On the Front Line of Minnesota’s Fight With ICE

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. I'm out now. I'm out now. I'm out now. For weeks, protests around Minneapolis have caught nationwide attention as the city shows open defiance to a federal immigration crackdown. We don't have a good neighbors under attack. What do we do? Stand up front there. We're not doing it. And our colleague Charles Homans explains why the city has become ground zero in the fight over the government's deportation strategy. It's Wednesday, January 21. This is Michael Simon Johnson. I'm here with New York Times reporter Charlie Homans, and we are what neighborhood are we in, actually? So this is the Lynn Lake area of Minneapolis. We're in South Minneapolis, and it's, named after this intersection that we're standing at actually, which is Lindale Avenue and Lake Street. It's kind of the place where sort of the recent waves of immigrants and settled refugees and the Minneapolis of the kind of white liberal urban culture intersect. And those groups have been kind of have been brought together in an interesting way by this ice crackdown in the city. I mean, the thing that's different about Minneapolis compared to Chicago or Los Angeles or other cities that have been targets of this crackdown so far is that it's a very small city. It doesn't have that many people in it. And the number of federal agents that have been sent here is really quite huge. And what I've been hearing just talking to people here is that, you know, in the last few weeks, you know, people who are potential targets of these rates have really felt like they can't leave their homes at all. And so that has kind of become a focus of the organizing of of a lot of these local organizations and businesses, which are kind of gathering donations. So we're about to go to one of these places. Tell me about what this place is and then what its role is in the in this kind of network that you're talking about. Sure. So we're gonna go to Smitten Kitten, which is a sex shop on, Lyndale here. And it's been playing a very interesting role, kind of what's been happening here lately. Okay. Well, let's go inside. So I'm Anne. I work here at the Smitten Kitten for the past two years. During the regular day, we are an adult store. We really focus on trying to give people, like, accurate information about sex education. We also have stuff for, like, every gender ever. Well, it it is very striking that this is, like, a sex shop. A really nice one, beautifully laid out. But also at the front, there's this, mutual aid. Mutual aid. Yeah. We're always doing mutual aid, but we just expanded it and, like, imploded ourselves with mutual aid, basically. Well, let's let's go downstairs. Yeah. Sweet. I'm now walking past the sci fi fantasy dildo section. That'd …