Social-media mainstay Will Stancil has been following ICE around the city. This is what he has seen.

Minnesota resident Will Stancil is a lawyer, policy researcher, and onetime candidate for the state’s house of representatives who has long been a voluble progressive presence on X and Bluesky. Over the past week, Stancil has become a mainstay of citizen patrols, tracking ICE agents around the city in his Honda Fit and sharing his experiences with his 100,000-plus followers. On Friday, I spoke with Stancil about what he has witnessed over the past few days.

…

Do the videos we’ve seen — of violent arrests, of agents deploying flash-bangs and tear gas on bystanders — capture the full extent of what’s happening?

No. In the private rapid-response channels, people will share many, many videos, and they don’t want to bring them public because they don’t want to be identified. People are worried. So there’s lots and lots more private stuff that is never circulating. The other thing is I think it’s really difficult to capture. The last few days have been calmer. But for the first week or so, it was really hard to convey the unrelenting pace of this stuff. I had a journalist come ride along — he just published an article about it. I had been talking about how crazy it was, and I could tell he was a little bit skeptical. He thought, Okay, maybe we’ll see an ICE car. In a two-hour ride, we chased four ICE convoys onto the highway, saw someone violently abducted alive in front of us, then saw a separate ICE convoy tear-gas a major commercial intersection for no reason at all. In two hours.

We have these rapid-response channels. I mean, I got to the point where — and this is very difficult to do — but I got to the point where I mute them or turn them off or leave them when I come home in the evening because getting the constant updates — as much as I want to be informed of my community, if I’m not out there and can’t do anything about it, I am a raw nerve all day and night. I come home and I just have to lie on the couch and just shut everything off and shut my brain off because you’ll go insane hearing about what all they’re doing.

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  • tabarnaski@sh.itjust.works
    65·
    16 days ago

    It will officially be once Waltz orders the state national guard to defend the city from ICE. Which is why he doesn’t.

        • otter@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          23·
          15 days ago

          When do we, though? When Once it’s clearly over already? Then, we can “bet against it”? When it doesn’t fucking matter anymore?

          Tough as nails that are currently getting hammered into silence, more like. 🤌🏼

          (edited for clarity)

          • chocrates@piefed.worldEnglish
            17·
            16 days ago

            That’s what I don’t get. There will be no politics when this is over if we don’t fight. What career are people trying to save.

            • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
              2·
              16 days ago

              The same one corporate boardrooms do. The ones that can’t look past the next quarterly report, the one that sacrifices the middle class and the biosphere for safe profits. The same one that shortsightedly sacrifices the future for the status quo, the status quo that requires no loss other than the creeping one you can ignore.

    • samus12345@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      16 days ago

      The state national guard can become federalized in a moment if Trump says so. Don’t count on them being any help unless they’re willing to disobey orders.

      • brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        15·
        15 days ago

        I’ve been advocating for months now that blue states need to get their state guard going.

        It’s like the national guard, but entirely run by the state. It cannot be federalized. The downside is that they often share membership with the national guard and often get their training through the national guard and federal military branches.

      • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        13·
        15 days ago

        Yeah, there have been a few instances of that happening. Notably, it happened when the governor of Arkansas tried to use the national guard to bar black students from entering a (recently desegregated) white school in 1957. Eisenhower federalized the guard, and ordered them to protect the black students instead. And the governor was forced to watch as all of “his” troops (who were already on the ground and ready to work because the governor had called them in) about-faced and started following the POTUS’ orders instead of his. It backfired on the governor pretty spectacularly, because they wouldn’t have been in place to enforce the desegregation unless he had ordered them to be there in the first place.

        And Walz isn’t dumb. He undoubtedly knows that story. He doesn’t want a repeat of that, where he calls in the guard, then has them turned against him.

          • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
            5·
            15 days ago

            I just had a horrific thought that old tricky Dick Nixon may actually end up inheriting that title just because of how bad everyone after him has been. Like compared to Trump the war on Drugs ain’t fuck all, and compared to Bush jr Vietnam was practically a peace operation.