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For limited durations, in isolated contexts, it’s a party. On a Thursday morning the number of protesters outside the brutalist building from which ICE conducts its menace in Minneapolis swells from 25 to at least 100 by early afternoon. Spirits are high. At times there is topical music (“Fortunate Son”; Ray Charles’s “America the Beautiful”); now and then someone will dance in the street. There is a dog in booties wearing a serape, led around by a man in a cape with a cardboard sign that reads SHAME. There is a quiet clown and a loud man in a wide-brimmed hat waving a giant American flag. “ICE out,” shouts someone next to me over and over into his megaphone; his beanie reads ABORTION YOU BETCHA.

Whipple is what we call this standing protest, the ominous structure across the street, and the social-justice-oriented Episcopal bishop for whom the building was named long before it was filled with Minnesotans snatched from the street. An SUV squeals out of the complex. “Oh!” says a woman next to me. “That was a happy Nazi!” Our boots scrape against the ice. A woman walks around with a box of disposable hand warmers before placing it next to a growing collection of other boxes — granola bars, water, almonds. All of us stare in the direction of a parking lot just past a chain-link fence, through which we can see many cars and the occasional agent. Sometimes a robot voice comes from that direction. “This is the federal protective service,” the voice will say. “Get off federal property and stop obstructing.” The man with the dog puts his hand to his ear performatively. “What’s that?” he says. “Hmmm?”

More agents gather; I can see them only dimly through the fence, but the crowd begins to prepare. “Do you have a mask?” a woman asks calmly, and before I can answer she has placed a disposable mask with a respirator in my gloved hands. I am standing next to Liz, a 37-year-old in a pom-pom beanie who recently quit her job in corporate event planning. “You should put your mask on,” she says pleasantly. “You should probably put that on,” another man says. “Do you have goggles?” A sign behind me reads YOUR GRANDMA HATES YOU.

There are three, then six, then 30 agents outside the federal building, across the street from the protesters, head to toe in black — vests, face shields, helmets, batons, tear-gas launchers, pepper-ball guns, sidearms. Protesters are supposed to stay off the street in front of the Whipple Building, but sometimes they step into the street. What you feel about what happens next will depend on what you believe to be the proper response to this violation of social order. The agents cross the street and keep walking, an undifferentiated mass of black except at their center, where Border Patrol boss Greg Bovino has chosen to draw attention to himself in a black scarf and long dark greatcoat.

If you grow up in New England the war made relentlessly real to you is the Revolutionary one. Men came to this land in ridiculous red coats and farmers in plainclothes drove them to humiliation and ruin. Minnesota, unlike most midwestern states, was founded by New Englanders, who brought their colleges and town squares and the moral rectitude some call sanctimony well west of Connecticut. The president claims to have won the state “three times,” but no Republican has won Minnesota since before many of the Whipple protesters were born. The state is a provocation to the kind of man who thinks the middle his.

The agents come all at once with a kind of mechanical sameness. The jeers from this side grow louder: “TRAITOR! FUCK ICE!” They shove protesters onto a snow-covered patch of dry grass; others trip trying to back up. “FUCK YOU! SHAME ON YOU!” An agent forces a fallen protester back down and slips on the curb. Somewhere in the mêlée a photographer has a knee pressed into his back.

I catch an older white guy on his way out and talk my way into his........

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