Why Minneapolis is at the centre of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown

With the cold so fierce that ice can cover the Mississippi River, this is the slow season for the hospitality trade in Minneapolis. So Donald Trump’s decision to swarm the city with some 3,000 federal immigration officers would seem a boon for the hotels and restaurants, at least. But some of the people who clean the agents’ rooms or pour them drinks are vulnerable to being scooped up themselves.

That is why Wade Lüneburg, political director of the local branch of a union representing hospitality workers, finds himself delivering food to the families of workers in hiding across Minneapolis. Before he knocks he texts a photo of himself in his red union hat to assure the residents he is not a federal agent. “They are everywhere,” says Catherine, who usually works in a hotel kitchen, after she lets him in. “There is no safe place anywhere for us.”

Elsewhere, a 16-year-old boy receives Mr Lüneburg’s box of onions, carrots, canned goods and corn tortillas at the door to his apartment building. He is a citizen—he carries his passport everywhere now—but his parents are not. He has noticed them lifting the curtain every few minutes to check if federal agents are in the parking lot, and he has stopped going to school in hopes of helping if the crisis comes. “They’re usually very good at hiding their emotions,” he says, “but I can tell they’re very scared right now. And I don’t know how to deal with it.”

To Mr Lüneburg, a member for 37 years of UNITE HERE Local 17, the hospitality union, none of this makes sense. “Honest, good, working folk should not be taking the brunt of this,” he says. As he drives back downtown, through block after block of comfortable single-family houses, he notes that cleaning hotel rooms is hard work. “I don’t see native Americans—native white Americans—raising their hands to take jobs in these hotels,” he says.

At close to three times the size of the combined police forces of Minneapolis and its neighbour, St Paul, the deployment of immigration agents here dwarfs the force Mr Trump previously sent into the much larger city of Chicago. Yet the population of undocumented immigrants in the entire state, estimated at 100,000, is small, particularly when compared with states such as Texas (2m) and Florida (1.2m). The latter have been spared the disruption of masked agents demanding identification from people on the sidewalks, turning pepper spray and flash-bang grenades on protesters and breaking down doors in pursuit of people they say are criminals but sometimes have proven to be law-abiding citizens.

“Why Minnesota? Why Minneapolis?” asks Muhammad Abdul-Ahad, who runs a violence-prevention group. He was keeping watch by the memorial that has sprung up where Renee Good was shot dead by an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on January 7th, as she tried to drive away from him. Mr Abdul-Ahad was wondering about any link to a nearby memorial for George Floyd, whose death under the knee of a police officer ignited global protest against police violence in 2020.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, says “anyone in our state struggles to understand this.” She muses that Minnesota’s political culture may help supply the answer. “One of the things that may be unique here is that in our case, regular citizens, including a very young woman in the George Floyd case, went to the scene and started videoing,” Ms Klobuchar says. “And when they told them to leave, they kept it up.” Minneapolis is exhibiting something like an immune response to the ICE incursion. Unions, non-profits, church groups and private citizens have assembled into a dense network to support migrants, documented or not, delivering food, tracking ICE vehicles and harassing agents with insults and warning migrants with whistles as they close in.

Minneapolis’s politics of solidarity and resistance draw on at least two sources, one old and one recent. The state Democratic party is called the “Democratic-Farmer-Labor” party, or DFL, because of its roots in agrarian and labour populism of the early 20th century. In one of history’s little jokes, it was a huge influx of the sorts of immigrants Mr Trump has said he wants more of—Scandinavians—that created this leftist politics. It is now centred on Minneapolis, since the “F” has faded as a Democratic constituency in Minnesota; and the “L” is waning, stalwarts such as Mr Lüneburg notwithstanding.

The more recent source is the killing of George Floyd, which sensitised even the city’s privileged residents to how the law could be abused and rights rendered null, says Emmanuel Mauleón, a law professor at the University of Minnesota.  “You had a mass awakening to what happens when law enforcement exceeds its bounds,” he says. “The ethos of protecting one another in this way, I think, is born of that moment.”

For Trump officials, it is the resistance that is abusing the law. They have called Ms Good a domestic terrorist out to run the agent down. They have defended ICE’s tactics as necessary to prevent anarchists from impeding law enforcement. Among modern presidents Mr Trump is unique in his zest, when encountering opposition, for increasing the political temperature. Whether this outcome is intended or not, the crackdown in Minneapolis could provoke overreaction on the left, in the form of lawbreaking resistance locally and a renewed national push from Democrats to “abolish ICE”, just as some also called to abolish the police in 2020.  Polls show Mr Trump’s crackdown is unpopular now, but also that voters still trust congressional Republicans more when it comes to immigration.

Whoever the courts decide is breaking the law in Minneapolis, this contest is ultimately a political one. It will be lost by whichever side overplays its hand. But no one will really win. ■