Minneapolis Feels ‘Like Being in a Civil War’ |
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interesting times
Documenting ICE is dangerous. This man wants you to do it anyway.
Hosted by Ross Douthat
Produced by Victoria Chamberlin
Mr. Douthat is a columnist and the host of the “Interesting Times” podcast.
The death of Renee Good in Minneapolis has put a spotlight on the aggressive tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents operating in U.S. cities, and it has spotlighted the groups organizing to observe and protest immigration enforcement.
I’m really interested in these small-scale efforts. They have led to people standing on street corners, blowing whistles to alert neighborhoods to ICE’s presence and following and recording agents while they are conducting operations and making arrests.
It seems like a very effective style of protest in certain ways, especially since it generates footage of ICE’s overreach and abuse, but it’s also fraught with risk, especially when it tempts protesters to interfere with law enforcement directly.
My guest today, Francisco Segovia, is training people for this kind of activism. He is the executive director of a Minneapolis nonprofit that’s on the front lines of anti-ICE operations. I wanted to talk to him about how he trains people for interactions with ICE agents, the risks it carries for protesters and what he wants to see from immigration policy.
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Francisco Segovia, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Francisco Segovia: Thank you for having me here.
Douthat: I want to start by getting something immediate from you about the situation in Minneapolis.
We’re taping this on Wednesday. It’s about a week out from when Renee Good was shot and killed. Can you just describe what you see as the current dynamic on the ground, both with ICE agents and with protesters?
Segovia: It is a scary moment for thousands of families in Minnesota. We see ICE agents all over the city driving their cars and stopping people, and we see people chasing them as well — people whistling, alerting others that ICE is present. There are a lot of videos of ICE arresting people and people crying, car windows being broken. It’s like being, maybe, in the middle of a civil war.
Yesterday, for instance, right outside my office, we saw a woman running — I think she was telling businesses to close doors because ICE was around — and we all, from the office, ran out, put on our vests to see what was happening. And immediately ICE came to the corner, stopped a vehicle and arrested two people.
That’s what we are going through right now.
Douthat: How many people do you think are involved in the different kinds of protests?
Segovia: It depends. If there is a march, hundreds or thousands of people will show up. But when there is an ICE action — what we have noticed is, for instance, yesterday, a lot of people came out of their houses. People go into the street, become present and chant things like “Shame.” In just a matter of minutes, you can see 30, 50, 100 people coming to witness and chant, saying various things to ICE agents.
Douthat: What is COPAL? What does the organization do in normal times?
Segovia: COPAL stands for Communities Organizing Power and Action for Latinos. We came about in 2018, and what we did — or what we created — was to better the quality of lives of Latino families in Minnesota. But then right after we began, Covid came in, and then we created the help line that we have now, supporting families across the state to keep healthy.
But our main mission is to better our communities through a range of activities that we do.
One of them is a worker center. We have a worker center where people come to look for jobs, careers. Both youth and adults. We also support people who have been victims of wage theft, which is pretty common in some industries. We have offices, as well, that we have opened in two other cities: Rochester and Mankato.
Douthat: And what about immigration work prior to the current protests? Obviously, there was immigration enforcement in Minneapolis before the current wave. If somebody called your help line, having been taken into custody by ICE, four years ago, would you have done something?
Segovia: The most that we could have done is to refer that person to a lawyer. We didn’t have, obviously, the level of ICE activity that we have now, but most of our work would have been: Someone was arrested, what do we do? OK, let’s connect that family or that person with a lawyer, and a lawyer will take it from there.
Douthat: Give me just a little bit of your own biography. You’re from El Salvador originally. Tell me your story of coming to the United States.
Segovia: My country was going through a civil war. I am a teacher by trade. In 1989, there was a major military offensive, and some priests were killed by the army. That situation was unbearable.
I couldn’t be in El Salvador anymore because many people, including teachers, were targets of the government. Then, with my ex-wife, who was expecting — she was six months pregnant — we had to migrate.
I looked for the Canadian Embassy and looked for political asylum, but there was no Canadian Embassy. Then a relative said: Why don’t you come to the United States? I hesitated a little bit about coming to the United States because I understood the role of the United States in El Salvador, but eventually we didn’t have any other options.
Like many millions of people and many Salvadorans in the ’80s, we traveled north without documents, crossed three borders, including the United States border, without documents.
Douthat: How did you cross the U.S. border specifically?
Segovia: At that point in the ’90s in Tijuana, there was no fence. I do remember that.
Basically we went to the border, and we just crossed. There were hundreds of people trying to cross, and the agents were chasing many people. There were so many people trying to cross. That’s what happened to us.
Douthat: OK. You just sort of carefully walked across.
Segovia: Right. And then we went to Florida, where our family lived, and eventually another friend who used to live in Minnesota said: You should come to Minnesota. And that’s how we ended up in Minnesota with a 2-month-old baby.
There were some nuns who offered us shelter. And at that moment, we didn’t speak English, didn’t have documents and were fearful of a lot of things, and Minnesota became home.
Douthat: What happened then, in terms of your legal status?
Segovia: I eventually was able to get legal representation. And I had to leave the country, go back to El Salvador to get the visa and enter again. By 1991, I had a green card.
Douthat: It’s now been 35 years. There have probably been infinite changes in the immigrant legal experience, but what are the biggest changes that you’ve observed between then and now?
Segovia: You know, when I came, I heard that the Reagan administration had given amnesty to a lot of people. Historically there has always been hostility toward immigrants. Mexicans had already been deported in massive numbers before.
But at least when I came, there was a different perspective. I think the wars in Central America — even the Republicans had a different perspective. You had people like George Bush and others with different perspectives of immigrants than what we have now.
What I see is that we have seen more waves of immigrants from Africa, for instance, from Latin America in Minnesota. When I came, there was hardly anyone that spoke Spanish. Over many years, I have seen the community grow. The Latino business community has grown. Which is something good.
Douthat: Had you ever been involved in any kind of direct protests on immigration before the second Trump administration?
Segovia: Immigration — human rights, civil rights — is something that has always been important. I am a teacher, as I said before, and as a person who had grown up in a country where the government was so abusive, your level of consciousness is........