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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TL;DR:
The person who replied to you said “Fight”, and they’re not wrong, but I want to emphasise that there are people whose personal circumstances mean that they feel they need to flee, and that is okay. You should not feel guilty if this is something you genuinely need to do.
If you need to flee, do so by relying on your community. Don’t do things along. Look for ways that you can resist while still keeping yourself safe, and use your community connections to support other people who need to flee. There are some people who are not as able to fight, but there are still ways they can contribute.
To give an example of the kind of thing I mean (albeit in a far less explosive context, because I’m not in the US), I am physically disabled and have a bunch of other factors that mean I am not safely able to attend most protests, even as a legal observer. However, there have been a few times where I have been on standby, parked near the police station overnight, waiting for people to be released. This is because UK police tend to make a lot of arrests at protests and either not charge you, or charge you at a later point. They tend to let people out in the middle of the night, and they often do not have resources to travel home, or easy ways to contact people for help. When people in my network find out which station arrested protesters have been taken to, we can coordinate to ensure that there’s definitely going to be someone there when they are let out.
Like I say, that’s an example from a very different political climate. Things on the ground where you are is changing so fast that I can’t possibly know what kind of support roles are both relatively safe, and useful right now. This is why it is crucial to connect with your communities. Figuring out what works is a work-in-progress, but I am confident that there are ways you can help contribute to the resistance efforts while also relying on your community to help you or your loved ones flee if you need to.
Things are awful, and it sucks. Nothing is safe right now, even fleeing. But we have a duty to do whatever we can to reduce the harm done to the people in our communities. At times like this, all we have is each other, so let’s look after each other.