scars being inflicted on my home because they won’t let up is extremely disheartening, so I have to hope for the best.

So yeah, I just wanted to humanize these places a bit, and point out that news events here may be an opportunity to prove a point for some, but for a lot of us who live in the Twin Cities, it’s very real and a bit life-altering. If not because of the aggression/rioting/protesting, then because of the massive memorials that now seem to pop up everywhere, intertwined with the sheer amount of media coverage and scrutiny we’ve been subject to. Minneapolis is full of insufferable liberals, don’t get me wrong. But it’s also full of hardworking, salt of the earth people (immigrants included, most of them legal for whatever that’s worth), who just want to get ICE out (at least for the time being) and our city put back together in its new, altered form.

Thank you for your attention to this matter ;)

(Thank YOU, Sam, for letting us see this at human scale. And you get a DING.)

*

From: [redacted]

Subject: Some Thoughts on the More Recent ICE Shooting

Date: Jan. 25, 2026

Hello,

For what it’s worth, I’m a current MPD cop (and former Twitter mutual with Mr. Moskos, hah).

I’ve been struggling with the ... shall we say mode of response to federal activity in my city, because in my view a lot of it is identical to the dumbest stuff that was said in 2020. And the effects of 2020 were really bad! In Minneapolis alone we’ve had dozens of excess murders over 2019 levels, which were already elevated over 2014 levels. Not to mention, the insane explosion in carjackings, non-fatal shootings, and the “non-violent property crimes” that are sneered at by everyone but their victims.

Broadly speaking with regards to policing I think activists diagnose us with problems we don’t have, and incorrect diagnosis leads inevitably to incorrect treatment.

This is happening right now in Minneapolis (and the U.S. generally).

The problem that everyone (including Frey and Walz) would diagnose is that immigration enforcement is racist, ICE agents are racist and sadistic thugs, all immigration enforcement in Minnesota is illegitimate, etc.

The problems we actually have are a complicated tangle of interconnected mutual pathologies. The incident where agent Ross (the guy that shot Good) was injured last summer is illustrative. CNN article here. What I’d point out is the following quote:

His violent encounter with a suspect last June began when federal officials moved in to arrest Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, an undocumented immigrant who had been charged with sexually abusing a teenage relative in 2022, according to a court affidavit written by an FBI agent involved in the case.

At the time, ICE had requested local officials hold him in jail, but that request was denied, the affidavit said.

I’d also refer to the State A.G. office’s 2025 press release on state law regarding immigration detainers.

That’s all bad. Bad law and bad policy with bad outcomes. Ross was hurt—and hurt badly—in a confrontation that should not have happened. If a guy is arrested for raping his niece (or whatever the relationship was), and the feds say, “Hey hold on to that guy for us,” the county should hold on to him. The decision to release him caused a violent confrontation that could have been avoided.

Layer on top of that all of the cynical, dishonest stuff the people at the top in Washington are doing, right? I don’t think the president cares about fraud in Minnesota, but I do think he cares about humiliating his enemies. And leadership in Minnesota has given him all the ammo he needs to tell the line officers in ICE and CBP that they’re doing the good, patriotic thing.

No one thinks they’re the bad guy. If your theory of mind for the agents running these operations in Minneapolis is “They’re violent thugs that like hurting people,” you’re going to be getting things wrong, and you’re going to end up contributing to what causes things like the shootings of Good and Pretti.

Marginal and bad law enforcement shootings don’t happen because the cops are wicked monsters thirsting for the blood of the innocent. They happen because a cop or cops managed a marginal or bad scenario poorly. Most of the shootings of unarmed people are because a cop is in a one-on-one fight with someone and got scared because they were losing the fight.

Which finally—at great length, my apologies—brings me to the attempt to articulate what’s really troubling me about what I’m seeing with the feds in my city. It looks to me like a failure of leadership at every level, including the line leadership on the street. This is upstream even of things like, “Oh, those are bad tactics.” The shooting of Pretti is a good example of this.

First, look at the environment these agents are operating in. The city is mobilized against them, and they’re followed and surrounded everywhere they go. It’s pretty likely to me (although I don’t know) that they’re getting run hard—long days, long weeks, long deployment to a place they don’t live, separated from their families.

You can say what you like about [how] cops should be held to higher standards, OK, sure, but the reality is that human beings will stubbornly remain human beings, and those conditions break people down over time. They just do.

And while I hear what Mr. Moskos said about managing the arrest, I think by the time we’re talking about grappling we’ve already bypassed many layers of problems.

I get why they’re working in these convoys. See the above about getting followed and surrounded everywhere. Just look at the environment on the street in the Pretti video, right? I think that the agents had just pulled up there and there’s instantly a crowd. If that’s the environment you’re working in, you’ve gotta roll everywhere 15-20 people deep.

But if that’s what you’re doing, everyone in that convoy has to have a defined role, and you need someone exercising pretty tight control. When I watch the video from the lady in the pink jacket, I see an agent dismount from his black SUV and he gets confronted by the ladies in gray and brown jackets. He’s totally alone for about 30 seconds, pushing them all the way to the other side of the street, with Pretti getting involved in the process. At the end of that push he’s trying to arrest people 1 on 3?

Where in the world is the leadership?

Everyone that dismounts from those convoys should have a tightly defined role. If he’s perimeter security, he should be perimeter security. If someone needs to be arrested, that should be a call made by the convoy leader, and that arrest should be assigned to the designated arrest team.

In the prior fatal shooting, I actually think arresting Good was probably the right call, but who made that call? It seemed like it was just ... the guy next to her car door? And he immediately moved to effect the arrest of a person sitting behind the wheel of a running vehicle?

It’s like there’s zero leadership at the street level. They’re just tossing guys in cars and telling them to get arrests. They’re setting them up for failure, and failure is what we’re getting.

This is creating a lethally toxic soup with the local populace, who are doing all the stuff where they’re following the convoys, surrounding, interfering, and so on. From the Pretti incident, the ladies in the gray and brown coats were way too close. They’re in the street, right next to the agent [who] ends up pushing them across the street. The camera swings off them to record Pretti directing traffic, but there was some interaction that led to that, because when he first got out of the car, he didn’t make any move to arrest or push them back.

Speaking in terms of moral responsibility, I’m fine with saying that the feds have more responsibility for managing these confrontations, but they don’t have all of it. Protesters are responsible for their own actions, and if they want to observe the perfidious feds, they should do so from a reasonable distance. Whatever that distance is, it’s greater than 6” away while standing in the street.

As far as the actual instant of the shooting goes, my tentative read is that they’re fighting with Pretti and it’s not going well. At least two agents see his gun. Black stocking cap agent draws his gun as gray-jacket agent is moving to disarm Pretti. Someone in the scrum probably yells something about the gun, but we can’t hear anything because of all the stupid whistles. It really looks like gray-jacket agent NDs (i.e., accidentally fires) Pretti’s gun as he’s leaving the scrum. This causes a volley of gunfire. Everything from seeing the gun to the ND is about, what, 3 seconds?

Obviously analyzing and speculating about the instant of the shooting isn’t tremendously useful, because that’s just the moment when the spoonful of toxic soup reaches our collective lips. But it does show what I said up at the top of this hilariously long email essay, that we’re diagnosing problems we don’t have. All of the discourse is that this was an execution. People honestly think that it was somehow planned that they’d take his gun first, and then, knowing he was disarmed, murder him for funsies.

The proper response to “murder for funsies” feds is something like civil war.

The proper response to everything I’ve been talking about in this email is—well—whatever it is, it’s not civil war.

Walz almost certainly could have prevented all of this. Trump likes to embarrass his enemies, and he likes to make deals. When the surge got announced, Walz could have groveled, prostrate before the golden throne of the king of kings, begged for mercy, and promised to repeal the sanctuary laws. He wouldn’t even have to actually do it (indeed, he doesn’t have the power to do so). Merely the debasement and the promise would have probably sufficed.

But he didn’t, and here we are.

I have, I can promise you, no shortage of crimes to investigate. I’m currently assigned to property crimes investigations. I think city-wide, between all the precincts, there’s like ... maybe 10 of us? For every single one of the thousands of property crimes every year in the city? I don’t know what our clearance rate is for auto theft, but I think it’s probably under 1%. This whole thing sucks. I just want to do my job, and instead I’m doing everything but.

As a final note—the moment where Mr. Welch was talking about [Body-Worn Camera footage] of shootings really stuck out to me because he inadvertently revealed that he doesn’t really have a theory of mind of cops as human beings. He said that he thinks he sees restraint in BWC videos because the cops are afraid of prison or even paperwork. This is wrong. We try to avoid shooting people because we’re human beings who don’t want to kill someone unless we really have to. I’d be happy to talk about that more if anyone wants but just ... please try to remember that cops—even ICE & CBP agents, even bad cops doing bad things—are human beings that have human motivations.

In the unlikely event anyone reads this whole thing, thanks for your time.

(“Unlikely,” psshaw! All emails are read around these parts, and those with insider testimony go straight to the top of the pile. Thank you so, so much for the terrific insights. Also, that was Moynihan at the end, not me.)

*

From: Lucas

Subject: Police Request

Date: Jan. 30, 2026

Gentlemen,

As your favorite police chief (I hope) and a paying subscriber, I have a humble request to make about your coverage of the goings on in Minnesota and other things related to ICE. Could you differentiate between local police or “cops,” and federal agents?

I know that I am probably splitting hairs, but I don’t think it is unreasonable to recognize that our roles and our training are very different, as our friend Pete Moskos has already pointed out. We are cops, they are not. We occupy very different parts of the law enforcement spectrum. It is also us local police who will be left to clean up this national mess when ICE retreats and we are left with a lot of angry people who want to vent at the nearest uniform.

Matt, I realize this point may be lost on you since we are all still on that jack-booted spectrum, but I am still very fond of you.

(First, DING DING DING. Second, I will republish here what I immediately wrote back to our [indeed!] favorite police chief: “Dammit, Lucas, I defended cops’ honor as recently as Monday!”)

*

From: Kyle E.

Subject: The Karen (kuh-ren) Community in St. Paul

Date: Jan. 26, 2026

I’m a St. Paul native & resident, a Scandinavian-American Lutheran, and about as stereotypically Minnesotan as you will find. There’s a particular story happening locally that is not getting much attention. The Trump administration’s attempt to revoke Temporary Protective Status for refugees from Myanmar was only just stopped by a judge. I will elaborate why this is particularly concerning.

The Karen (kuh-ren) are an ethnic minority group from Myanmar and Thailand. Those in Myanmar were targeted by that country’s Burman-majority military. Often, villages were burned and people driven across the border into refugee camps in Thailand. In the sense that the Thai military was not actively trying to kill Karen civilians, things in the refugee camps were an improvement. But the Thai military would still do things like extort Karen refugees, which is particularly grim, given how little there is to extract from people in refugee camps.

To our country’s great credit, we brought in Karen refugees. These were not illegal immigrants. These were not asylum seekers; there is an official designation for immigrants claiming asylum, and another separate designation for refugees. The largest Karen expat community is here in St. Paul, standing at 20,000. Presently there are around 4,000 Karen who have refugee status and have been legally authorized to live here since the day they set foot on U.S. soil.

The Trump administration attempted to revoke that refugee status. It would have ended today, today. Thank God a judge has halted it. But for how long?

That the current administration attempted to revoke their status while Operation Metro Surge is ongoing is notably concerning. The civil war in Myanmar is still active. The army is still targeting civilians. Here is an AP report just published today.

I do not think I am being irrational in worrying that what may come next could be profoundly immoral.

The 20,000 form the entire expat Karen community are not overwhelming our institutions here in St. Paul proper (pop. 300,000), nor in the Twin Cities Metro area (pop. 3,760,000). And the 4,000 [who] are now at risk certainly even less so.

There is no excess criminality in our Karen expat community that you would not find in a population of any 20,000-some Americans. There is no widespread organized fraud. These were not economic migrants who made dishonest asylum claims. These are people who were persecuted and fled a conflict that is still ongoing, and came here legally—were brought here legally by our government.

I do not have the answer to this, but if deportations were to start, where will those deported be sent? These are Karen refugees that fled Myanmar. So, back to Myanmar into an ongoing civil war where the nation’s army will resume targeting them? Or, back into the camps in Thailand where they were shaken down for the next-to-nothing they had? Or, to a different country they have never known?

If any Karen individuals have committed serious crimes, and not repaid our nation’s generosity with appropriate gratitude, by all means deport those individuals. But attempting to revoke the refugee status of 4,000 Karen? What rank cruelty, what sin is this? I have been trying to reach out to a handful of the Karen I know, as it never occurred to me to ask about their specific immigration status.

(Thank you, Kyle, for your knowledge and your heart. The blunt and ugly reality is that the most influential White House official on immigration not named Donald Trump is someone who fundamentally believes, and is empowered to act upon, such inhumane nonsense as “The Refugee Act of 1980 has been one of the gravest historical calamities.” Not only have we cut annual refugee intake by 94%, down to 7,500 [the lowest total since we’ve been keeping records], but we’ve rescinded Temporary Protected Status and Humanitarian Parole for around 1.5 million people who up until that point were in this country legally. Many are being flown back to bewildering, precarious, and even life-threatening situations. These overlapping policies [including just ending visas for residents of 75 countries] are being enthusiastically embraced by the president, vice president, deputy White House chief of staff, secretary of state; basically everyone in the administration.)

*

From: Alex

Subject: Minneapolis from an Expat Historian

Date: Jan. 24, 2026

Hello gents, hope all is well. Hate to be a downer (I feel like I’ve done that a lot, but hey, I’m a paid subscriber of three years now), though it’s fair to say that as a Los Angeleno who is now 15 years removed from his hometown of Minneapolis but who maintains several close ties (including parents), I have been getting hit pretty hard by recent events. It now marks not one, not two, but now THREE brutal killings by law enforcement in and directly adjacent to the zip code of my birth and upbringing. The knot in my stomach I got in 2020 during the riots has returned, including the nagging feeling of relative helplessness at being 1,800 miles away. I was thrilled to see your guys’ emergency dispatch of sorts with Peter Moskos, who really helps make sense of this crap.

ANYWAY I obviously have my own thoughts on all this as a historian (in training, as I like to say), and I don’t want to enumerate them at length here since this email is long enough. But in short, it really feels like Minneapolis is under siege with psychological warfare from the federal government; maybe that’s too strong but I honestly don’t know how else to characterize it. Our mutual pal and fellow podcaster Jack Henneman inspired me to feel a little less gross about self-promotion when he sent our conversation to you guys, so if you fine fellows have the time to check out my essay on the subject that my long-time editor posted to his own Substack (by sheer coincidence only one hour before the shooting today), I think you might find it at least interesting to see where one Minneapolis native’s head is at.

Thanks again as always for everything you guys do and bring. It’s a cliche to say, but it really helps keep me sane.

(Thanks for extending the conversation, Alex!)

*

From: Mark E.

Subject: Lunatic Culture -- Ep. 540 (Paying Subscriber, Long Time)

Date: Jan. 16, 2026

Hi guys,

You’ve helped keep me sane through some pretty insane times. I think I first started following you all the way back when MM did an interview on The Federalist with Ben Domenech when he was running that joint. Simpler times...

I thought your discussion of ICE in Minneapolis was really good, but incomplete. First on the really good.... I’ll state my priors. I’m a former conservative-leaning-libertarian, now a conservative with nostalgia for libertarianism. I would have to say that Biden pushed me pretty hard to the right, especially on immigration. That means I have a bit of a tendency to be reflexively defensive of ICE.

I try to guard against that, but the media landscape is so fucking polarized that I don’t trust anything—literally anything—from the anti-ICE camp. I’ve seen this movie before, the media will not hesitate to straight up lie about ICE and border enforcement issues. If CNN reported that the sky was blue above an ICE detention facility, I’d be skeptical. But still, I don’t want to turn a blind eye where ICE is truly fucking up, and I know they are.

I trust you guys to be fair, and I think I needed to hear some fair coverage of ICE’s misdeeds. Thank you.

BUT, there’s another half of the story here that I think is at least equally important. The behavior of the people and the politicians in these “sanctuary jurisdictions” is truly appalling. They are basically in open defiance, not just of particular incidents or enforcement practices, but of the entire mission of immigration enforcement. And let’s not kid ourselves, inasmuch as there are some incidents of ICE picking on day workers or people going into their swearing-in ceremonies, the vast majority of their targets are really, really bad people. Which kind of makes you wonder: Why is it left to ICE to go get these guys? Where are the cops? The answer is that the cops have been told to stand down.

You’ll notice that this messy stuff isn’t happening in cities where local law enforcement cooperates with ICE, just in these #resistance jurisdictions. There is a culture of lawlessness in places like Minneapolis and Portland, and it’s been incubating with the encouragement of their corrupt, idiot politicians like Jacob Frey and Tim Walz. I was in Minneapolis for a wedding in 2021, and the feeling of lawlessness was palpable. I witnessed multiple police encounters with some local youngs and it was very clear that the youngs had no fear of or respect for law enforcement. My wife and I went out to walk the dogs after dark one night downtown and suddenly found ourselves in a situation where we didn’t feel safe. And we’re no snowflakes, we’ve both traveled a lot and both been in plenty of dicey situations. I’ve really only had that feeling in three places: Cape Town, Oaxaca, and Minneapolis. My wife escaped a kidnapping attempt at the border, and she was the first to speak up. It was a shit show.

That’s the environment up there. When Frey and Walz tell you that everything was fine before ICE showed up, they’re lying.

What about these citizen red brigades who have convinced themselves that we’re living under literal Hitler and what they need to do after dropping the kid off at Marxist Day Care is to spend the day following around federal law enforcement officers to harass and obstruct them? What about the politicians who encourage them and the networks behind them? Both Walz and Frey have made some pretty shocking comments strongly implying that the state of Minnesota could soon be in a state of armed rebellion against the federal government.

MM said that federal enforcement shouldn’t be used as a bargaining chip in reference to Trump-Mamdani. Doesn’t that apply equally to Walz and Frey? They don’t get to choose to exempt themselves from federal law. Fixing the immigration crisis was a key issue in the 2024 election and the country voted for (at least some form of) this. These #resistance assholes don’t get to shield corruption and lawlessness from federal law, otherwise we become Mexico.

I could go on and on about immigration, but that’s enough for now. Keep being awesome guys, we need you.

(We read out and responded to parts of this on Episode #541, but I wanted to enter the whole email into the permanent record, and reiterate my apology for blurting out Mark’s last name.)

*

From: Jason S.

Subject: MPD & ICE

Date: Jan. 24, 2026

Gentlemen,

Just listened to Episode #541. A few remarks:

There [was] some slight pushback regarding some of Mark E‘s claims about local PD being told to “stand down” around ICE/DHS activity. In Minneapolis at least, Mark is absolutely correct.

At MPD it is a firing offense for an officer to provide information to ICE about the immigration status of *anyone* in their custody—even in response to a direct inquiry. In other words, in Minneapolis, “sanctuary city” means that they do withhold “information about the violent convicted criminals under [MPD] jurisdiction” (as Matt phrased it).

But that is just the tip of the ICEberg. MPD has been MIA lately in no small part because it is dramatically understaffed—at or below 50%. The department still has not recovered from the massive attrition that followed the George Floyd mess, and officer absenteeism has risen markedly since December, when ICE began its activity in Minneapolis.

This information comes from a party who is in a position to know (and who is also a subscriber—I know because I gave them their NFC subscription).

All that said, IMO, it is still true that the “worst of the worst” claims are bullshit and that the arbitrary, incompetent, and chaotic actions of ICE/DHS imperils MPD safety and authority. The present situation threatens to cause a total collapse of MPD, as morale plummets and more officers use up PTO and take early retirement. This is what the Minneapolis Mayor-Council have sought for the better part of a decade.

(DING to you and DING to the party that’s in a position to know!)

*

From: Elizabeth S.

Subject: Another Letter from Minneapolis

Date: Jan. 22, 2026

Hi guys,

The letter you received calling your points about Minneapolis “incomplete” was itself incomplete. It’s not true that ICE is behaving better in areas where local officials are more cooperative. In Willmar, MN, they are at a Mexican restaurant and went back hours later to stalk and arrest the workers. Willmar is in a red county that voted for Trump by over 60%:

That’s just one example. ICE has been stomping around smaller towns and rural communities, and have been met with protests there too.

There’s also a report circulating that they detained a five-year-old child to use as bait so they could arrest people in his house. “Uncooperative local governments” is not a defense for that. Moreover, it happened in Columbia Heights, an inner-ring suburb heavily populated with immigrants. Jacob Frey is not mayor there, so anything he’s said or done is not license for ICE to act like assholes there.

Third, I feel you have an incomplete picture of Jacob Frey. He does not want and is [not] encouraging political violence. He has been telling people to go home when protests become unlawful assemblies, and constantly reminds people to engage in lawful activities. The progressives hate him for it. If he sees political violence as an opportunity, as you suggested, then why is he so despised by progressives? “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” sounded irresponsible to you but was necessary for validating his community’s anger and acting as a pressure-release valve. You see someone who said something performative. I see someone who understands his constituents. He’s also taking flak from progressives for refusing to say “Abolish ICE.”

Also, for context, the person who led the protest into the church was Nekima Levy Armstrong, who ran for mayor in 2017 and lost to Frey. She has often been at the forefront of these things, and is telling people that the mayor and police chief have abandoned them. She deserves some criticism, but maybe you have to be a local to know that. She also was just arrested by the FBI.

I agree with you that some of the protest tactics are counterproductive and that they’ll make things worse. I’m frustrated, because I know they’ll never listen. But that doesn’t mean no one is trying to get it right. A friend of mine attended “upstander training” where she learned that it’s counterproductive to taunt ICE agents. I want to go to one of these trainings, but they seem to be constantly full.

As a fifth generation Minneapolitan, I get awfully tired of people who view us as flyover country constantly talking down to us. So I wanted to provide some of the more granular details I feel were missing from your conversation.

Like a lot of people, I just want this to end. My personal life is in a holding pattern because everyone’s so busy with ICE, everything else is on the back burner until who knows when. It’s maddening, really.

Anyway, I hope you’ll take these things into consideration next time you talk about my city.

(Indeed we will, and indeed we did; reading excerpts from this on a recent episode. Thank you, Elizabeth! And thanks again to all our local correspondents for testifying. Do we need some healing music from our greatest Minneapolitan? Yes, we do: