This week, we spoke with Donna Mae, a longtime resident of Minneapolis and registered nurse working mostly with people who are unsheltered and use injection drugs. Donna lives in a neighborhood of the city that has had very heavy ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) activity and speaks for the hour about the last two months of invasion, organizing with neighbors, the legacy of the George Floyd Uprising and the aftermath of the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, the recent General Strike and lessons for preparing in the next incursion, wherever that may be.

• Transcript
• PDF (Unimposed PDF)
• Zine (Imposed PDF)

Some links for support

• Fundraiser for folks in the Phillips neighborhood: https://gofund.me/0ba86917d
• Southside Harm Reduction Services: https://shrs.org/get-involved/donate/
• Minneapolis Indian Women’s Resource Center: https://miwrc.salsalabs.org/miwrcgeneraloperations/index.html

Additional Links

• A great recent interview with two folks doing rapid response in Minneapolis by The Beautiful Idea: https://thebeautifulidea.show/ice-vs-ice-on-the-ground-in-minneapolis/

Facial Recognition Tech Used in Minneapolis to Target Protestors:

• in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/27/ice-facial-recognition-minnesota
• in Politico: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/29/ice-tracking-tools-protesters-00755703

Rojava Updates Podcast Release

Recently, armed conflict has flared between the Syrian Democratic Forces and both the Turkish-backed, so-called Syrian National Army militia and the forces aligned with the Syrian transitional government. In coming days we’ll be sharing a timely podcast featuring an interview with a member of Tekoşîna Anarşîst and another with a western activist on the ground in Qamişlo to share their perspectives on the situation and updates on the changing terrain. We talk about the danger of a resurgence of ISIS, the humanitarian crisis growing due to the seige in Kobane and the fears of a renewed patriarchal governance, but also about organizing and international solidarity.

This is a good time to get together with community in your area to figure out how you can support the revolution in Rojava. If you don’t have a Rojava solidarity group in your area (start one), keep an ear out for calls to action via the Emergency Committee for Rojava: https://www.defendrojava.org/

In the meantime, check out this first podcast by the Youth Media project, Ronahi: https://www.ronahi.eu/2026/ronahi-podcast-episode-1/

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Featured Track:

• TFSR by The Willows Whisper

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Transcription

Donna Mae: Hi. My name is Donna Mae. I’m a registered nurse here in Minneapolis. I work mostly with people who are unsheltered and use injection drugs. That’s my background. I have some history in street medicine, and have lived in Minneapolis for the last 17 years solid— actually, the last 19 years—and I grew up in Minnesota. I think that’s what people need to know about me.

TFSR: Obviously, for anyone listening in the audience, unless you’re living under a rock, you’re aware that there’s been an increased federal assault on the residents of Minneapolis. At the vanguard is Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), as well as Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) Officers, and I’m sure a slew of other federal agents. My understanding is that this onslaught was argued to be about focusing on, I think, Somali immigrant communities. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the part of town where immigration enforcement has been focused and how people have been responding in those communities. Sort of like geographically focusing ourselves on what part of town this is happening in.

Donna Mae: Yeah. I can talk about the part of town that I live in, and I can talk about the part of town that I work in, which is only about a mile from each other. I live equal distance between where George Floyd was murdered in 2020 and where Renee Good was murdered this month. So my house is probably about three or four blocks between each of those sites. I live on a busy one-way street. It has a lot of traffic that goes to downtown Minneapolis. The street that Renee was murdered on is the one-way in the opposite direction going outside of town. I say that to just describe that there are some specific routes that feel like they have been more heavily present with ICE. My block in particular, has had several times where large convoys have arrived under the auspices of enforcing, I don’t know, immigration policy?

The neighborhood that I live in is largely residential. It’s a part of town that when I moved into the area in 2006, it was one of the most integrated neighborhoods in Minneapolis. So we have an equal number of Latinx, African-American and African-born, and Caucasian folks that live in the neighborhood. I would say, in the last five years, even since George was murdered, there’s been a lot more affluence that’s come into this part of the city. Then we also have long-term residents that have… I would say that these are the folks who are being targeted the most through immigration—who have long-standing homes, long-standing leases, and have been in the community for as long as I’ve been here. Sure, there’s been some turnover, but there’s really a strong community here of people that have been around and have made this place home for a long time. So that’s where I wake up and go to sleep.

My work is largely in the Phillips neighborhood. That neighborhood is on a cultural corridor for our native folks. We have a higher incidence of unsheltered homelessness there. It’s really resource rich as far as healthcare and social services, but also where there’s definitely some of the highest need. That area also has a pretty high concentration for families that would be vulnerable for ICE and these different enforcement and federal agents that are coming into town. There are other parts of town that I know are also being more heavily… you know, like, ICE is everywhere. There are definitely corridors or places that they seem to be coming back to more often. I don’t know as much about those areas, because I’ve really been trying to stick on my block and then in the places where I work and have long standing relationships.

You brought up the question about Minnesota being a place where immigration enforcement was going to start because of fraud, and because that fraud was linked to some racialized ideas specific to our Somali community. We do have the largest Somali community outside of Somalia, and it’s a large population here in the Twin Cities. It does seem like that was the narrative; that it was somehow responding to the incidents of Somali organizations that were associated with this fraud. There’s so much misinformation about that. I am not the one to speak directly to it, except to know that the numbers that are being reported are nonsensical, and the scale of it really is.

I’m not trying to make any excuses for fraud happening. As somebody who works in homeless services, I’ve definitely seen misuse of Medicare dollars that are going to provide housing support and case management to people. So not trying to absolve anyone from fraud. Also recognizing that Minnesota is just in general, one of the more robust social service states and we have expanded Medicare. We provide a broader base of supports and services for our people that are here—the residents of Minnesota. I just hesitate to equate fraud at the scale of how it’s being talked about with what is actually happening here in Minneapolis.

TFSR: I think anyone who’s paying attention or knows the United States well enough will recognize that while the right-wing talking points might be about fraud and make it seem like, “Oh, it’s a reasonable law-and-order-type issue,” out the other side of the mouth of the same politicians and the same police is racialized accusations of corruption. Even if fraud were occurring for social service needs, then I think that the approach and targeting of boots on doors and pulling children out of schools and stuff is clearly out of a reasonable range for addressing minor corruption levels.

Donna Mae: I’m not someone that has access to this information, but I don’t think it would be too hard to understand who it is that they’re investigating for the fraud and whether or not those people are even at risk for immigration. It would be a very big surprise to me. I mean, our community here is long-standing and generational that live here in Minneapolis. Absolutely, there’s new people arriving, and we continue to welcome people in from different places. I think even equating fraud with a long-standing population here in Minneapolis as being about immigration is also a distortion.

TFSR: I guess what I was getting at is that I think that there’s logical jumps that the administration, Stephen Miller and company, are doing to equate corruption with immigration status, with skin color and the concept of belonging or not belonging.

Donna Mae: Yeah, absolutely.

TFSR: I think it’s much more about how do we identify a community as ‘the other’ and then make them into a scary being in the imaginary of white suburbanites? And then how do we criminalize and export, or incarcerate or whatever? But, yeah, not trying to tell you what’s going on on the ground, but, it seems not disconnected from all of Trump’s language about garbage countries and garbage people and whatever. All the rhetoric that he’s been spitting for quite a while now between the two administrations.

I wonder if you could talk about your neighborhood specifically that’s had these two notable police murders. In 2020 George Floyd was murdered and a collective mourning space was opened up and held. I’m curious about how that memory— and I mean, not just related to the police murder of Ms. Good. Like this isn’t just about the two people that have been like shot on film recently. The reaction is about our neighborhoods being invaded, our neighbors being kidnapped, kids being taken out of school. I wonder about the culture that was built up around 2020, and the memories and skills that people developed, the ways of relating to neighbors, and how that transformed into community patrols and mutual aid and care that’s going on in the neighborhood under this current incursion. Does that make sense?

Donna Mae: Yeah, it’s a pretty big question, or pretty broad, but I can try to take a stab at it.

TFSR: Okay.

Donna Mae: Minneapolis has a long-standing history of police brutality. Though we have a large social service net and we have really good healthcare, we have some of the most abysmal racialized outcomes and disparities. So though we have supports and services, they are not equitable across everybody in our community. As someone who works specifically with people who sleep outside there’s some very racialized aspects to that. It is, for my body—and I’m an outlier, I don’t know what it would sound like to talk to my other neighbors—it was not a surprise to me that the police were violent. It was, I think, significant that that was filmed. I think it was a surprise to people across the community. It probably is more significant that it happened in a part of town that’s less common. It probably is a little bit a part of how things are going down with using CBP and ICE. Like that acronym is new to me, but I can understand that.

I think what was so stunning about the footage when Derek Chauvin was on top of George Floyd is that there were people around. There were people around saying “Stop.” There were people around that were recording, and that violence continued and ended that man’s life. That’s the same kind of experience that people are having with all of the brutality that these agents are bringing into my community, and was very much a part of both Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s death. I think that it is really shocking as a person in the United States to see that this is witnessed by people, it is different, and that it’s happening in places where people are and people are living and people are feeling that this shouldn’t be happening and this shouldn’t be happening here. Maybe that’s a little part of what ties the thread together between those stories. But really trying to be clear as well that the long standing history of state violence is present here in Minneapolis.

I bought my house in 2006. We had the highest amount of vacancies of any neighborhood in the city. There were houses that were like, vacant and foreclosed for years. It was a time when people were incentivized to move into this part of town and stay in this part of town. That’s a totally different landscape than the housing situation here. Our housing situation is totally different. The economy of the city is totally different, as well as just the rate at which our city is being developed by all of these different future speculative development kind of mentality. All of that has made the city less livable for so many people in the last five years, but for sure, in the last 15 years. So I can’t think about the way in which state violence is playing out in the city without some of the context of that. Minneapolis is seeing what some of the larger cities have dealt with before, and that’s in real time right now.

I haven’t really sat with the difference between what it feels like in my body to have watched the murder of George Floyd and the murder of Renee Good and the murder of Alex Pretti, knowing that these are all moments in US history that are galvanizing people not just here in my city, but across the nation and potentially even across the world. It is very striking to see the way these deaths have gone down, the way these murders have happened.

TFSR: I think that you hit on a thing that’s really striking that I haven’t heard other people talk about. Which is that, with George Floyd’s murder, there was this nine minutes or something of people standing around saying, “stop it,” “get off,” but not doing the intervention thing. I feel like one of the things that is really inspiring for people on the outside is seeing people in Minneapolis…and seeing people in other cities too, but Minneapolis at the moment, where Border Patrol and ICE are going stupid hard…is that people are not just standing by and people are intervening. I know that that also puts people… especially when these federal law enforcement have been told, “Oh no, don’t worry. You’ve got immunity from whatever you do,” this has caused them to react much more violently during these interventions. With Alex Pretti’s death, my understanding was that he was intervening to help keep another person there safe when the police decided to attack him and focus their violence on him.

Donna Mae: Yeah, I think in this situation with George Floyd, allegedly, there was a counterfeit $20 bill. Then all of this story kind of spun around that. There is this kind of general understanding that if the police were intervening with a person, that they have done something fundamentally wrong. So there is also that element to the murder of George Floyd, where it’s like, “well, police are the experts. They know what they’re doing.” But in this instance, the people around were like, “Holy cow, don’t do that. Don’t hurt him. Don’t kneel on his neck to death. Don’t do that.” Somebody from the fire department was there, like a young child was there, a middle schooler. That’s who was responding. Again, it’s like these people in community saying “Stop.” I don’t think at that time we had an understanding that we could actually intervene, and it wouldn’t have been safe to intervene— that kind of thing.

I don’t know how that translates five years later, when this person is like, “Hey, the way ICE is enforcing things right now is chaotic. We don’t even understand who’s at risk for immigration.” They’re haphazardly taking people out of vehicles or taking people from their houses. It’s not just people who are assumedly at risk for deportation. These are people who are here on asylum, who are in the legal process for their citizenship, people who we have not named as at-risk for deportation or at-risk for immigration enforcement. We also know at that time there was a lot of brutality that was happening. It was happening around schools. It was happening around churches. It’s happening in our community. That is absurd that that’s happening. Then there also is underneath that, maybe a difference in the understanding of like… these people who are being supported by our institutions and our government and everything like that, there’s maybe a little bit more of a general understanding that they don’t know what they’re doing and they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, and that people who are having an impact from them are not necessarily people who we would say are doing something wrong.

I think it becomes this moral question around that for Renee Good, should she have been living her life that day? And coming across ICE agents and having an interaction, and then— you know, how it resulted? Kind of similar with Alex Pretti. Should he have been there? But in all of these things, I think there is this difference. In the sense of the understanding of “Minneapolis Police generally know what they’re doing.” I don’t think there’s that same trusted understanding or assumption about CBP and Border Patrol and the way they’re behaving in our community right now. I think there’s so much gray area and it’s so arbitrary. You don’t know what the difference is between talking to one agent and another agent. Or it’s so dependent on the mood and the situation and how many vehicles are within a certain area. Are they going to deploy tear gas, or are they going to use bear spray? Are they going to use pepper balls? You know, like, what are they going to do?

I have talked a little bit to friends about this who, like myself, work a lot with emergency first responders. When I am in the community and there is a situation that needs a response… when fire comes, like they have their tools, they can put out a fire. They also can respond and help save a life, reverse an overdose, have these ways of de-escalating, can make a safe scene. When emergency medical services like an ambulance comes they can do a lot of things. They can put someone on a transportation hold and bring them to the hospital. They can medicate somebody either by their will or against their will. They have tools at their disposal for a situation that needs some sort of resolve. And if police come, similarly, if they can give someone a ticket. They can arrest someone. They can de-escalate a situation. They can also put someone on a hold and send them to the hospital. They can bring them to jail. And then, beyond that, they have all of these tools of use of force. They have the tasers, and they have spray, and then they have lethal weapons.

From my perspective, Border Patrol has no tools until the tools are way over the top, like when they’re deploying—I don’t even know what we call it, pepper spray? But at such close range, like into people’s eyes. They’re using tear gas next to preschools, they’re shooting the pellet-ball things that like go up in smoke at people’s feet. All of those things are unheard of in an American city towards civilians who are literally standing there blowing a whistle. That makes no sense. Everyone understands that that shouldn’t be happening. The consequence for blowing a whistle should not be having tear gas sprayed in my eyes at point-blank range by an armed Border Patrol officer. You know, that’s just so absurd.

I just was in a room today full of people, and asked—there was probably 60, 65 people there. How many people have not interacted with ICE agents that are in town? It was maybe five. Maybe five people had not encountered that, and that’s huge to me. These are not people who are seeking that out. It’s like, we’re seeing that going about our day. We’re going to encounter. Whether it’s them in a vehicle, or them in our community, them pulling people from vehicles, them pulling people from their homes. That amount of people in this short amount of time. I think it’s day 59 of what they’re considering this current occupation.

We know that there were agents here before that, and we know that police violence or state-level brutality has been happening even before that. This level of interaction has been happening for about 60 days, and that 60 of the 65 people have interacted with ICE. That is also pretty stark. I don’t think that that many people would have raised their hand if we were asking if they’ve had an interaction with Minneapolis Police Department in the last 60 days. The room was full of people who are unsheltered and who experienced street homelessness and who come together every month to talk about what displacement has looked like in the community. That’s been a longer standing conversation and some of what we’ve been coming to understand as a group of people that are coming to these meetings once a month. So, to have that be the conversation that we’ve been having for the last two years, and have this conversation today, it was quite different. The last time we were together was just before the holidays. I think it was December 18. So we were talking about what has changed from December 18 to January 29, and a lot of things have changed in our community.

TFSR: Are most of these people having interactions with ICE where ICE is coming and asking them for paperwork or questioning them, or holding them, detaining them? Or is it mostly just because they’re just on the street when people are walking by or going to the —

Donna Mae: Or they’re seeing neighbors that are being abducted. I mean, it’s happening so often and so fast. You might be walking through an alley, and then you might encounter that. You might be driving by on the bus, and you might see somebody having it happen. I mean, it is so often and so visible. There’s no strategy to it. It’s like, I don’t know… On my block, a man pulls up in front of the house. Then what happens is, like four of these huge ICE vehicles block him in. Twenty agents get out of the car and it’s me, and eight neighbors blowing whistles. They take the man. The two women and the babies are able to run back to safety. All of traffic is stopped on this big one-way going into town. It’s just a huge spectacle. It’s like, nothing’s wrong with a man pulling up and opening the car door. But then, if you’re surrounded by these four vehicles and all these people in tactical gear get out and start scuffling with this dude and terrorizing everybody.

You know, they already have the adversary. Like, you shouldn’t be here. You don’t know what you’re talking about. And it’s like, well, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t know this person’s immigration status. They’re just targeting this dude in his car because he’s brown. It’s just so disorienting and unheard of for the people that live in my neighborhood that they’re like, “That can’t keep happening.”

I think the block that I live on and the adjacent blocks, I think since Renee died here, we’ve probably had 15 of those, big, big—actually, that one’s not one of the bigger ones, that experience. We probably had 15 of those over the last couple of weeks. Sometimes it’s even bigger than that. I’m just a few blocks from where the woman was detained from her car, who, was saying, “Hey, I need accommodation.” And then tear gas, and a whole bunch of canisters were deployed. And, you know, the snow is still green there. I mean, that’s just on the next block for me.

The dad and the two-year-old that were in Texas within like, three hours of being detained. That’s the block kitty-corner from me. There’s been three more abduction attempts in this area just within the last two days. There was another huge event where they shut down all streets within like a five-block area, and made this huge corridor. It all abuts against the memorial for Renee.

Yeah, it’s crazy making. There’s no indication that that’s going to slow down. There’s no indication that there’s any other response that’s going to happen, except these huge convoys of people are going to keep coming in and taking my neighbors away. When other neighbors are coming to respond to that, then they’re going to also be brutalized. I couldn’t have imagined that six months ago, that would be happening almost every day on my block.

TFSR: It looks like a war zone every time I’m on social media and seeing footage, or some news story shows footage, it absolutely looks like a war zone. It’s not what I would expect to see.

Donna Mae: Well, a war zone is even different. It’s like a war zone, you have certain areas of town that are being targeted. This is so specific. It’s like, block by block or house by house and then they go away and you’re supposed to go back to your life as normal. This is, I think, another one of these disorienting things. They’re like “why would this dude go to the riot with a gun?” And it’s like, dude wasn’t at a riot. It was a freaking donut shop that he was in front of walking around. That’s not a riot. Is the guy inside of the donut shop that’s videotaping at a riot? Like, where’s the riot? The riot isn’t until all of these ICE vehicles show up and pin people in and start pushing pedestrians. And other people respond and are like, “Hey, you can’t do that. We don’t want you here. Get out of here.”

Like, it doesn’t matter where they park, everybody’s going to be like, “What are you doing? Why are you here? Why are you in this tactical gear? And why are you behaving in this way? And why are you terrorizing everyone around you?” That is what’s happening. It’s not like there is a place where there’s this ongoing insurgency happening or something like that. The conditions are that they can come and create that at any corner, in front of any house, at any time, for any reason whether they have a targeted person or not. They can do it for the feeling that a car is following them or that somebody’s videotaping them. It’s not even about immigration enforcement anymore. Maybe they’re still trying to get to people who are at risk for detention. That is not the majority of what the interactions are. I don’t even see the facade of that in so many of the ones that I have stumbled across.

TFSR: Do you think it’s just because they’re aimless, and they’re being motivated by creating a shocking situation, because there’s a sense of power in the destabilization attached to that? Or do you think that because of the pushback that they’ve experienced in some of the neighborhoods, they’re doing less of the targeted just-following-through-on the paperwork that they’ve got for specific individuals. Does it seem like a tit-for-tat type thing? You might have to speculate to answer that so you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

Donna Mae: I mean, I don’t actually know. I don’t pretend to know what the actual motivation is. I cannot understand. I mean, it’s not like I want to give advice on how to do immigration enforcement. But certainly, if that was your goal, you would not behave the way that the agents are behaving, or even just the tactical strategy that they’re using. Are they here to terrorize us? Are they here to brutalize us? There’s definitely no indication that, “Hey, your community and your safety is really important, and we’re here to make sure that you feel safe and that you feel safer because of the interactions that we’re here to carry out.” There is none of that happening.

There’s sometimes the facade of that in policing that I have seen in the community, where it’s like, “Hey, we’re here to keep you safe. You know, we’re the helpers, and, we keep peace or whatever.” There’s nothing. There’s not even, like, any kind of indication of that. “We understand that you have been terrorized by the immigration status in your community, and we’re here to help solve that.” That is not the premise at all. I don’t think anyone would suggest that that’s happening here. I don’t even think they would.

TFSR: In your opinion, how have the city and the state reacted to the murders and the terrorizing of the population of Minneapolis and surrounding areas? Have the police been working with ICE? Because it seems like from the interviews or stories or videos that I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like they’ve really been on site. I’m sure they’ve been doing some back-end support. But has there been tension that you’ve seen between them, or does it just seem like MPD is just sitting aside?

Donna Mae: I happened to be just a couple blocks from where Alex was shot, when he was shot. I was in my vehicle and then was parked to watch. I actually didn’t know that it was gun shots. I heard the sound. I didn’t know that someone had been shot, and I certainly didn’t know that someone had been murdered. But I watched… you know, at first it’s these six or eight vehicles that are just there because they travel in these big clusters—and kind of strategically. It’s like one or two will show up, and then as soon as they’re there, four to six more come and just kind of shut down the area all around it. So that’s already happened by the time that the shots are fired. Then, from my vantage point, just like up the street, then you see, within minutes, twelve more, and then four more, and then another twenty more, before… Then the fire department came. They blocked off one of the streets, and then eventually some of the squads came. Police came. They started creating a perimeter, they put the crime scene tape up. And from what I understand then—because I couldn’t understand why they came—and then not long after they came, they left. From what I understand now is that the Border Patrol said “You can’t be here. You don’t have a warrant.” And so police had to leave.

At some point, the ambulance came out and was followed by nine ICE vehicles. I was like, “What the heck is going on? Like, why is this emergency vehicle leaving with all of these law enforcement around?” Not even law enforcement, the immigration people around it. At that time, I think there was still one Minneapolis Police officer. I was like, “Why? Why is that happening? Why are you letting this happen? Like, what is going on?” I think then it wasn’t much longer before state troopers came and you know, you watched sixty of them walk up the street, walk through the crowd of observers and people that were there. Then they got to the line and turned around back on the observers. It was very stark to watch that happen, because well, who are you protecting?

Also, the Border Patrol people that were have no training to do any kind of like crowd control. By that time, as more and more observers came, all they have is “You need to move. Get the f*** back. We’re going to spray you. We’re going to tear gas you.” They’d already done that by the time the state troopers came. They’d done that by the time Minneapolis Police Department came. Are they working together? I mean, it does not seem like any of those agencies could be in a position to stand with observers or the residents or to say “this needs to stop in our community.” I think there’s a ton of political reasons why that is. Yeah, I mean, maybe that’s a little bit speculative, or maybe that’s even giving them too much credit.

I am so impressed with my city council person, Jason Chavez, who is in the community, on the scene, on the block. He’s there when ICE shows up. He’s getting the calls from the residents. He’s responding. He’s part of the mobilization. He’s embedded. He knows where they’ve been on the blocks and who’s been affected, and he’s following up. I have not seen that in any way from the mayor. The mayor’s on this, like, freaking press tour. Who knows, wherever the heck he is, what his influences are or what his agenda is in this. It just seems so nefarious. Similarly, I haven’t seen the governor on my streets. Maybe he has visited. I have seen my representatives. I feel really good about our local and state reps. Ilhan Omar was here today after the week that she had. Being in community and showing up, coming and saying, “I know that you all are being impacted. I’m here with you.” But there is an absence of that as well from politicians or our local government.

TFSR: When there have been moments of brutality by Border Patrol, by police, have they been allowing medical professionals through? Have they been blocking ambulances, that sort of stuff? Because I remember with Renee Good, as I understood, paramedics were blocked from actually coming to the scene for at least 10 minutes if not longer,

Donna Mae: Yeah, I can look at the timestamps from it. It was a long time before EMS came, and I have no idea how they would have gotten to the place where Alex had died, because there were so many ICE vehicles that were clogging that entire street. Again, I don’t think it’s by design. I think it’s just the incompetence that no one is even considering, because they’re trained to be in battle. They aren’t trained to do any kind of rescue or anything like that. So yeah, if you create a problem, you just flood it with more vehicles and more force. There’s no one there that’s being like, “Oh, we’re going to need to get an ambulance through this. How are we going to do that?” Then complete hostility with anyone that is in the crowd who may have any kind of medical background. I think in both situations, there were people who identified themselves as medical professionals and were not allowed access. I think one of the reports from Alex is that they were counting bullet holes on him, rather than administering any kind of first aid. That’s just so dark.

TFSR: With 15,000 active duty military of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division based in Alaska on standby from the Pentagon—at least a couple of days ago, this might have changed—but Governor Walz also was mobilizing the Minnesota National Guard in response to the rhetoric about the insurrection act. It sounded like Walz was mustering the National Guard in order to do crowd control with them, as opposed to keeping the streets safe from the federal agents that were going around terrorizing people. Have you seen any military deployment in the streets? Or they kind of like ramp it up and then hold off to see what happens next?

Donna Mae: There was definitely deployment the day that Alex was shot. I don’t actually know the difference between when you call in state troopers. State troopers were the ones that seemed to be—they had to have been in a place close by, ready to go. I do understand that state troopers have a different scope than what National Guard has. But I think National Guard was there within, like, two hours as well. National Guard comes in much more militarized vehicles. I was in such a weird place, kind of the center of it, so I don’t actually know what vehicles state troopers came in. I know that they had to have been parked far away. I didn’t see any of their vehicles, because I was inside of this place where more ICE vehicles had… You know, it was probably a six-block, maybe nine-block area that, within five minutes, was totally blocked off from anybody. They got all of the vehicles that were like driving through out of there. Then the people were left that were inside. More people came to be witnesses. So then 20 minutes in, none of those vehicles could get inside of that zone that ICE had already created.

I don’t know when or how the National Guard tanks got in, but I think from the footage that I’ve seen eventually they were closer in. But then by nightfall, I think National Guard had created a perimeter that was like several blocks out. I want to say it was like a mile, or a mile and a half wide in all directions. In order to go in or out of there—they weren’t stopping people, but they must have been collecting all the information about license plates and everything of anyone that was going in or out of that area. Again, is that to keep people safe, or is that for increased surveillance? Certainly, the Border Patrol was not going to stop because National Guard was telling them that there was a perimeter created. By the time nightfall came it was just folks around Alex Pretti’s memorial that were there. It’s so disorienting. I think then when you compare it to a battlefield, it’s like, no, the expectation is: these huge conflicts between all of these just militarized agents, common pedestrians, this huge battle. And then it’s just supposed to go back to life as it was.

TFSR: Yeah, I guess it’s more of like an occupation or a counter-insurgency than it is a battle. So a lot of people were going out in their neighborhood when they hear ICE is around. People are whistling. People are joining in to whistle and videotape and bear witness, at least, to these instances. I’ve heard that ICE has been visiting people later who were at sites of protest, or witnessing or videotaping or whatever. Going to their houses and just sort of saying “Hi, we know where you live.” Someone speculated that cars were getting marked with pepper balls that have a dye in them, like a UV dye, so that they could get recognized later, or they were just noting people’s license plates. Is that a thing that you’ve seen in the neighborhood where people are getting door knocks because they’ve been out with whistles?

Donna Mae: Yeah, I mean, it would be hard for me where I live, because there’s so much ICE and they’re just creeping around and intimidating everyone. They’ll be in the alley and they’ll point at the house or whatever. But yes, I know several people who have been either doing the driving, and notifying people when ICE is coming into the neighborhood or following an ICE agent after one of these brutality things and the ICE agent will literally drive them back to their house. They must do a plate search or whatever and then bring someone back to their home. I know several people who have had that happen. I imagine that because my car was inside of that perimeter, it’s very much in the database or whatever, the register. I’m sure, yeah. I also know—if they’re using the technology, and I can’t remember what it’s called offhand—but I live within a block or a couple blocks of where Renee was murdered-

TFSR: Like, FLOCK cameras, or whatever?

Donna Mae: Yeah, so if they’re drawing that perimeter like, “We want to know every vehicle and every phone that goes in and out of that area for the next week so that we can keep track of that.” That’s everyone on my block. We live here, so of course, we’re going to come in and out of there. Does that make us like… I don’t know what they’re what they’re trying to demonstrate by that, but it’s very intimidating. That’s a cause for concern for a lot of my neighbors, just the heightened surveillance. Helicopters, drones, and the agents that are coming around. Oftentimes inside of a vehicle there will be three or four agents, and then someone that has that facial recognition camera. They’re taking pictures of different people as you’re driving through, or things like that. That has nothing to do with immigration enforcement.

TFSR: I’ve read an article earlier saying that ICE was planning on descending on Springfield, Ohio, and attacking the Somali communities there, and I’m sure whatever other people they can bully in the area. I know that ICE was active in North Carolina not that long ago, focusing on Charlotte and Raleigh/Durham before going down to New Orleans. They’ve been in Memphis, they’ve been in Chicago, they’ve been in all sorts of cities around the country. I wonder if… because the resistance that I have seen coming out of Minneapolis has been so strong and so inspirational for a lot of people. But also, I am sure it has been absolutely, amazingly tiring, just with the amount of violence, with the numbers of officers around, blocking streets, harassing people, threatening people, kidnapping your neighbors—that it’s been stupid tiring. I wonder, if you have any sort of insights, or any sort of like suggestions for folks in communities where ICE might show up in these kind of numbers? To give some sort of clues?

Donna Mae: My perspective is probably shaped again, by working in homeless services for so long. So many times somebody needs a ride, or needs $10, or needs to have this really specific thing. And there’s not an agency, or a way in which they can get that need met in the moment. I think in community, we also think, “Oh, that’s up to the experts. That’s up to the system. We have a service provider, I’m not the right or best person to meet that need, give that ride, resolve that.” It is very different what’s happening here. I think people still feel like, “I’m not the right person to give this person I’ve never met a ride to work tomorrow, but I’m the only person that’s going to, so I’m going to do it anyways.” That changes something, I think. When people are able to just say “There’s a need and I’m going to meet it, even though I don’t feel like I’m the right best person.” Somebody was joking the other day when we were at one of these meetings with my neighbors. We were just all getting together, and he was laughing. He was like, “Yeah. At some point, someone was like, you should be a block captain. I was like, I’m not the block captain. And then then I went back home, and I thought, well, block captain’s just an imaginary thing. We’re just making this up. I could be a block captain, who knows?”

It’s just these ideas of whether or not we feel like the right best person to do the next thing. And how many times I’m seeing neighbors that I wouldn’t have expected that from doing the next thing. Being present, showing up for one another, building out these systems of mutual aid, figuring out how to really take care of the people on our block is going to take care of the people on the next blocks. And then how do we…? You know, three weeks ago, it was fine for me to go to the food bank and bring it directly to somebody that needed it. But now they’re following cars from the food bank because they think that they’re going to bring them to vulnerable families. So how are we getting what needs to get to the blocks with only cars that usually go to the block or that live on the block? You know, those are all strategies that people are figuring out in real time to just be responsive. It does mean that people are doing things that they wouldn’t have thought of doing, or wouldn’t have expected doing, or don’t feel like they’re the right person to do it. That’s what feels like the biggest mobilization, or the biggest shift here in Minneapolis.

I think that probably what we saw in 2020 as far as the mutual aid and the response when George Floyd was murdered… there are so many people showing up to so many actions. There is not the kind of like, you know, damage to the city. There was a lot of that in 2020. Some of the places that I live really close to burned to the ground. There isn’t that happening at all. 50,000 people came to downtown Minneapolis and walked in the freezing cold. There wasn’t damage that was done. There wasn’t violence that happened. That’s amazing. That’s kind of unheard of. I think that also is just the spirit of people showing up to do the next thing. There is a lot of agreement that it should not be happening the way that it’s happening right now.

Even though our little makeshift systems are not perfect. They’re working and they’re responsive and they’re nimble. There’s not the kind of leadership that I think we’re accustomed to, where there’s like a handbook and a protocol, and here’s the strategy, and here are all of the roles. It’s so moment-to-moment and relationship-based and that is really profound. I have really benefited in my life working with people who sleep outside to see the way in which communities have to be nimble, have to be responsive, resourceful. There’s so much learning that happens in watching communities that are constantly under strike like that. Respond to weather changes. Respond to being together in community. There’s so many lessons in that that I think are coming through to the larger community now.

As a nurse, we think a lot about “what’s the best practice? What’s the evidence-based best practice?” That’s what we work out of. There’s no best practice here. There’s no evidence-based best practice. There’s no handbook for this. So it is only able to move at the speed of, who am I in relationship to? What is the trust I have, and also, like, what is my own relationship to risk and what I want to do?

It is surprising and inspiring to see how many people are willing to be like, “I will go outside and I will blow my whistle. I will stop and I will blow my horn. I will get out and I will say, I’m going to watch you. I will videotape. I will put myself here to be a witness to this.” Oftentimes that’s preventing an abduction from happening—whether or not that’s always preventing violence from happening or brutality happening for those observers. Then there’s people who are just hustling, you know? Giving rides, bringing food, checking in on families, building health systems that are more robust and responsive, building out… I don’t know. What’s coming around right now is, how do we get people packages at home so that they can have inspirational things to do? Coloring books! Like, how are people going to experience joy during this time? That’s also important to just be able to show up in community and do that. I’m not trying to bypass the brutality. It’s also remarkable to see people just returning to connection and returning to pleasure and joy. People are like, yeah, it’s not enough to just bring bread. We also have to check in on people and see if they’re how they’re doing and if they’re doing okay.

TFSR: Yeah, no, that’s really well put.

Donna Mae: I mean, I will say that I hesitate to give too many specifics, because there’s so much. You know, the agents are trying to get into more information. There are people posing as people that live on my block at the end of the block, to be like, “Oh, yeah. And how are you communicating? Are you using Signal?”

TFSR: Oh, for sure.

Donna Mae: “Tell me about Signal. How do you get into that?” I’m like, so where are you from again? “Oh, I’m from, you know, up by Lake Harriet.” So you’re from Lake Harriet, and you just decided to come and stand on this block corner, and now you’re asking me about Signal? That’s so nefarious. There’s people who are coming to the school patrols, and they wear the vest—because they’ve been watching which vest they wear—and then come in to pretend like they’re part of the school patrol. That has nothing to do with immigration enforcement. That is creepy surveillance. I don’t want everyone to know how we are building out communication plans and how we are connecting block to block, and how we coordinate between driving patrols and foot patrols and all those kind of things. That’s all going to have to be hyperlocal anyways. It’s all going to have to be neighborhood by neighborhood and block by block, wherever it is. I think it actually will do people a disservice to be like, “We have to replicate what Minneapolis did.” When I think of being part of the street medicine community, I know that my skills here in Minneapolis cannot translate if I would go to Philadelphia next week and try to be an outreach nurse. Some of that’s about relationships, but so much of that is about the landscape and how information moves. Yeah, it’s so hyper local.

TFSR: I think that with people having the expectation that this sort of thing is going to be happening in their community—and to be clear, I do agree that it’s already happening in everyone’s community. Police violence, violence to houseless folks, violence to people that are being marginalized by the system in any number of different ways, is already happening. The opportunities are there to get involved, to build these relationships, as difficult as it can be. Then when stuff flares up and is exacerbated, hopefully you have those relationships and those trusts to be able to build off of, to figure out what the next piece has to be to respond to what’s happening in front of you, right?

Donna Mae: Absolutely. I will say that when this brutality comes to someone’s block there is going to be a different reaction. You cannot see this happen and not have the human response… Well, I guess you can, because some people are there. You know, the agents are there. I’m like, “how are you even doing this? What is actually happening? What do you think you’re doing here?” It’s oftentimes a conversation I’m trying to have. For my neighbors… You can’t see this little kid get ripped away and not be like, “that can’t happen again. What are we going to do about it?” There’s not another agency. There’s not an institution. The police aren’t coming. The city’s not coming. If we really can prevent it, we will keep preventing it. We’ll go out and blow our whistles and we’ll be out on the block when we can be to make sure this isn’t happening.

I do think that having such a high level of brutality here… maybe it will change, maybe it’ll shift, and it will be less brutal. But I kind of doubt that. Once you have that—and you know, it is the case where it’s happening so often on my block that you can’t not be thinking about it, and you can’t not be ready for it. That’s the same in the area that I work in, too. It’s just so consistent that it also creates that absurdity of, like, “are you seeking this out? Do I want to intervene with ICE?” Like, am I going to seek out information on how to do that? It’s happened. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen on my block. It’s going to happen to my neighbors. Whether I’m seeking it out or not, I’m going to be running into it. You know, I don’t know if I’m describing that well.

But thinking about communities that this is going to come to, it’s like, when you have all of these unmarked cars start pulling up to the school and taking parents away during school drop off you are not going to want any kid to see that. You’re not going to want any community member to have to witness that again. You’re going to figure out how to patrol, or create a way in which that can’t be happening by the school. And then you’re going to do that. That can’t be happening at the grocery store. It can’t be happening here. Where are the lines to that? I do think Minneapolis, it’s like the first wave of border control was like, “We can go anywhere we want. We can take that guy out in Walmart. We can take the kids out in front of the Target entrance. We can take people out on their way into preschool. We can do whatever we want.” That kind of immunity also is just so impossible to reckon with that people will mobilize and people will do that. I do think that that’s the case. I think it will be those, like individual moments of somebody being like, “I’m not the right best person to do this, but I’m the only person to do it right now. So I will…” Blah, blah, blah, insert whatever mutual aid or mobilization of resources that you put after that.

TFSR: Minneapolis is getting hit very hard and has been for, as you said, almost sixty days. Knowing that this is also happening to varying degrees in other places around the country… ICE is in every community even if they’re not mobilizing in these numbers and with this visible brutality. Are there ways that people in the listening audience can offer support to folks in Minneapolis in ways that will get redistributed back into the community and alleviate a little bit of the pressure? Are there any groups that you would suggest people keep an eye out for?

Donna Mae: I feel like I’m always wanting to promote people investing in harm reduction organizations, because I feel like that’s something that, regardless of what kind of state violence or what kind of surveillance or what kind of policing comes in, those are some of the folks that are most impacted. But in general, I mean, I don’t know, organize a national general strike. [Laughs] I mean, I think it really is the solidarity, like it is not going to impact until there’s a big economic impact, and until industry is impacted. I think that’s some of the political landscape, but some of just like the ways in which our gears have been working for a long time. Well past this administration, for sure.

TFSR: There was a call for a general strike a couple of days ago. Did many people stay home who wouldn’t have stayed home otherwise?

Donna Mae: The amount of people who showed up that day in the cold to march in downtown Minneapolis was enormous, like 50,000 people. A lot of things were not open. Many businesses were totally closed. As always, there’s various levels of support—like, we’re closing our whole business, or we’re encouraging people not to come to work, or we’re allowing people not to come to work. I feel like in anywhere people were working, there was the most amount of leniency possible in those situations. People showed up en masse to walk the streets together. I guess I don’t know how economically that changed things, or what that did. I just know that it was also a very galvanizing moment for so many people. For so many people to come together and to be together in that way was really powerful. There’s something in it that is way beyond words to see. These are neighbors who had been out and who have been mobilized and who have been doing this, and who are, like, making decisions about who is going to stay back to be on the block because we knew ICE was going to be coming during that time. These are relationships where people are like, “So much is at stake, and we need to be there and we need to be here.” Those were the conversations that I was having that day. Working with vulnerable people, it’s like, who’s going to be able to check in on the folks who are sleeping outside in this cold weather, while as many of us are downtown as we can?

For those of us who need to be in our blocks where ICE is most prevalent, that’s the level of planning that people are doing with one another. “Well, I’m going to go out of town next weekend. Are you going to be around? Maybe we shouldn’t go out of town the same weekend.” Neighbors don’t do that, that’s unheard of, but we want to make sure there’s going to be enough people to keep us safe. It’s very different. I don’t know how that relates in my mind, to the general strike, but there’s something about it that was so profound that day. The way that people are orienting to one another and orienting to a broader sense of safety and not just personal convenience. I think that’s another one of the lessons right now in this. As someone who has a lot of critique of people who confuse discomfort with being unsafe, I see a lot of that shifting. People are willing to do more things that are uncomfortable and recognize that they actually are not unsafe in doing something that’s uncomfortable. I’m seeing that at a larger scale than what I could have imagined several months ago.

TFSR: Were there any things that I didn’t ask about that you think you want to note or touch on?

Donna Mae: I think I’m still in the stage of “This is actively happening.” I can’t imagine, or I couldn’t have conceived of this enough to be able to make large connections with something that happened five years ago, or what I know to be true and ongoing in the community about state violence. Or even things that I’ve known about Border Patrol, or things that I’ve known about Immigration Customs Enforcement. These things that have been a part of the landscape of things for a long time. There’s something about the way that it is here, actually on the ground that is so inconceivable. That makes it hard for me to be like, “Wait, this is actually of that.” It is maybe also really clear then how this is part of larger, other… I’m thinking of things that are happening in Gaza, things that are happening in in-the-world politics of things. Like, “Oh, this is what this looks like, and this is how it is, and this is what it really means to be in a place where such brutality is happening.” And how could that be in the place that I live in in my lifetime? Yeah, that makes it harder for me to be in conversation about what this means for policy, or what this means in the political realm. There’s something very galvanizing about it too, to be like, this is just a different side of the same coin.

TFSR: Well, Donna Mae, thank you very much for taking the time to have the conversation. I really appreciate it.

Donna Mae: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, thank you for having me and thank you for lifting up the questions that you did and being in the conversation. I think it is something that we’re going to be unpacking for a long time. I’m curious what I would say two weeks from now, or two years from now about this moment, I know that I only know what I can just like hold in my body and my nervous system at this time. So, appreciate that.