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Under the Minnesota Metro Siege, even in the ‘burbs: EYES OPEN for ICE!!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2026| 1 Comment »

Schoolchildren learning about justice and the rights of free speech and assembly, in real time, for their friends and for themselves. Heroes!!

https://www.startribune.com/is-ice-really-pulling-out-of-minnesota-observer-data-tells-a-complicated-story/601580496?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=essential_minnesota&utm_term=Essential+Minnesota&from_app=1&darkmode=System&from_mobile=1&utm_source=webview&from_app=1&darkmode=System&from_mobile=1&utm_source=webview?utm_source=copy
Sylvia Lindman
Does it feel like this? Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: From: JVL – The Bulwark <thebulwark+thetriad@substack.com> Date: February 21, 2026 at 5:43:
Allison Campbell Jensen10:29 AM (4 hours ago)
Response to writing prompt from my dear friend.
Allison Campbell Jensen <allisoncampbelljensen@gmail.com>11:01 AM (3 hours ago)
to Geneva, Jeffrey, Sylvia, me

Background: I live in Roseville, Minn., founded about 75 years ago. It is located between the two downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul. I have lived here 25 years, with a garden and raspberries and, lately, cherry trees. I am white, retired, and in okay physical shape. I will be 68 years old in a couple of weeks. Although I go to the gym three times a week or so, my 11-year-old grandson can beat me in a 10-yard sprint–and he doesn’t even like to run!

When I first realized that ICE thugs were not confining themselves to South Minneapolis, I spent a week [considering, perseverating or musing] whether I had the physical courage to confront ICE. In mid-December, my neighbor, a lovely gardener and a lefty leader, asked if I would train to be an observer, like Pretti. Neither he nor Renee had been shot yet, but the thugs driving around town in vans and Jeeps and SUVs with faces covered, carrying firearms, including obvious long guns (rifles), had succeeded in scaring me.

I finally said I could not help with that part.

Then in January, we returned from a long weekend in Duluth, celebrating our friend Kim Eckert’s retirement, I noticed people in their 30s and 40s near the high school, wearing safety vests and looking around a lot.

At first, I feared there was an active ICE incident. Then I realized they were parents and neighbors protecting our children. One of my Resilient Roseville friends stood out for weekday mornings at the low-income mobile home park, to make sure the students made it to their school buses and schools without problems. One -20 morning, I drove by and, at the adjacent Central Park parking lot, there were the goons, faces covered, milling around their white vans with dark windows. Noelle was there, across the street, too, a sentinel and a possible helper: I admire her greatly. She also connected the threats of ICE and Climate Change and wrote about her experience.

I would wake up at 3 in the morning, or sometimes 3:33 and imagine what it might be like to confront ICE. I was fully imbued with great fear and would lie awake until time to get up to make coffee.

Marching in the NO KINGS rallies during 2025 felt much safer. We could see our allies easily and if a jerk in a pickup reared by with swearwords and middle fingers, I had recognized how many folks we had on our side, yelling back.

When 50,000+ Minnesotans protested against ICE in January, on the other hand, I feared they ICE agents would borrow helicopters from the Minnesota National Guard or shoot protestors with rooftop snipers. The fear, in other words, was deep inside me — and I was not yet ready to die for the cause. I wish I were kidding; I was paralyzed. But I watched and listened to the MARCHers (many of them friends, or like R.T. Rybak, former mayor of Minneapolis, well-known to me!) in the -25 cold, on an unedited video stream: Heroes.

In January, the Roseville City Council held two community listening sessions: searing, emotional testimony from a range of Roseville-ites, from people whose families had farmed in the area before WWI to folks who moved from other states within the last year. (After Felon47 ‘s second election)

The latter were Gay, trans, or with children trying to decide on their identity as people or sexual beings or simply families and folks seeking work, academic achievement, or community… They mistakenly thought Minnesota would be safe for them and their families. Sans Trump, I believe they would have been safe.

I listened to 4 of 6 hours of the first testimony–middle-aged women boxed in by ICE and harassed verbally. Young children, whose parents are professors at the U, who refused to go to school for a week or longer. A welder who has been welcoming immigrant newcomers for more than 2 decades–and tries to help them build shells against bullies. Because we do have bullies in Minnesota: white men, mostly, and some white women.

Once I was too emotionally wrung out, I left. My lefty leader’s spouse spoke about the “totalitarian oppression.” There were still about 200 people remaining to witness or speak. The second meeting, I stayed for only 2 hours. I left with my heart hurting and my head pounding: very anxious!!

The first time I went to volunteer at First Nations Kitchen in January, my friend Andy ran out shouting that a guy had been shot just blocks away.

Andy had the local video coverage playing on his phone. I entered the church and heard a man on the audio say: “BUT I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!!”  THEN, GUNSHOTS.

I am convinced that I heard Alex Pretti’s last words (or close). He had a deep voice. ICE gunmen silenced it.

Since then, I have given away $400 to orgs buying groceries for those too fearful of ICE to leave their homes and for rental assistance for those unable to work for a month or longer–because of fear.

At an Elementary school where I volunteer, I also saw the Anti-ICE, no entrance without a judicial warrant Signs go up on early January. Mid-month, after Mr. Pretti’s murder, the Saint Paul School District decided kids could go to virtual learning. I tutor 6 kids there 2x a week; and the abrupt disappearance of up to 1/3 the students (K-8) was shocking. Only one of my kids, a tall for his age Native boy, stayed away for a couple of days. Now, about a month later, About 1/2 of the students have returned. 

Ms. K., kindergarten teacher, says her kids of color are still terrified. 

Allison Campbell Jensen
Writer & editor
651-492-5931

Allison Campbell Jensen <allisoncampbelljensen@gmail.com>11:04 AM (3 hours ago)
to Sylvia, me, Geneva, Jeffrey

One more thing: we, Don and I were distributing EveryMeal sacks to kids. Don loves Ms. Kerrigan.

We chatted about the ways Felon47 and his crew of sycophants–and these blasted Brown Shirts–e trying to mold fearful children who are intellectually deprived, socially stunted, and have no trust in anyone. Easier to fool… Are simulacra of Hitler Youth next?

Let us follow our recent leader lost to Death: “Keep Hope Alive.” Thank you, Rev. Jackson.

Love, 

Allison 

Initial Answer to Syl’s writing prompt.

More TK but for now from FB post (not by me): “The floodwaters are finally starting to recede, but now we have to deal with the mud. For weeks, Minnesota has been submerged under a relentless wave of federal enforcement, and as the official tide rolls back, the structural damage to our neighborhoods is fully exposed. The cleanup is going to require everyone grabbing a shovel and working side by side.


Today is Saturday, February 21, 2026, here’s what happened yesterday in Minnesota:


ICE Shifting Outward: Despite the “drawdown” announcement, observers and elected officials say enforcement has expanded into the suburbs with smaller teams, more unmarked vehicles, and day-to-day presence in places like Eden Prairie and more southern suburbs. Friday’s Operation Metro Surge monitoring showed early-morning ICE activity also clustering around Shakopee and Burnsville, with reports of traffic stops and continued sightings in neighborhoods. Hospitality Union Unite Here Local 17 also says ICE agents are still being housed at multiple Minneapolis hotels, with observers tracking persistent vehicle staging in hotel lots… a sign the operation’s footprint remains active even as tactics get quieter. 
Lawmakers Force Visibility: Federal officials told Reps. Ilhan Omar and Angie Craig that fewer than 500 ICE agents remain in Minnesota and that activity has “slowed” to about 20 arrests a day and two deportation flights a week, with a stated goal of returning to a “regular footprint” around 150. But the figures came with no public breakdown of which units are leaving or staying, unclear accounting for Homeland Security Investigations, and no transparency on how tactics are shifting. Then, during a scheduled oversight tour of the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, staff said the detention area had been cleared about 30 minutes before the lawmakers arrived, blocking them from speaking with anyone in custody. Omar and Craig said they’re taking DHS claims “with a grain of salt” because the timing looked less like openness and more like control of what the public is allowed to see.
Courthouse Deal Fell Apart: The Star Tribune reported that Chief Justice Natalie Hudson quietly met with border czar Tom Homan and came away thinking there would be clearer limits and better communication about ICE activity in state courthouses. Four days later, ICE agents carried out a chaotic detainment inside the Hennepin County Government Center anyway. Lawyers and observers swarmed as people moved through the skyway at lunchtime. It read like a warning that even high level assurances can vanish at the moment they matter most.
Local Cooperation Disputed: Hennepin County is now openly accusing the federal government of rewriting what’s happening inside its own jail system. In a blunt court filing tied to the sanctuary-policies lawsuit, county attorneys dispute federal claims that local cooperation with ICE has increased, arguing the government’s story about jail holds doesn’t match the facts. Sheriff Dawanna Witt has also said no policies changed and no new agreements were signed, but the county is being forced to fight that narrative in court anyway. It’s a warning sign that if the “official record” gets set by federal assertions instead of local documentation, the outcome may follow the fiction, not the reality.


Even in the thick mud, people are planting seeds. Here are some reasons to hope:


Tonight Brandi Carlile Shows Up: The Star Tribune confirmed that tonight’s sold-out Brandi Carlile concert at Target Center will include more than $25,000 in proceeds going directly to The Advocates for Human Rights, the Minnesota nonprofit that has been on the front lines of the surge since December. The full show will be livestreamed free on 89.3 The Current. Carlile said she couldn’t come to Minneapolis without acknowledging what this community has been through and called Minnesota her family. Twelve thousand people in one room tonight, and anyone with a radio can be there too. Watch it here: https://veeps.com/brandicarlile/10bee30f-604a-40a8-9c39-6a0a6553d878
Judge Hears ACLU: More than 80 Minnesotans have now filed sworn declarations in the amended complaint in Tincher v. Noem, turning scattered allegations into a formal, testable court record of retaliation, surveillance, and alleged violence against people who tried to watch, document, or protest federal enforcement. After an evidentiary hearing, the presiding judge, Eric Tostrud (a Trump appointee), indicated he’ll rule on an expedited basis… he’s heard the testimony and he’s still deciding. That matters because once these accounts are locked into the record, they’re harder to dismiss, harder to erase, and more likely to produce enforceable limits.
The Courts Doing What’s Right: During Operation Metro Surge, lawyers filed 1,000+ individual challenges to detentions, and Minnesota federal judges have ordered releases hundreds of times after finding arrests and detentions unlawful. That local wave fits a bigger national pattern… 400+ federal judges across the country have issued 4,000+ rulings finding ICE held people illegally, as habeas filings surge amid record detention levels. The hope is simple and stubborn: case by case, order by order, the rule of law is still working because people refuse to disappear quietly.
Community keeps pressure on with new rally: 50501 is planning yet another anti‑ICE rally and march, set for today at Whittier Park in Minneapolis. Organizers are using it to demand passage of the accountability bills and real recovery funds for neighborhoods hit hardest by raids. After weeks of watching agents shift from city cores to suburbs, they’re making sure public attention shifts too. That persistence, showing up after the headlines seem to cool down, is how movements outlast operations. To find out more about the rally or how to attend, go here:  
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16sitMLQr9/


Looking past the state borders, here are some national stories worth knowing:


Tariff Takedown: The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping global tariffs in a 6–3 decision, ruling he lacked authority under the emergency-powers law he invoked, a major setback with huge economic stakes and looming questions about what happens to the money already collected. Within hours, the White House pivoted and issued a new order imposing a temporary 10% import duty on foreign goods under a different trade statute, signaling the trade fight will continue even after the court drew a line. The whiplash, court limits, and immediate workaround all sent a clear message to markets and governments: the rules are being contested in real time, and policy can change overnight.
DHS Admits the “Worst of the Worst” List Had Errors: MPR News confirmed this week that the DHS website used to publicly justify Operation Metro Surge, which listed people the administration called “dangerous criminals,” was riddled with factual errors. Some people listed as serious threats were legal residents, asylum seekers, or had no criminal records. DHS has quietly updated some entries without announcement or apology. The list was the public face of the surge. Its accuracy was never verified before it was used to justify detaining thousands of Minnesotans.


Let the Record Show 


Nobel Winner Elie Wiesel warned us: “Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” That’s what this community has been fighting since December — refusing to let people be reduced to a label, a status, a checkbox on a warrant, and refusing to let the most powerful people’s version of events become the only version. That’s what’s at stake in Hennepin County’s pushback, lawmakers calling out conditions, communities tracking movement, and in Tincher v. Noem. Those 80 people who filed sworn declarations in federal court this week didn’t do it because it was easy. They did it because they understood what happens when nobody speaks plainly into the record: the harm keeps moving, and the story gets rewritten around it.


Every time DHS is forced to backtrack, the world sees the difference between narrative and evidence. The surge may be ending, but the record of it is still being written. Let’s make sure the truth is in it.


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Allison Campbell Jensen
Writer & editor

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Deep History in the Deep South: a personal tour report

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on April 2, 2025| 2 Comments »

Remembering leaders of the Black Freedom Movement in Foot Soldiers Park, near the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama.

Among the multiple exhibits of brutality, startling statistics of violence, vivid videos, re-creations of the slave trade scenes, sweat-inducing tales, and photographs of the hundreds of people who fought for African-Americans’ freedom, Montgomery’s Legacy Museum also displays simple glass jars.

Huge jars, bigger than a person’s head, that hold dirt, loam, sand, clay, in colors as different as individuals are different. Ranks of preserves, shelves reaching nearly to the ceiling, marked with dates, with places, and, in larger type, with names—or Unknown.

Preserves of soil taken from more than 800 lynching sites where white murderers spilled African-American blood. At its nearby sibling National Memorial for Peace and Justice, people are silenced by the lists of Black people’s names, and, occasionally, 8 or 11 or 15 Unknowns, all killed on one date. Those memorialized on steel rectangles number some 4,400 lynchings, divided by counties.

The Deep South ruled by Jim Crow codes and the James Crow that spread to the North join in shame. In Duluth, Minnesota, three men working with a traveling circus were lynched in July 1920, for allegedly raping a white woman. Black people fled Duluth and nearby Superior, Wisconsin.

Breaking the silence for the whole country was one lynching—an extra-judicial murder carried out by white mobs for crimes as they defined them—of Emmett Till.

In 1955, Emmett Till visited family in Mississippi on what ended up to be a fatal trip from his home in Chicago. Mayor Johnny B. Thomas, who now leads the tiny, predominantly Black town of Glendora, recalls the details of the death of the 14-year-old “child.”

In 2025, the mayor led our We March for Justice Civil Rights Study Trip group of 19 people, ages 18 to 85, along Emmett Till’s Trail of Terror. Ours was the 14th Civil Rights Study Trip organized by faculty of the University of St. Thomas in partnership with the Selim Center for Lifelong Learning: David “Todd” Lawrence, American Culture and Difference, English; David Williard, American Culture and Difference, History; adjunct faculty Shanea Turner-Smith; and Selim’s Bob Shoemake. The trip leaders have visited for several years; they retreated into the background as Mayor Thomas directed our bus driver to crisscross the springing-green countryside of rivers, bayous, small shacks, tidy homes, and ruins—of the church where Till’s grand-uncle preached and the country market where he may have whistled at a white woman, now reduced to vine-covered walls,

Mayor Johnny Thomas describes Emmett Till’s torture in a nearby barn.

We heard details known in this locale but foreign to us. The white assailants forced Mayor Thomas’s father, and other Black men, take part in Emmett Till’s beating and murder.

Emmett Till was kidnapped from his great-uncle’s home, tortured in one white fellow’s barn, then paraded through the countryside like a trophy to other white households. Whether he was alive or dead at that point? Hard to say. His mutilated body was thrown off a bridge; it was found downstream by a young white man fishing.

Some catch.

Placing myself as a witness to this horror, I could not comprehend the dominant white men’s stance: that they were protecting something, a culture precious to them with a brutality poisonous to millions of others. That dehumanizing their Black victims as “beasts” also co-created white supremacists as predators.

Local white people buried Till right away. Yet, he would not be silenced in death because of his mother, Mamie Till. She insisted his corpse be exhumed and taken back to Chicago. Emmett Till’s nearly unrecognizable face was shown in an open casket—a horrifying sight that Jet magazine published. There could be no cover-up. There would be no justice, either. Although the white killers were identified by a Black witness, they were acquitted by an all-white jury. That witness left town to save his own life.

Mayor Thomas commemorates Till, his murder, and the Black freedom movement in his Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center, housed in a former cotton mill in Glendora. He says he worries: he does not know who after him will carry on the work of deeply local remembrance.

Surviving

Cloaked in a shimmery tunic, Flonzie Brown Wright stood before us, a renowned Civil Rights leader and our guide to the African-American struggle with freedom in her community of Canton, Mississippi. She had grown up in relative privilege for a Black person in Canton: she attended Catholic school, and her mother would not allow her to do manual labor, because she expected better things of her.

Her mother having set the seed, and the soil being prepared with a surfeit of Black blood, already as a teenager, Wright began to push the boundaries of Jim Crow. From the time Wright saw white police beating a Black resident trying to register to vote (the photo is in her book “Looking Back to Move Ahead”), she was caught up in the civil rights movement. “I had to do my part for freedom,” she writes (“Looking Back,” p. 56). Having failed the test to register to vote one time, she practically memorized the U.S. Constitution—and the second time, passed.

Life-long civil rights activist Flonzie Brown Wright in the last existing Freedom House.

Wright not only voted, she went on to sue for Black rights to serve on juries; to run for Election Commissioner in Madison county in 1968 and win (the first African-American female in the state to serve in that role following Reconstruction); and to work at the Freedom House, the last one standing in Mississippi, a place to gather, to rest, to strategize for Black and white activists who belonged to any Civil Rights movement organization: NAACP, CORE, SLCC, and SNCC. In 2025, she showed us that the Freedom House still stands, wallpapered with leaflets and newspapers and election notices to honor those who fought for freedom.

Wright, who was being videotaped by a documentary team on the day we met her, commented: “Don’t things change?. . . In time, they do change.” Yet only when people who come together behind one goal. Asked about a speaker at one of their rallies, the “radical” Stokley Carmichael (the coiner of “Black Power” who later took the name Kwame Ture), Wright said: ”We needed everybody’s opinion . . . as long as our goal was the same”: Freedom.

Goosebumps

The profoundly personal accounts and somber depictions of those striving for a better society, from the thousands who took part in the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted more than a year, to a speech/qua sermon by Rep. Justin Pearson of the Tennessee state house, are enough to shake sensitive, empathic persons such as myself.

Hearing the trail of Emmett Till’s terror retold on a warm evening in Memphis, a present-day activist declared: “Oh—I have goosebumps.”

Similarly, in Montgomery, we viewed the intact and active 16th Street Baptist Church. Asked about its possible renovation after four young girls were bombed to death in 1963 by white criminals, one lead faculty led me around to the back. On that hot day, I also suddenly had goosebumps. Already moved by the church’s floral tribute to these victims of racial violence, my soul was haunted by the extensive preserved blast marks.

Goosebumps provoked by the proximity to violence, to water cannons, to police dogs, to KKK bombs, to the assassins of Medgar Evers and far too many others were just a physical manifestation of the emotional burden I recognized and took on, to a degree.

The continuing movement

Rosa Parks depicted refusing to give up her seat to another passenger.

Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery bus; she was arrested. In response to the racist act, thousands of Black residents became foot soldiers in the movement. For more than one year, they walked, they carpooled, they boycotted the bus system. They showed courage every day, and determination to make a difference.

“Hey, Boy! What’s up?”

At the re-creation of that bus incident in Memphis’s National Civil Rights Museum, the bus driver’s statue attracted a mocking greeting from an African-American woman in March 2025: “Hey, Boy: What’s up?” The bus exhibit included recordings of the driver and Parks’ confrontation. Off the bus, I stood among the statues depicting weary people carrying groceries, walking steadfastly toward freedom: quiet heroes.

During this whole tour, March 22-28, 2025, the details sank into me. Yes, of course, Dr. King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, now enfolded by the Civil Rights Museum. That was horrific and moving. Of the 12 million estimated African people kidnapped and bound in chains for what would become the United States, one-third would die before completing the voyage across the Middle Passage. The tremendous wealth of white people in Mississippi before the Civil War was rooted in the huge numbers of enslaved people who had been transported in-country, south, to those productive cotton fields. Once they were “emancipated,” they outnumbered the whites—and white lynchings and Jim Crow codes were used to force them out or to murder them.

Among all these amazing people, a particular light shines in Fannie Lou Hamer. She had to leave the plantation where she worked because she was encouraging Black people to register to vote. She was sterilized without her knowledge or consent by a white doctor while being treated for a tumor. The control of bodies, tour leaders noted, is another way of keeping people from being free.

Ruleville, Mississippi, hosts the gravestones of Hamer and her husband in a park that remembers this passionate pleader for civil rights for African-Americans. She was not stopped by a beating that scarred her for life; she was not slowed by death threats on her phone; she built an agricultural haven for Black people before poor health took her life.

Hamer’s words are chiseled in stone in the park: “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been scared but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me and it seemed they’d been trying to do that a little at a time since I could remember.” So Hamer lives.

From ordinary people to leaders like Hamer and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., those who fueled the movement for Black freedom would not turn back—and new leaders continue to arise, met with less fury yet continuing attempts at suppression.

During a visit to Memphis that happened to overlap with ours, Prof. Timothy Snyder, historian and author of “On Tryanny” and “On Freedom,” recorded a video on Civil Rights and Historical Honesty about the current administration’s executive order that would define as history that which lifts up their agenda—all else would be propaganda. Snyder resisted. “The truth, the truth about history,” he said, “and the truth about everything else is that it has to be there for us to discover. . . . If we want the people to rule, we have to understand one another.”

Even among the current spewing of executive orders at high levels, let us not catch the virus of blindly following leaders who would mislead us.

Although the 2025 March for Justice was a tough journey, emotionally, for me, I recognize that it was just one segment along a much more difficult, too often fatal, march toward freedom for so many of our fellow citizens.

What I saw:  I saw that the soil activists blessed with their blood now nurtures red bud trees in blossom, wisteria vining wildly in abandoned places, and hope growing for the future we may create together.

Notes:

  • We March for Justice is a week-long inter-generational study tour of the American Civil Rights Movement. The trip, which began under Cynthia Fraction 14 years ago, in 2025 included stops in Montgomery, Selma, Canton, Jackson, the Mississippi Delta, Oxford, and Memphis. Students studied the landscape of justice in America through field experiences, museum studies, readings, videos, encounters with foot soldiers of the movement, and class discussions. The tour explores a challenging history centered on racial oppression, the struggle for equality, and the endurance of Black lived experience. Explains Prof. Williard: “We talk about it as ‘intercontextual learning,’ where encounters among people (students, faculty, and foot soldiers), place, textual evidence, and interpretive spaces allow participants to think deeply across multiple levels of learning (from knowledge acquisition to critical evaluation to personal transformation).”
  • In the decades since the Duluth Lynching, observers have noted that relatively few Black people live in Minnesota. “James Crow” or maybe it’s those formerly harsh winters, of which I have heard said: “They keep out the riff-raff.” Hmmm. Whose riff-raff?

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