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“Sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt you guys.” The man crunches his way toward us, through this snow-covered field and past rows upon rows of identical wooden tombstones, then gestures back in the direction he came from. “I wanted to make sure you’re aware that there’s ICE right there.”

This is how it happens, I was told the day before. Immigration and Customs Enforcement moves fast in Minneapolis, the way you have to when an entire city is against you. Volunteers call in license plates to volunteers who check those plates against databases created by other volunteers. Once identified, these agents have minutes at best before residents with whistles and horns and furious loud voices gather to alert their neighbors to the threat in their midst. If you’re more than five minutes away from a sighting, odds are you’ll be too late. No, the best way to find ICE in Minneapolis is to stay in one place. Go about your day. Eventually, you’ll see them.

I am standing with two Minneapolis residents who go by Tim and Star, looking out at the Say Their Names memorial. The art installation consists of over 100 tombstones, each with identical black fists and names I remember from 2020. Philandro Castile. Ahmaud Arbery. And, of course, George Floyd, who took his final breath two blocks south of here. Minneapolis is no stranger to tragedy, or to the white-hot spotlight of international media attention, or to banding together in the face of a crisis.

“In some ways, it primed the pump,” Tim told me, referring to the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020. Like everyone I spoke to, Tim and Star ascribe Minneapolis’ successful mobilization to lessons learned during that time.

“We have a lot of media coming in and asking, ‘Oh, what’s your organization? Who are you with?’ And it’s like, we don’t have an organization. We’re not with anyone,” Star told me.

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“We’re just neighbors. That’s how we know each other,” Tim confirmed. “We live here.”

Star nodded. “ One of the things that I’m not sure that people are realizing outside of Minneapolis: The headlines say that Alex Pretti was a protester,” they say. “He wasn’t at a protest. He wasn’t at—”

And then we turned to watch the man approaching us through the snow—the man now telling us ICE has pulled up by an apartment building across the field. “We’ve got the block, we’re situated,” he says. “I just want to make sure—in case anybody’s targetable or something like that.”

None of us are targetable. Tim and Star want to help, and I want to see the action.

Just as roadkill summons........

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