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.
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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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He is not going to do that. I like Walz but that isn’t going to happen.
Minnesotans are modest but hard as nails. Don’t bet against it.
What would be the point? Trump can just instantly federalize them and then use them against you.
WHY would we DO such a Thing as PUNISH MAGA when we Need HEALING and PEACE!
-Democrats who said They had Enough Information to Jail Trump during Biden’s Term but chose Not to!
Kronstadt is the point.
When do we, though? When it’s clearly over already? Then we “bet against it”? When it doesn’t fucking matter anymore?
Tough as nails that are currently getting hammered into silence, more like. 🤌🏼
Minnesotans are out in the street daily. It is the democratic leadership I have no faith in.
Fair enough. 🥲
i don’t know what news you’re watching but minnesota is literally resisting harder than any other state short of maybe California
In what way is California resisting ICE harder than Minnesotans?
Already passed laws against masked and anonymous ICE, alongside a governor that at least speaks with a spine. Far as I can tell, most states don’t have enough establishment leadership that opposes ICE.
Still not enough IMO.
You’re kidding right? The guy who rolls over like a dog for Ben Shapiro and mourns Charlie Kirk speaks with a bigger spine than Tim Walz?
I’m not answering your question because I literally never even said that
Literally speaking, you literally did say those literal words, literally.
I mean, you did.
I’ve read it three times now, and I can’t any other conclusion. Is it the “maybe” part, which can’t be constructed as a no?
Maybe not when their political career is on the line.
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.
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.