Ryan Broderick writes:

The frontline of America’s slow-moving civil war has come to Minnesota. The Department of Homeland Security doubled down on their occupation of the state following last week’s murder of Renee Nicole Good. Now residents armed with whistles, snowballs, and group chats race through the streets, trying to protect one another from the more than 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers swarming the city.

During my four days in the Twin Cities, I watched the fabric of American society start to break down. ICE agents armed with assault weapons, tear gas, stun grenades, and pepper spray balls drive cars off the road and break down people’s doors with abandon. The institutions that are meant to protect us — local law enforcement, local politicians, the basic machinery of democracy and accountability — have all but thrown their hands up. “They have bigger guns than we do,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said during an interview over the weekend.

The digital tools activists have come to rely on have similarly been turned against them. The days of the hashtag and the Facebook Event are over. Instead, anti-ICE organizing is done quietly, via word-of-mouth or (theoretically) untraceable Signal groups. On Saturday, local volunteers pulled over next to my car and asked Panic World producer Grant Irving and I if we were with ICE. We told them we were journalists and they explained they had to ask because our rental car had Florida plates. “A lot of the rental cars around here have been used by ICE,” one of the volunteers told us, before using a walkie talkie to tell other volunteers to stand down and stop monitoring our car.

The public social networks once relied on to mobilize a community, meanwhile, are full of right-wing propaganda, distorting what’s happening on the ground. ICE has been stalking Minneapolis for months, but the current conflict in the city started in December when far-right Gen Z content creator Nick Shirley published a video titled, “I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal.” Shirley claimed that allegedly fraudulent daycares like Quality Learning Center are supposedly receiving federal funds without having any children enrolled. Shirley’s video has been watched 3.5 million times on YouTube and 139 million times on X. The version on X became a right-wing sensation in the days after Christmas last year. The right-wing hysteria was so loud that no one seemed to notice that the story had been covered extensively by various local and national news organizations over the years and that there’s an FBI investigation currently looking into the allegations. Attention is the only thing that matters. “Who would’ve thought Quality Learing [sic] Center would’ve started all this,” Shirley posted on X over the weekend, sharing a video of a massive anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis.

With tensions inflamed in the city — and following pressure from Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and FBI Director Kash Patel, who all shared Shirley’s video — ICE ramped up their presence. There are more agents in Minnesota than there are local police in both of the state’s major cities. An escalation that directly led to the murder of Good last Wednesday. And now, in response to that, ICE has effectively taken control of the city. Rumors swirl about Trump sending in the National Guard or declaring martial law next. [Continue reading…]