“Minnesota has the nation’s largest Karen population, indigenous people who were forced from their homeland in Myanmar, with about 20,000 living mostly in Ramsey County. It was not immediately clear Monday how many have TPS.”

www.startribune.com/temporary-pr...

I am devastated for our neighbors and for our city. We will continue to do everything we can do push back against this authoritarian behavior by the federal government, just as we will continue to stand with every single immigrant who calls Saint Paul home.

They detained people with no criminal record and with no evidence that they will receive the process they are due. And they physically attacked our community members who dared to show up in defense of the immigrant community.

Every one of these people is a member of our community; a member of a family; a neighbor; a loved one. The federal government lied about why federal agents were here.

I am devastated that this happened today. I don’t want to live in a country where the federal government is a threat to our community. And I am committed to working every day to build a better world for the people of Saint Paul.

Because of this incident, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota has opened its Detention Line today (11/18) until 5:00. If individuals have a family member who has been detained, they are available to help at 651.641.1011. Additional resources can be found at stpaul.gov/immigration-resources.

And we can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our immigrant neighbors, as folks from across the city did today, saying that in Saint Paul, immigrants will always be welcome.

We can work to provide the information we have as quickly as possible, while not unquestioningly trusting official sources—something we strove to do today by both sharing what we were told as we were being told it, but also moving quickly to the scene itself to get accurate, real-time information.

That said, we can—and today did—ensure that our local authorities are not cooperating with ICE.

In this moment, I wish I could say ICE isn’t welcome here and have that mean something. But as much as our city’s residents don’t want ICE here, we cannot stop them from coming. When the federal government turns on its own people in this way, the tools that we have as a city are painfully limited.

They used chemical irritants on our neighbors, shoved and threw people to the ground, and made sure everybody knew that there can be no expectation of safety in our own city when federal agents are around.

While there is much that we don’t know, here’s what we do know: today, the federal government intentionally terrorized our community. They arrived in large numbers, in masks, and with no explanation.

Getting this information is our top priority. It is also exceedingly difficult in the face of a federal government that is operating in intentional secrecy.