Inside the Somali-Led Resistance to Trump’s Assault on Minneapolis |
Kamal Yusuf doesn’t speak English. That hasn’t stopped him from getting involved as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents flood his immigrant-heavy Minneapolis neighborhood.
For the last two weeks, he has been on the streets actively looking out for any ICE presence.
From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Yusuf travels through the Cedar Riverside neighborhood, popularly known as West Bank, on foot in biting cold and on slippery ice. The instant he spots ICE agents, he immediately informs a Signal chat and whistles for several minutes without pause.
Yusuf, with his neon orange vest and black beanie that says “FUCK ICE,” is not an inconspicuous presence.
“But I am a citizen. I need to do this for my community,” he said, speaking to The Intercept on Sunday, through a friend who translated.
“We realized we can’t fight the federal government. But we can come together and patrol the neighborhood, keep ICE out.”
The only breaks Yusuf takes are at mosques or the West Bank Diner, a restaurant that gives free tea and sambusas, a savory Somali pastry, to anyone who is part of the patrol.
Creating new ICE watch patrols and rapid response networks, fearing going to work or leaving home, watching their shared community spaces grow desolate and their shops sit empty — these are the experiences of Somali residents of the Twin Cities who spoke with The Intercept about being under siege in their own hometowns.
While many of the state’s residents are being impacted by President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, Somalis in particular know they are targets of the administration and the thousands of federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota.
Yusuf’s Signal chat includes eight Somali founding members among the hundreds of volunteers belonging to a patrol group created last month after Trump’s surge of force began.
“When ICE started showing up in our neighborhoods,” said Abdi Rahman, a 28-year-old founding member of the West Bank neighborhood patrol, “we realized we can’t fight the federal government. But we can come together and patrol the neighborhood, keep ICE out, deescalate, keep some of these right-wing lunatics out of our neighborhood.”
Home in Minnesota
The Somali community in the Twin Cities is putting up a resistance against ICE, pooling resources, and trying to protect its more vulnerable members from arrest.
“We buy groceries for them and drop them off at their homes.”
In the past two weeks, videos of U.S. citizens of Somali heritage confronting ICE have spread online. Most Somali people in the Twin Cities are citizens or permanent residents, but the many who are not find themselves vulnerable to the vagaries of the federal government.
“The non-citizens have stopped stepping out entirely. We buy groceries for them and drop them off at their homes,” Rahman said.
The current moment is reminiscent of the unrest that swept Minneapolis in 2020, Rahman said, after police murdered George Floyd. “The Somali community came together back then too, and it really helped keep us safe.”
Rahman had just ended his own patrol on a 35-degree day — balmy by the standards of January in Minneapolis. A........