Immigrant rights activists call upon city leaders to enforce sanctuary city policies, not police protesters

Minneapolis, MN – On January 21, the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC) held a press conference outside Mayor Jacob Frey’s office to respond to the federal agents’ ongoing assault upon the people of Minneapolis, and to demand that city officials prosecute the violent agents harming our communities, rather than the people reacting to that harm.

This call to action is a follow up to the “Real Sanctuary Now!” campaign, in which MIRAC pushed the mayor and city council to enact stronger safeguards against collaboration between local law enforcement and ICE.

Among the petitioning, rallies and other actions to push the campaign forward, MIRAC organized a sit-in in Mayor Frey’s office on October 28 to demand that the mayor not only pay lip service but take concrete steps to protect immigrant communities of Minneapolis. Instead of engaging in dialogue with the community organizers waiting in his office, Mayor Frey chose to let the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) arrest all 11 of them. Since then, city prosecutors have used their time to uphold trespassing charges against the activists over months of negotiations, until the sit-in participants agreed to be fined for petty misdemeanors.

MIRAC organized the press conference to highlight the city prosecutors’ and MPD’s prioritization of the suppression of dissent over the preservation of the rights the people of Minneapolis. A MIRAC member who participated in the sit-in, Owen Lubozynski, stated, “every time MPD is dispatched to a scene where community members are responding to ICE violence, the officers’ boots are pointing at us. Never have we seen them standing on the side of Minneapolis residents. Never have we seen them facing the state-sponsored terrorists who represent the greatest threat to our civil rights and our safety.”

Angel Smith-El, a member of the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice, provided further context by pointing out that “the Minneapolis Police Department has never been held accountable for police terror, or assisting the residents of Minneapolis when it comes to police crimes or domestic abuse,” and so we must have community control of the police to guarantee real accountability and non-cooperation between MPD and federal agents.”

The council member for Minneapolis’s Ward 2, Robin Wonsley, expanded upon MPD’s failure to protect the community by recalling that in 2023, “a council member requested MPD to block off streets here in downtown in response to Somali youth, apparently causing a ruckus in the downtown area around the Fourth of July. We saw cement barriers go up to prevent youth from accessing that. Why aren’t we seeing the same rapid response from the MPD to put up blockages to protect our neighbors as well from federal ICE agents? That’s the request that has been posed to the mayor’s office that has not been complied with.”

Owen Lubozynski points out, “Regular people are out patrolling for ICE, observing them, documenting them, and chasing them out of our neighborhoods. And we are also giving our neighbors rides to work and to school, delivering groceries, organizing fundraisers, guarding neighborhoods and local businesses. We are taking care of each other.”

In response to concerns from the press about the ways regular people are fighting back against ICE, Erika Zurawski, co-founder of MIRAC, stated that “We would never condemn any type of protest, or protester, for the way that they want to show their reaction and their objection to the Trump administration and to how these ICE agents are destroying communities and kidnapping people out of their vehicles. ICE agents are being violent actors in this; they are the only ones bringing violence into our communities. Anybody who objects and opposes this violence, we will not condemn them for protesting against these atrocities.”

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