Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
New ICE Occupation Longread Just Dropped
Minnesotans might not learn much from Emily Witt’s lengthy piece on Operation Metro Surge in the New Yorker, but it’s invaluable to have all this detail documented so thoroughly in one definitive place. And it’s certainly the only story about ICE’s Minnesota occupation you’ll read today that spells “coöperation” with a diaeresis. (Yes, that’s what those dots are called.)
Witt speaks to patrolling neighbors, court observers, state and local government officials, detainees (including a Peruvian man waiting for his green card who was shipped off to Texas), one of the Minneapolis 15 defendants, a former federal attorney, and an activist who offers one of the most Minneapolis quotes ever: “What if we lived in a utopia where puppets drove civic action?”
They’re Gonna Put Us in the Movies
In other “the world notices us” news, They’re Here, a short doc about Operation Metro Surge that edits together street-level filming, dashcam footage, and crowdsourced data opens at the Venice Film Festival next week.
The documentary is a collaboration between local filmmaker Rachel Lauren Mueller (who I’m pretty sure I met earlier this summer?) and non-local filmmaker Laura Poitras (most recently celebrated for her doc about artist and activist Nan Goldin, All The Beauty and the Bloodshed; we’ve never met)…