After the government declares mission complete in Minneapolis, aggressive ICE occupation continues in small-town Minnesota

Magdalena fought hard for her American dream. Now, it is dying on the side of a road near the Shakopee, Hy-Vee supermarket.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents surround her car with handguns and rifles drawn. They are all wearing masks.

More agents swarm the car in front of her. It holds her two teenage daughters. They are both American citizens and on their way to school. An ICE agent starts banging on her windshield.

She doesn’t know what to do.

The agent with the rifle demands Magdalena’s papers.

“Roll down the fucking window!”

He stares her down.

Magdalena is frightened. All she can do is beg for her children.

“Let them go. They are citizens. Please.”

Life in Shakopee

Magdalena grew up in Mexico City. (Those appearing in the story by first name only have had their names changed to protect against ICE retribution.) She tells me that when she was 12, her mother crossed the border with her older brother because she feared her son would become entangled in gang violence. Her mom came back for her two years later, and they crossed the border into Texas. Mom and daughter split up after crossing the border — reasoning that traveling as a family made them more suspicious. She spent a week alone in a Texas border motel waiting for a ride to Denver. She often thanks God that nothing unspeakable happened to her.

Around two weeks later, she was reunited with her mom and brother in a town called Shakopee, Minnesota, about 25 miles from Minneapolis.

The main bridge over the Minnesota River into Minneapolis often floods over in the spring, making the journey into the city a 90-minute trip. But a new bridge was built high above the river around 1996, and over a generation, the small town morphed into a suburb of nearly 50,000. Now, it is Everytown, USA, with a Panera, an Applebee’s, and a Wednesday-night trivia contest downtown at Mana Brewing.

None of that meant anything to Magdalena as a child, she just knew her friends were in Shakopee. That made it all the more surprising when after a year, Magdalena’s mom told her they were moving to another town 10 miles away. She asked why.

“You are just hanging out with the other Mexican kids; you’re never going to learn English here.”

So, Magdalena moved to the new town where she and her brother were the seventh and eighth Spanish-speaking kids out of hundreds of students. Her mom’s plan worked, today she speaks impeccable English.

She returned to Shakopee and fell in love with a man who had arrived in Minnesota at 15 under similar circumstances. But there was one difference: Magdalena had filed papers under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Act (DACA) that granted legal status and work permits for undocumented immigrants brought to America as minors. She now was legal. Her husband is not, despite being in Minnesota since the last century.

They now have four children, all citizens. For decades, Magdalena kept a low profile, taking her daughters to dance class and helping new arrivals adjust to Shakopee life. She loved to read about her new country. Once, she told a friend that her hero was Harriet Tubman, the former slave who went back to the American South to help others escape through the Underground Railroad.

“It’s one thing to escape from danger, but to return to that danger and help others takes so much courage,” Magdalena once said.

Magdalena didn’t want her four children to have her vagabond childhood, so they stayed put in Shakopee in the same mobile-home community. Her husband ran his own business. Life was hectic, but it was good.

Then, in December, President Donald Trump sent thousands of ICE agents to Minne­sota. The president raged that Somali American fraud in Minnesota was the reason for the surge. Then why, Magdalena wondered, are so many of the people being arrested Hispanic? And why, if the focus is Minneapolis, as the news reported, are there dozens of dark-tinted SUVs circling her neigh­borhood?

Magdalena and her family take precautions. Her husband shuts down his business. She makes sure her girls have their passports with them at all times and begins following them on their 10-minute drive to Shakopee High School as an added precaution.

As Magdalena tells it, it is just after 8 a.m. in mid-January, and the temperature is still below zero. Magdalena’s girls load up their car for school. That’s when Magdalena notices the silver SUV. Magdalena loads up her car, and the SUV slowly creeps ahead.

She motions for the girls to drive. Three more SUVs pull out of a parking lot and join the silver SUV. They tailgate Magdalena. She texts a neighbor and tells them to spread the word that ICE is in the area.

“Don’t come out.”

The silver SUV pulls out of the caravan and speeds past Magadalena and her daughters’ car. He throws on his flashing lights and forces the two cars off the road. The other SUVs pull up and box the two cars in.

A half-dozen agents stalk toward Magdalena’s car. Two of them pull handguns. A third brandishes a rifle. Magdalena’s first thoughts are for her girls. One of her daughters has special needs, and she knows she will go to pieces. Agents bang on her girls’ car windows. Magdalena can’t focus. She sees her kids crying hysterically. The girls press their passports against the window. Magdalena doesn’t want to think of what would have happened if one of them left her passport in another jacket.

“Please, I really have to go to the bathroom. Please,” one of the girls says.

The girls are released after about 15 minutes. They drive away, and the agents focus on Magdalena. She cracks the window and again asks why they stopped her. An angry agent manually forces her window all the way down.

“She’s resisting. Get her out of the car.”

Magdalena refuses to move. The agents eventually tell her the car she is driving was linked to an undocumented citizen. This isn’t true, it is registered to her stepfather, who is documented.

She shows the agents her DACA paperwork.

“This doesn’t mean anything.”

She refuses to give them the papers. She knows they have a habit of not returning them. Instead, Magdalena produces another letter from the United States government that states her DACA status prevents her from being deported. This flummoxes the agents, and they make a series of calls.

Eventually, the agents say she could be deported based on an old ticket she received for driving without a license in the 2000s. This was from before she had DACA status. For a moment, she doesn’t remember the ticket. The agent screams at her.

“You’re lying to us.”

Magdalena has visions of being hauled away to an ICE detention center and never seeing her children again. (This isn’t paranoia. The DHS admits in February to deporting 86 DACA recipients.) She tries to focus.

“I’m done talking. You’re trying to trap me. I want to talk to my lawyer.”

Finally, another agent comes up.

“She’s OK. Let her go.”

Then Magdalena says something that she later regrets.

“Thank you.”

Magdalena drives up to Shakopee High School, home of the Sabers. She parks and finds her daughters waiting in the office. They hug and fall to the floor, crying and shaking.

In February, I asked Magdalena why she thinks they were stopped.

“They saw my brown skin. That’s all.”

I didn’t hear hatred in her voice or in the voices of others targeted. They all just wanted one thing: to be treated like Americans.

A Small Town Transformed by ICE Occupation

By the time I arrive in Shakopee, the town is in the second month of an ICE occupation. The media is focused on Minneapolis, but Shakopee is living through its own hell. Everyone is exhausted — from the kids at Sweeney Elementary missing their Hispanic friends to the abuela stuck inside her home since Christmas.

Brad Tabke looks different, too. There are dark circles under his eyes, and his beard is grayer than I remember. I first met Tabke, a state representative, six months ago at the Shakopee Brewhall for a story on his friend and mentor, Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, who was murdered last June.

After some tears, we make small talk and I remark how the quaint Shakopee downtown reminds me of the Michigan town where I lived when I was in high school. Tabke used to be Shakopee’s mayor and gives me a “You don’t know the half of it” grin.

“Not anymore.”

You can still get glimpses of the old Shakopee when you watch the Shakopee Sabers play hockey at the ice arena, where the boards are festooned with ads for Tommy’s Malt Shop. There are downtown pubs serving craft ales to Paul Bunyan types. In a generation, the town has diversified, with 35 percent of the population classified as immigrants, mostly South Asian, Hispanic, and Somali, in that order.

How we got from those demographic facts to ICE agents terrorizing teenage girls on their way to school is a window into the Donald Trump years, and a policy of terror built on one lie that leads to more lies.

Trump has convinced himself that he did not lose Minnesota three times in his presidential bids, but — wait for it — the elections were stolen from him. He despises Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was also the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2024. On Thanksgiving evening, Trump called Walz “seriously retarded” for allowing, in his words, Somalian gangs to roam Minnesota causing mayhem. On Dec. 1, Trump sent more than 3,000 ICE agents into the state with the goal of eradicating the Somalian criminal element responsible for perpetrating fraud against the federal government in a series of health care scams.

Trump’s invasion was based on a shred of fact. The Minnesota fraud scandals are real, beginning with Feed Our Future, where $250 million was stolen from a fund earmarked to feed children during the pandemic. In 2022, 47 people were charged — most have either been found guilty or made plea deals. (The mastermind of the scheme was a white woman.)

In 2025, a federal prosecutor alleged that Somalian-led groups may have looted up to $9 billion from Medicaid programs. Trump claimed it was actually $18 billion and labeled members of the Somali community “pirates.” (So far, the Minnesota Star Tribune lists the proven fraud amount to be $200 million.)

Real scandal morphed into Salem levels of hysteria in December. That’s when right-wing influencer Nick Shirley shot video purporting to show closed sham day-care centers in Minneapolis that garnered 135 million views on X. None of Shirley’s claims have been officially substantiated, but it didn’t matter. Trump then moved thousands of ICE agents into Minnesota with the purported goal of capturing Somali fraudsters and deporting them.

There was just one other problem with Trump’s ICE surge: Somali Americans make up less than two percent of Minnesota’s total population, and the overwhelming majority of them — law-abiding or criminally inclined — are American citizens or legal residents. Soon, it became clear that most Minnesotans swept up in ICE raids were not Somali and/or the worst of the worst, as Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem like to frame it. No, they were Hispanic people who have nothing to do with social-welfare scams, real or imagined.

In one way, Shakopee was already a right-wing influencer’s dream. In 2021, an undocumented Cuban immigrant decapitated his girlfriend, America Thayer, with a knife and left her body on a Shakopee street. (He was acquitted due to mental illness and sent to a mental-health facility.) Any complaints about ICE tactics could be met online with grisly photos and comments about Thayer’s murder.

The Trump administration started slowly in Shakopee, first notifying local factories that many of their employees did not have work papers. Some laborers simply stopped showing up to work. In early December, ICE vehicles circled school-bus stops and predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods.

That’s when Tabke and his wife, Katy, a high school teacher, activated their connections. They held seminars on how Shakopee residents could help their besieged friends. The Shakopee resistance was nonconfrontational; if law enforcement asked you to back up, you didn’t confront them, you backed up, and lived to resist on another day.

“If you want to be more aggressive and in their faces, there’s other organizations,” Tabke told attendees. “That’s not us.”

The volunteers patrolled Shakopee neighborhoods where ICE was hitting the hardest, and packed and delivered groceries to 350 families. Not that all of Shakopee was on board. The town is the ultimate purple district; Tabke was reelected by 14 votes in 2024 after a contentious recount. Trump’s aggressive attacks emboldened bigots in the community.

Mary Hernandez runs Mi CASA, a nonprofit that delivers food and other goods to low-income families. In December, she was leaving Shakopee’s Chipotle, and a woman threw a soft drink at her, screaming, “Go back home.” Another member of her team was collecting toys for a Christmas toy drive when a man shouted, “Why are you in my country?” In January, a woman was arrested in Shakopee’s Cub Foods parking lot after screaming ethnic slurs and curses at a Hispanic woman and leaving a note on her car saying she was reporting her to ICE.

“Trump gave people permission to be cruel,” Hernandez tells me.

I don’t realize until much later that the first person Tabke introduces me to in Shakopee is Mary’s daughter, Ashley Gomez, a sweet college student. She has sad eyes and looks tired from helping her mother run Mi CASA. She is an American citizen like her mom.

“I only go out for school,” says Gomez. “I’m afraid — what if I get pulled over and forget my passport? I don’t want to go to one of those detention centers, even if it is just for a few hours. I have anxiety. Bad things happen to women there.” She shrugs and seems to shrink inside her hoodie.

“That shouldn’t happen in my own country.”

‘They Come for Criminals, But Go After Customers’

Not everyone in Shakopee embraces Tabke’s nonconfrontational advice.

Luis Ramirez is going through his daily ritual outside of La Flor de Jalisco, his mom’s restaurant and market in Shakopee, located next to a coin laundromat and across from a pawn shop. He steps out onto the cracked pavement in the parking lot and shouts at an SUV with an ICE agent behind the wheel.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

The agent puts the car into drive and shouts back.

“I hope you’ve paid your taxes.”

Ramirez shouts, “You’re a piece of shit,” as the SUV peels out. He steps back into the restaurant and locks the doors, an odd move since it is lunch hour.

“Customers knock, and if we recognize them, we let them in,” Ramirez tells me. He smiles. “Someone thought you were ICE, but I told them you were OK.”

Ramirez is intent on making La Flor de Jalisco an island of safety. He has largely succeeded; nearly every Spanish-speaking source suggests we meet at the restaurant Ramirez’s mom opened six years ago. Still, the place is only half-full, the customers eating their food quietly in a dining room decorated with portraits of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Ramirez says that before ICE there would be a line out the door at lunchtime.

“All the construction sites shut down, and we got really slow,” he says.

Ramirez is in his thirties, with fierce brown eyes. He has three kids but still looks like he gets carded at the liquor store. In January, he saw on a friend’s live Facebook feed that ICE had two construction workers trapped on the refuse of a half-built house about four miles away. He jumped into his truck and a few minutes later pulled up at the worksite.

Ramirez went up to the second floor, where an ICE agent was pointing a gun at a construction worker balancing himself precariously on the half-built roof with a rope tied to a post down below. The agent pulled on the rope. Fearing the worker was going to fall from his wobbly perch, Ramirez grabbed the rope to steady it. Within seconds, Ramirez was swarmed by three agents. They punched him in the ribs, hogtied his feet and hands, carried him downstairs, and threw him into an SUV. An agent shouted at him.

“You’re looking at a bunch of felonies for assaulting an officer. What’s your name?”

Ramirez told the agent he never touched anyone and wouldn’t give any ID until he was charged. The agent tried another tactic.

“I’m going to pepper spray you right now.”

Ramirez told him to go ahead, but the agent didn’t spray him.

The SUV came to a stop, and the driver made some calls. A few minutes later, the agents told Ramirez they were letting him out at La Flor de Jalisco. Bruised and shaken, it took about 30 minutes for him to realize the possible reason why ICE cut him loose.

“Renee Good had just been shot,” he tells me. “I think someone told them to let me go because of that.”

Since then, Ramirez has made it his mission to protect his mom and her business. Every day, ICE returns and takes down the license plates of every car in the parking lot, and every day Ramirez tells them to fuck off.

“They want to come after the criminals, go ahead,” says Ramirez. “But they are going after customers and my mom’s business, and that’s not right.”

Then, his mom, Francisca, walks over from the cash register. She is a tiny woman, and lightly puts her hands on her son’s shoulders. I ask her if she worries about her boy. She responds in Spanish.

“Of course.”

Then she smiles a little.

“But I am also proud.”

‘ICE Has Done Some Crazy Things. We’re a Little Scared’

It is still black night in Shakopee when I meet Linda Simenstad in the parking lot of an apartment building. We’d arranged to meet there at 6:45 a.m. so I could ride along with her observing ICE activity. I roll down my window and give a wave. She doesn’t wave back. Instead, she calls my out-of-state license plate into her dispatcher and has it run through a database of known ICE vehicles. (This happens to me multiple times while in Shakopee.) Only then does she drive over to me.

“Sorry about that,” says Simenstad, a fortyish teacher. “ICE has done some crazy things, and we’re all a little scared.”

Tabke has had his truck’s plates run multiple times by ICE while observing, and has arrived home only to find an ICE vehicle sitting in front of his house. (A DHS spokesperson says, “ICE did not follow a state representative to his home.”)

One night, a helicopter hovered over his home. Drones crisscross his neighborhood after dark.

Then there is Steve Stauff. He is a strawberry-blond middle-aged professional who would not look out of place in an Eddie Bauer catalog. One morning, he was in his truck observing an ICE vehicle from a block away. Suddenly, an ICE SUV pulled in front of him and four agents jumped out and shouted.

“We will find out where you live,” he remembers one saying. “We will shoot you in front of your house!”

The terror in Shakopee conjures up the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth”:

Paranoia strikes deep.

Into your life, it will creep.

It starts when you’re always afraid.

Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away.

I’m not immune. I pull out of my Airbnb driveway about a week into my stay and notice a GMC Yukon Denali behind me. The windows are darkly tinted, and the car has Florida plates. The SUV follows a little too closely and seems to be heading toward a Shakopee middle school where I am meeting volunteers boxing and delivering groceries to needy families. Is it ICE or just a Minnesota snowbird tightwad who registered his SUV at his Sarasota condo to save money on car insurance? I never find out.

Simenstad is a mom with three kids in their teens and early twenties; one has medical needs that require someone to always be in the house with her. Still, she spends most of her nonworking hours observing ICE. Recently, she got into an argument with an agent hanging out by a school-bus stop, a common ICE tactic meant to scare undocumented parents into coming out to protect their children, only to be scooped up by law enforcement.

“Why are you scaring kids?” she asked.

The ICE agent said they were looking for a criminal.

“If what you’re doing is legal, drive up to their house and arrest them.”

The ICE agent ends the conversation by telling her to leave or she will be arrested for impeding an investigation.

As the sun comes up, Simenstad drives in and out of the parking lots of the heavily Hispanic-settled apartment buildings near the Shakopee police station. In the early days of the ICE action, federal SUVs would simply park behind dumpsters and grab any brown-skinned resident coming out of the building, according to Tabke.

“They say they are going after the worst of the worst, but that’s not true,” Tabke says. “They never have a warrant for a specific person. They’re just grabbing anyone who isn’t white.” (“Allegations that DHS law enforcement engages in ‘racial profiling’ are disgusting, reckless, and categorically false,” a DHS spokesperson says. “DHS conducts enforcement operations in line with the U.S. Constitution and all applicable federal laws.”)

It has become a cat-and-mouse game between ICE and Shakopee activists. ICE vehicles pull into one of those parking lots, and we follow at a distance. ICE spots us and circles around, often hiding out in the stalls of a self car wash across the street. Meanwhile, Simenstad warns a bodega owner to keep his door locked. By 8 a.m., the ICE presence is undeniable, agents can be seen putting on their bulletproof vests in the police-station parking lot.

Now, ICE is following us. Simenstad jumps out of her car and blows a shrill whistle, a warning for residents to stay inside behind locked doors.

A caravan of three SUVs flies by a few minutes later. The dispatcher sends Simenstad and two other observers to follow them, worried that the activity around the apartment buildings was a planned distraction and that ICE is going to hit a construction site a few miles away.

The ICE caravan abruptly turns into a residential neighborhood at high speed. The cars split up, and we end up following a Ford Edge without license plates. It abruptly stops, and we drive by. Simenstad circles back and parks 40 yards away, a safe distance, according to her training. After a few minutes, the Edge does a U-turn and drives straight at us. At the last second, the Edge veers to the side and slams on its brakes, maybe an inch from Simenstad’s door.

The masked driver yells at Simenstad to roll down her window. She refuses. Instead, she holds up a piece of paper stating that she has the legal right to observe ICE activities from a safe distance. The driver yells back, shaking his head.

“Watch the news. That’s changed. You can’t do it. That’s not the law anymore.”

We are both rattled but remain confident that we did not miss the passing of any new laws on the subject.

Simenstad doesn’t want to pull away because she fears that will lead to an arrest on a charge of evading law enforcement. We sit for maybe 10 minutes. Eventually, Simenstad exhales.

“I’m going to go.”

As soon as we move, the ICE SUV begins tailgating us. Simenstad asks the dispatcher what to do. She tells Simenstad to call 911 and drive back toward the police station. (The activists’ relations with local police is excellent.) She follows the instructions.

“Scott County 911, what’s your emergency?”

“I have a vehicle following me really close. I believe it’s ICE. There’s no license plate on front or back.”

Simenstad gives our coordinates, just passing St. Francis Regional Medical Center.

We ride in silence for a few minutes until we see the police station. We pull into the parking lot where a squad car is waiting. It is only when he sees the cop that the ICE driver gets off our bumper. A police officer talks to ICE and then walks over to Simenstad.

She tells the cop ICE is using the police station parking lot as a staging area. The cop looks frustrated.

“We just let them use the bathroom as a professional courtesy. But the parking lot is a public area.”

Simenstad needs to go home and check in with her kids.

It’s not quite 10 a.m.

Standing Up for Community — and Putting Family at Risk

I’m supposed to meet Sara on a Saturday morning, but it’s not easy. Originally, she wants to meet a half-hour away in Minneapolis, where no one knows her. Eventually, she agrees to lunch at Flor de Jalisco. Her husband, Henry, is coming along, but arrives separately. Sara pulls into the parking lot and calls me. She asks for my license plate. Only then does she get out of the car and come inside.

Sara and her husband are American citizens. They met in Los Angeles, but moved to Shakopee more than a decade ago, looking for a quieter and cheaper place to raise their family. She is slight and light-skinned, he is a big guy who is dark-skinned, tattooed, and wears a Dodgers cap.

On a holiday weekend, Sara and Henry drove over to a mobile-home park to pick up two teenage girls and take them to a youth-club party. (Their parents were too scared of ICE to leave their house.)

Sara and Henry were surrounded by masked ICE agents with guns drawn. It’s like Magdalena’s encounter, but lasts longer. An ICE agent pointed a rifle at their windshield and demanded that they get out of their car. They refused and the standoff only ended when the agents began shivering in the subzero cold and retreated to their cars.

It isn’t the only time the couple have been hassled by ICE in Shakopee.

“Now, we always take separate cars,” Sara says. She grabs her husband’s arm. “Because he is dark-skinned. I can pass; he can’t.”

Henry tells me a story. Recently, he brought their seven-year-old to get the car washed. He thought she’d get a kick out of the suds and whirling brushes. An attendant in a face mask because of the cold motioned for Henry to pull up. His daughter screamed.

“It’s ICE, Daddy! We have to get out of here.”

Sara and Henry are like many here who face a terrible choice: They want to help their community but are afraid that if they are arrested, it leaves their kids without a parent. In other cases, there are American citizens who want to help but don’t want to endanger undocumented family members.

That’s the dilemma for Maria, a white-collar professional who is an American citizen. In December, her nephew went to a long-scheduled USCIS appointment in Minneapolis on what he thought was just another step in the laborious process toward legal residency. Instead, ICE arrested him. Within a day, he was flown to a notorious El Paso, Texas, detention facility. For a month, he lived in a crowded windowless room. He did not see natural light the entire time, and lost track if it was night or day.

Last week, he called Maria and told her he was losing his mind. He was going to self-deport to Mexico. There was just one problem: ICE was so backed up with paperwork, they told him, it would be more than a month before they could process him and deport him to Mexico, just a few miles away. He must spend another month in hell.

The nephew asked Maria if she would take care of his son, a teenage American citizen. She readily agreed but worried about her work with the Shakopee activists. If she got arrested, she tells me, the boy would have no one. The result is that volunteer groups like Mi CASA are now almost all-white.

“Our people are afraid to help, and I understand,” Hernandez tells me.

That makes what Sara does next extremely brave. She volunteers to take me to meet and translate for a Hispanic family that has been holed up in its trailer-park home since Christmas.

It is the first sunny day in a brutally cold week, but the blinds inside are down. The place is immaculately clean but chaotic. On the couch sits 47-year-old Camila and her daughter, Isabella, who is in her early twenties. Bouncing off the walls are Isabella’s kids, who can’t go outside and play.

“I live 22 years in Mexico and the rest here, so 25 years here in Shakopee,” says Camila. “I came when my daughter was eight months old. I love Shakopee because it is so peaceful.”

Camila has two other teenage kids; a son and a daughter. They are both citizens, but Isabella is not. So, while her two younger children can go to school and work, Isabella is mostly housebound here with her mother.

For years, Camila has made a decent living cleaning the grand houses that line a nearby country club, sometimes with Isabella’s help. At first, Camila and Isabella kept working despite ICE’s presence. Her posh clients would tell her she had nothing to worry about. They even made jokes. One day, a man at one of their houses handed Camila a carton of ice cream.

“He said, ‘You better put the ice cream away before you get in trouble,’” Camila tells me with a perplexed shrug.

Then, one early morning, ICE took away her neighbor. Working was now out of the question. Isabella called one of the houses they cleaned and told them they couldn’t make it anymore.

“You guys are fine,” said the woman. “But they started letting too many in.” She complained about the protesters. “They need to let ICE do their jobs.” Isabella didn’t say anything. The woman blathered some more. “You guys are great, hardworking people.”

“It’s weird,” says Isabella. “My mom is the most by-the-book person in the world. It sucks.”

Camila spends most of the day preparing meals for her family. It isn’t easy. She shows me how she cooks in a crouch or on her knees so that her shadow doesn’t appear in the window. The kitchen sink is broken, but she doesn’t dare call a repairman. Camila must do all of the dishes and kitchen prep in the bathroom sink.

She says she feels like her mental health is deteriorating. She feels guilty about her son, who must do all of the shopping and errands while also taking college classes. Recently, he hurt his back. Camila gets teary telling me how bad she felt that she couldn’t take him to the doctor.

It’s time for Camila to start making dinner, and I thank her and Isabella for letting me into their home. Camila tells me that it is important to tell their story.

“I’m OK talking because we have to tell the news,” Camila says. “They don’t say the real truth. They say we are criminals. We are not criminals. And when we have the opportunity to speak, we don’t speak.”

She pauses for a moment and looks confused.

“The people we work for are wealthy people; we have the code to their house. And they trust us. So why do they say we are criminals?”

I don’t have an answer.

A Town Forever Changed

The long-term impact of ICE’s occupation of Shakopee is deep and toxic. One day, I help more than a hundred volunteers pack up boxes of food and diapers for families. The drivers are given addresses, but are told not to knock or wave, just leave the groceries on the doorstep.

I trudge through the snow and leave a box outside of a dark townhouse. Upstairs, I see a shy girl — maybe seven — peek out. That night, I lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling. I can’t make the girl’s face disappear. What is her life like? What can she possibly think of this country?

That Sunday, I accept an invitation to attend services at Iglesia Vida Nueva en Cristo Jesús, a small chapel across the street from Mike Lindell’s My Pillow outlet store.

The pastors, Juan and Victoria Vargas, are a married couple and American citizens who I met through their 20-year-old daughter, Alondra, another citizen hassled by ICE in Shakopee. Victoria wears a long traditional dress, and her husband is in a suit and yellow tie. They are originally from Mexico, but have been here for 25 years, starting their church seven years ago.

“Before ICE, this town was beautiful and so full of peace,” says Victoria in Spanish. Back then, the services attracted around 70 people. Since the crackdown, the service has garnered maybe 10 worshippers a week.

They have started a WhatsApp for their parishioners, and the chat is filled with stories of despair and depression. Victoria recites Psalm 46, verses one and two to the frightened in her flock.

“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.”

I ask Victoria what she loves most about America. She smiles and points at Alondra.

“America gave me her.”

Alondra explains. As a baby she was diagnosed with pediatric cancer and given only a small chance of surviving. But skilled Minnesota doctors operated on her and saved her. She knows she would have had no chance in Mexico. Victoria smiles.

“She is my American miracle.”

A few minutes later, the service begins and Victoria sings in Spanish about Christ’s love. Her voice soars into an empty space. Today, there are eight attendees. I look around and everyone is singing, but they are also sobbing, some so hard they fall to their knees.

I turn my phone back on after leaving the church. Linda Simenstad has sent me a photo. It is outside one of the apartment buildings she patrolled last week with me. An old woman is being handcuffed by ICE. She is terrified and vomits on her clothes.

When the World Moves On

On Feb. 12, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, holds a press conference in Minneapolis and announces ICE had completed its mission and would begin pulling out its 4,000 agents. He says this was possible because Minnesota county sheriffs were now cooperating with ICE and turning over undocumented criminals to the feds for deportation.

Like the entire incursion, this was a lie. As a policy, county sheriffs notify the feds if they hold a jailed criminal who they know is undocumented. What they generally wouldn’t do is hold them past their release date. ICE chronically failed to pick up the criminals on their release date, and then blamed local police for the “worst of the worst” disappearing back into the state. The policy remained the same as it was on the day ICE arrived.

Nevertheless, the national media packed up and moved on. This didn’t matter in Shakopee because the national media had never shown up.

Then a strange thing happened in Shakopee: ICE did not leave.

It is Feb. 15 and Brad Tabke is exhausted. He has just returned from Washington, D.C., where he met with congressional Democrats to discuss their list of demands that must be met before they would vote for further ICE funding. It felt futile to Tabke — Trump and ICE would continue doing whatever they wanted.

Like the rest of his town, Tabke is at his breaking point as the ICE siege enters a third month. His family was recently doxxed after the right wing “discovered” his network of activists communicating on Signal and called for his arrest. He is getting regular death threats, some serious enough that the police have traced the calls and visited the perpetrator. Tabke tries to tell himself that he and the rest of the community have done some good.

In January, he obtained a document that showed that a cavernous warehouse on the edge of town was scheduled to be acquired by ICE and become a detention facility in 2026. Shakopee activists put a full-court press on the corporation that owns the space, letting it know in no uncertain terms that the corporation would never do business again in Shakopee if it leased its property to the feds. The corporation backed down, and the Shakopee site was removed from ICE’s list of new facilities.

This Sunday, Tabke and Katy get into their truck and begin driving through ICE areas. They are not surprised when a red Chevy Blazer pulls behind them — Tabke had noticed another vehicle in front of his house that morning. For the next 30 minutes, the car follows from behind, then passes them, and then disappears. Eventually, Tabke pulls into the parking lot of the Shakopee Fire Department in hopes of shaking any other ICE vehicles.

What he finds is six or seven ICE cars and 11 agents waiting. He rolls down his window, and they insist they just want to talk. They insist this is all a coincidence, but he wonders if it is an ambush. (A DHS spokesperson says they were conducting a targeted operation.) Katy doesn’t think it is a good idea, but Tabke gets out.

He lets the agents know that he is recording the conversation, and the ICE agents say that is cool. (He later shares the recording with me.) Tabke listens to the agents talk, and what he hears makes him wonder about his sanity. The agents, many who are Hispanic, insist they are the real victims. They complain about cars honking at them and blowing whistles. Tabke almost loses it when an agent tells him it is the agents who are being tarred with a broad brush, not the folks being arrested.

“What we are doing is targeted enforcement,” says a senior agent who is white and well over six feet tall. “Unfortunately, anybody else brought is just caught up in the collateral.” (This is contradicted by another agent who insists that they are here to remove all undocumented residents.) The agents insist they do not do racial profiling, and mention the Canadians and Russians who they have detained.

The head agent tells him the policy is one warning for following, and that Tabke and others can be arrested for impeding an investigation on a second offense. Tabke is lost for words and sputters out that is not the law.

He tells them stories from his Shakopee community, Magdalena’s encounter, his friend Steve’s life being threatened, and the drones humming over Hispanic neighborhoods. The senior agent waves him off.

“Oh, that has nothing to do with us. We don’t have them. You know there are a lot of agencies here. There is the FBI, DEA, ATF, and Bureau of Prisons.”

Tabke’s voice is breaking, and he tries one more time.

He tells the agent that two days ago he got a call from a Shakopee public employee. She was pulled over and hassled by ICE with her kids in the back seat. They let her go, but an hour later, they were parked outside of her house. An ICE agent approached her with a piece of paper.

“They gave them a fucking list,” says Tabke. He starts crying. “‘If you turn these five people in for us, we won’t bother your family.”

The agent says he knows nothing about it. But he has another idea.

“When this is over, let’s sit down and have dinner, and we’ll get a beer.”

Tabke doesn’t know what to say. He gets back in the truck and grabs Katy’s hand. And then they drive home.