Last Thursday, I sat idling in my car, waiting for a photographer colleague to finish an assignment. An SUV pulled up in front of me. A middle-aged white woman, with a no-nonsense haircut, dressed in a puffy coat and big sunglasses, opened the car door. She leaned out of the driver’s seat and stared at me for a while. I realized she was trying to decide if I was an ICE officer.
I took the large press badge sitting on my dashboard and raised it for her to see. She waved and got back inside her car. A moment later, a woman who looked Latina stepped out of the passenger side, and walked to the house across the street.
I saw my first ICE vehicle in Minneapolis at the very start of the new year. It passed in front of the car I was in with my husband, and entered an alley a few blocks from my home, the slogan Defend The Homeland written on its side. Later, the vehicles would rarely be marked.
I ate arepas that night with friends at a restaurant where, a month earlier, immigration agents without a signed judicial warrant were turned away. The restaurant’s owner was praised for knowing her rights as a business owner…