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This is part of a series of on-the-ground reports from Minneapolis.

Over the past few weeks, previously unthinkable horrors have unfolded in Minnesota as federal agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement have shot Renee Nicole Good in the head, killing her, and arrested a 5-year-old boy just as he was arriving home from school. Erin Maye Quade is a Minnesota state senator who has now witnessed countless instances of federal agents arresting and detaining her constituents. This week, Maye Quade decided it was time to put out a blunt warning for the rest of America in the form of a TikTok video: “There may be people outside of Minnesota who are thinking: When this comes to my state, I’m white, or a U.S. citizen, or I live in a suburb or rural area, or a neighborhood with few or no immigrants, and this is something I won’t experience or see,” the senator said. “I’m here to dispel that myth for you. That is not the case.”

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Maye Quade, who lives in the Minneapolis suburb of Apple Valley, emphasized just how ubiquitous immigration enforcement has become across rural, suburban, and urban Minnesota. ICE presence is so large it surpasses the number of local law enforcement members in the state’s 10 largest metro areas combined. These agents are not working from an organized list of known immigrants living in the U.S. unlawfully, let alone a judicial warrant; instead they are operating at random. Maye Quade says she’s observed agents just driving around her town “looking for kidnappings of opportunity,” which she described as agents idling their cars and simply waiting for Black, brown, or Asian Americans to walk by, as they take out the trash, walk their dog, or run into a gas station. “They will swarm that person, kidnap them, and take them away.”

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