The less densely populated areas outside the Twin Cities make it harder for protesters and observers to organize.
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 up in front of her, getting out of their car, and threatening her with bear mace. This time, the figure on the other side of the glass was friendlier: not an ICE agent, just the manager of the auto shop. We were blocking a loading zone, he said, and he was fine with us loitering in the parking lot, but could we move our car up a bit?
Lety was out watching ICE, which she tries to do a couple times a week. Eventually the ICE agents left and we did too. Lety led us to Sunny Acres, the mobile home park 20 miles south of the Twin Cities where there had been rumors of ICE activity earlier that morning. We ran into another patroller and he and Lety exchanged pleasant, cautious hellos, addressing each other by their respective Signal codenames. He hadn’t seen ICE yet, but he worried it was just a matter of time…