The people patrolling the streets of the Twin Cities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents call themselves “commuters.” That just about captures the minute-to-minute experience of being with them. I rode along with these commuters for a day, and the story that no one sees is that it was really no more exciting than any drive to and fro in a medium-size city on an endless kaleidoscoping loop of surface streets. The differences between their old daily routines and their new ones only make these drives more stultifying, not less.

There’s an audio Signal chat happening in the background: alternating silence with strong Minnesota accents calling in the license plate numbers of SUVs. You can’t talk. You can’t listen to music. One veteran commuter tells me the experience is hell on his ADHD. “I can’t even listen to podcasts.”

Drawing from a spreadsheet amassed from eyewitnesses to ICE activity, the database operator on the call identifies most of the license plates called in as negative or suspected. Others are confirmed not affiliated with the agency. But the indicators of “friendlies” are no longer reliable. ICE agents have marked cars with student-driver stickers and SpongeBob decals. There are rumors that they’re also adding comically stereotypical bumper stickers for various liberal causes. In one chat, someone says they saw an ICE agent disembark from a Subaru with a sticker that just said “queer.” A person I’m driving with laughs. “Can you imagine? Just ‘queer’?”

I’ve only been granted access to these drives because friends from my old life here vouched for me. Others checked my social media history. One person consulted a mutual friend who happens to be a well-known science fiction author to make sure I was on the up-and-up.

The drivers don’t know how they’re connected to the broader effort except through the crowdsourced database. The Signal chat reorganizes daily. One of the people I drive with, a lawyer, uses his real first name because he suspects attempts at operational security are well meaning but ultimately futile. And indeed, commuters share stories of being approached by ICE agents and called by name, or of starting to follow a car only to be driven past their own homes.

Other volunteers say strangers have approached them as they watch over corners and schools—people dressed in liberal mufti rather than the drab ICE camo—saying they’re with Indivisible, or that they just want to help, asking who to talk to about getting involved. There’s now been news coverage of such infiltrations, apparently so easy someone at the Free Press managed to do it.

Of course, the commuters and corner watchers organizing this are not experts at subterfuge. As one person told me, “I think we’ve decided that between scale and perfect op-sec, we’ll go with volume.”

The code names are the only place where you find a thread of underplayed Midwest surrealism, which put a T-Rex sculpture in the background of the Renee Nicole Good murder footage. I cannot repeat those code names verbatim, but they included references to the state fair, Star Wars, Firefly, sports teams, and phrases that rhymed with Fuck ICE. I suppose it’s OK to reveal there were several variations on Mom.

We drove........

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