Good evening. Tonight we’ll take a close look at the events in Minneapolis, trying to understand who the protesters are and why this moment may be causing a shift in U.S. politics. We’ll start with the headlines.
What Minneapolis means for the country
A young asylum-seeking family, terrified to go outside or even to look out of the window. Parents of elementary schoolers, struggling to explain to their children why their Latino classmates were staying home. Another fatal shooting of a U.S. citizen by federal agents. These are some of the painful and extraordinary scenes my colleagues in Minneapolis are documenting during the federal immigration crackdown there. It’s a fast-moving, fluid and unpredictable situation, as the sudden move to reassign Greg Bovino shows. But increasingly, one thing seems clear: The country is now paying attention. Moderate Democratic lawmakers have called for Kristi Noem, who leads the Department of Homeland Security, to step aside or to be impeached. At least some Republicans have broken with the Trump administration in expressing grave concerns or, in some cases, urging a full independent investigation into the fatal shooting on Saturday. Former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, who rarely weigh in on the day-to-day moves of the Trump administration, cast the moment as an inflection point for the country, with core American values and freedoms under real threat. And over a weekend when many Americans were snowed in, plenty of people around the country who don’t usually post about politics took to social media to talk about Minneapolis. To make sense of all of this, I turned to my colleague Charles Homans, who just wrote a deeply reported piece capturing how the Trump administration’s immigration operations are stoking fear and chaos across Minneapolis. It’s well worth reading in full. In the meantime, here’s our conversation, edited and condensed: Katie Glueck: In your story, you mentioned that many of the people pushing back aren’t what we might usually think of as activists. Who are they, and how would you describe them politically? Charles Homans: I was struck by what a broad cross-section of Minneapolis liberals and progressives I saw participating in one way or another in the resistance to the federal deployment. The Twin Cities are overwhelmingly Democratic and have a real culture of political engagement. But participation is not the same as activism. Most of these people were not in the streets in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, for instance, and a lot of them were very ambivalent about the aftermath of his killing in the city. What you are seeing now is a much broader kind of engagement, where even people who are not attending protests or following federal immigration agents with their phones are doing little things through their schools and churches, or with local businesses, to stand in the way of the federal operation. KG: You also wrote about the parents — particularly those with kids attending schools with larger Latino populations, it sounded like — whose “latent politics had been supercharged by a very parental mix of fear and fury.” What does that look like in practice? Is this a newly engaged political demographic? CH: In Minneapolis, I think these are people who were pretty politically engaged to begin with. One big question I have, which is a good subject for further reporting, is whether this is the same farther out into the exurbs, where you start getting into constituencies who are more politically mixed and maybe less political in general, but confronting similar circumstances. The raids have happened there, too. They’ve just been less well-documented. KG: Watching from New York, at least, the events in Minneapolis seem to have broken through with parts of the public in a way I’m not sure I’ve seen in the second Trump administration. Is that your sense, too? CH: It does feel that way. You always want to be careful about over-interpreting these moments in the moment itself. But even before the first fatal shooting by a federal agent in Minneapolis this month, polls had shown approval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tactics really tanking, especially among independents. Americans have contradictory and ambivalent views about immigration, and what should be done to control it. The administration’s tactics and messaging have forced voters to think harder about that question. Clearly the biggest factor here is the video that Minnesotans have been gathering. There’s the footage of the shootings themselves, and the administration’s false or misleading accounts of what happened — which have been easy to see through even for people who are not especially engaged. KG: How does this moment in Minneapolis compare with the protests there after the murder of George Floyd? CH: I asked a lot of people in Minneapolis about that, and the consensus, which I think is true, was that they are extremely different. The George Floyd protests, riots and ensuing debate about defunding or reorganizing the Minneapolis Police Department produced a deep division within the Twin Cities’ Democratic majority that was never really healed. But pretty much none of these people disagree about the federal deployment. And amid all of the fury and alarm of the present moment, there is a very palpable sense of relief among a lot of these people that they are on common ground, at least for now. KG: You mentioned the Defund the Police movement, something Democratic leaders came to see as a huge political liability nationally. Is there any concern among Democrats you talked to that scenes of unrest, or pushes to abolish ICE, could backfire for them politically? CH: Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, has clearly been trying to keep the Minneapolis Police Department out of the mix as much as possible. And for now, the balance of violence in the footage coming out of the city lies clearly on the side of the federal agents, who have shot and killed two people in the midst of what has been extremely angry but overwhelmingly nonviolent resistance. It does seem that so far, this has kept a lot of the ghosts of 2020 at bay. What is clear on the street in Minneapolis is that this is really a tightrope walk, and I think it is much more so since the second fatal shooting. KG: Anything I didn’t ask you about on the political front that you think is important for people to understand about Minneapolis? CH: I wrote about this in another piece this month, but I do think that Minnesota’s particular political history, of which the state’s liberals are very proud, is very relevant to how Minneapolitans see what they are doing now, and the stakes of what they are doing. They see themselves as fighting for a civic ideal that is directly under attack by the federal government.
Why the Trump administration wants Minnesota’s voter rollsA curious demand stuck out in Attorney General Pam Bondi’s letter to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota over the weekend laying out what must happen to restore “law and order” to the state: Hand over your voter rolls. My colleague Nick Corasaniti, who covers voting rights and elections, explains why the Trump administration is seeking voters’ private data from states across the country, and the concerns surrounding the effort. Got a tip? ONE NUMBER 65 percentThat’s the percentage of American voters who believe a middle-class lifestyle is out of reach for most people, a New York Times/Siena poll found. It reflects the nation’s pessimistic mood as another midterm election year kicks off.
QUOTE OF THE DAY “You’re not addressing the problem by throwing a 500-pound gorilla into these inner cities.”That’s Oscar Hagelsieb, a retired immigration officer and special agent. He voted three times for President Trump but is now feeling anger and despair about the administration’s deployment of his former agency: “It’s completely unfair to the agents who have been put in this position.”
ONE LAST THING Where is your hat, young man?For newly elected mayors, major weather events can pose tough tests of leadership. So far, my colleagues Sally Goldenberg and Dana Rubinstein write, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City has seemed to clear early hurdles with his handling of the snowstorm this weekend. But Gov. Kathy Hochul — his political pal, at least for now — had some feedback. “Thanks for helping out our neighbors,” she wrote on social media in response to a video Mamdani shared that showed him trying to help a car stuck in the snow. “But put on a hat!” Taylor Robinson contributed reporting. |
