‘Our spirit can’t be broken’: Minneapolis city council member on resisting Trump’s immigration crackdown

After weeks of federal raids and aggression, Minneapolis city council member Aisha Chughtai said what her community needs most now “is for ICE to leave Minnesota”.

Chughtai represents the district where 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents on Saturday, the second killing of a Minneapolis resident by a federal agent on the city’s southside this year.

“There have been three homicides in Minneapolis, and two of them have been perpetrated by ICE,” she said. “The number one deadly killer of Minneapolitans right now is ICE.”

On Saturday, she woke up to calls from a neighbor that someone had been shot in the neighborhood. She lives four blocks away and rushed to the scene, arriving as an ambulance was leaving with Pretti. She stayed as dozens of federal agents came in, liberally deploying chemicals into the crowd of residents.

The area is one of the densest in the city, she said – apartment buildings and businesses nearby were filled with teargas. She watched agents tackle someone who was walking down the sidewalk and violently arrest them. When she tried to get away from a cloud of teargas, two agents with guns drawn told her she couldn’t go through.

It was a “devastating day” for the neighborhood, amid more than a month of destruction in south Minneapolis, home to the largest immigrant community in the state. Daily, federal agents roam the area, trying to detain immigrants and arresting or deploying chemicals at people who try to prevent them from taking their neighbors, Chughtai said.

“There’s so much fear and grief, despair, anger, pain in our community, so many folks who are afraid of being in their homes, of leaving their homes, because they don’t know if that will be the last time they ever see their loved ones,” she said.

On the ground, though, Minneapolis residents aren’t giving up the fight. “Our spirit can’t be broken here,” she said. “We’re going to continue to show up for our neighbors.”

As a local official, she is pushing for local leaders to arrest those who killed Pretti and Renee Good and hold them to account. She and the rest of the council are also calling on Minnesota governor Tim Walz to declare a state of emergency and put in place an eviction moratorium. In her district, approximately 80% of people are renters, and the majority of Minneapolis residents are renters. She wants to do “every single thing we can to keep people safe in their homes and unified with their families”.

Minneapolis residents should continue to show up and participate in their neighborhood’s rapid response networks, pick up whistles and get trained on how to be legal observers, she said. For people outside the state, it helps to amplify what is actually happening on the ground and dismantle the federal narrative about Pretti and the city, and find ways to donate to organizations and people helping locally.

“The only thing that’s within our control as individuals right now is that we continue to show up, to resist, to be in the streets, to be in our neighborhoods, and continue calling for ICE to to leave our city, to leave our state,” she said. “I think our state and local officials are unified in wanting to see that outcome, and we have to keep pushing until we get our city back, our state back.”

Even if ICE leaves tomorrow – and the Trump administration has given no signs so far it will soon pull its forces out of the state – the impacts of this period in Minneapolis will be felt for much longer. Residents, including children, have been traumatized, witnessed deaths, violence and family separations. But that recovery can’t even begin until ICE leaves, Chughtai said.

But, Chughtai said, “I don’t think that we can even begin to rebuild or recover from this grief and trauma that we’ve been experiencing now for two months until these people leave our state.”