Federal immigration enforcement agents (and other law enforcement officers) have long been known to use excessive, even lethal, force against civilian populations. This violence has disproportionately targeted Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) people and communities and now is no different.
While this violence is not new, its tenor and intensity increased dramatically in 2025 and 2026. Cruel and violent campaigns have targeted American cities, such as Chicago (Operation Midway Blitz), Los Angeles, and Minneapolis (Operation Metro Surge), as ICE heavily recruited more agents and acted largely with impunity to US law.
In Minneapolis, thousands of ICE and Customs & Border Patrol (CBP) agents deployed to the Twin Cities and metro area with militarized equipment and indiscriminately racial profiling, targeting people of color, and causing massive direct violence and indirect harms. In the process of wreaking havoc and violence on the Cities, ICE and CBP agents murdered multiple legal observers, with the federal government immediately impeding investigations in to these killings and attempting coverups.
Because federal forces have overrun our cities, acted with depraved and ferocious violence, and abducted and killed our neighbors, we need every avenue to collectively organize against them. We are collecting data of ICE abuses for exactly this reason. Rapid Response networks have proven effective and have surely prevented innumerable abductions, but we need to be able to fight a force this strong on multiple fronts. That means providing testimony to national legislative bodies (the Senate and House), lodging legal and class action cases against ICE and the DHS, bettering our systems of protection and resistance, collectively joining to heal and bolster our resolve, and more!
We need to protect the data that has been collected by thousands, even tens of thousands, of legal observers across the State of Minnesota and more broadly across the US as ICE will surely continue to harass and torture communities until it is abolished.
This data portal is a new and agile tool to collect this data in an ever changing environment in the fight against the illegal and violent behavior of ICE and the DHS. It is designed for rapid responders and others who have limited time but want to be able to opt into collective efforts to organize against ICE/CBP/DHS.