Minneapolis Under Siege (Neon Liberalism #60, with Will Stancil)

Samantha and guest Will Stancil talk the murder of Renée Good and the Trump administration's larger assault on Minneapolis. Will is on the front lines of monitoring ICE in Minneapolis, working with his neighborhood rapid reaction group, and remains a vital commentator and activist in this disturbing time.

Will recounts witnessing ICE abductions, confronting ICE agents, and the personal experience of living in a city under siege. He also talks the larger questions of how resistance has been organized, why this isn't 2020 all over again, why this isn't about immigration, but terror—and how we can beat them.

Neon Liberalism can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Transcript

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:00:00]**
Welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I'm Samantha Hancox-Li. Minneapolis is a city under siege. The federal government, in the form of ICE, has descended on Minneapolis. They are kidnapping people off the streets. They have murdered a woman, Renee Nicole Good. And I wanted to talk about that, and especially to get the perspective of someone on the ground, on the front lines of resisting this, on the podcast.

So I'm very excited, very happy to have Will Stancil back on Neon Liberalism. Will, welcome to the podcast.

**Will Stancil [00:00:52]**
Thank you. Very different circumstances than before.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:00:56]**
Yeah, that's for sure. So I guess my first question for you is—you're very much on the front lines of this, right? You are out there, you are following ICE around, you are trying to confront them when they're trying to snatch people. What's it like? What is an ICE kidnapping like?

**Will Stancil [00:01:19]**
I've seen two of them now, and they're very different, both of them from each other. In both cases that I saw directly, I was sort of the lead pursuit car of the ICE vehicle that did the kidnapping, the abduction.

In one of them, it was a large convoy. They roll through the neighborhood many, many, many times a day, often in these large convoys full of masked men. There's four men in them usually. You can't always tell because the windows are tinted, but there's usually four. If they're masked up, there's usually four of them in there. I think there were four cars, so probably sixteen guys. Maybe there were five cars—I couldn't see that clearly. I was behind them. We had tracked them, and I managed to sort of intercept them and get behind them and follow them.

One of the things we had started doing is honking to draw more attention to them. So we basically followed into the neighborhood honking. It's a sort of tactic to get more observation on them. So more cars are starting to accumulate around them, and then they pull up suddenly. One of them just veers off, abruptly cuts me off. It's at the main commercial intersection, one of two main commercial intersections.

Guys pile out of the car, heavily armed. All the cars empty out. They grab a woman from the street, a Black woman who appeared to be alone. And there's everyone screaming immediately. This is a very public area, people around. People are screaming. It's a very tense scene. I have it on video.

The ICE agents have bear spray, and they're putting it in people's faces, occasionally spraying people in the face. One of them's just standing guard, and on the video, you can see she's physically shaking. It's tense enough that—I mean, I'm sure they were also very nervous. It's a tense situation. People are screaming, "What's your name? What's your name?" to the person being taken. But there's no indication. Given the situation, I don't think that her awareness was that great, honestly. So we never got a name.

Then they stuck her in the van, and then the agents hung out for—the whole thing lasted probably two and a half minutes. The agents hung out for a bit, basically fighting back and forth with the crowd. One of the cars peels off, the other cars—because it's a busy intersection, there's so much chaos, you can't really get out. It kind of evolves into this melee.

I was, honestly—this is the first time I'd seen anything like this—I was useless. I had a passenger in my car filming, so thankfully she had the presence of mind to film. I went out there with the intention of filming and just ended up degenerating into screaming at them to go home. "Go home, go home!" Because I couldn't—the situation is so chaotic, you just can't think. It's like being in a combat situation. An ICE agent got in my face with the bear spray. I didn't actually get sprayed.

And then they go racing down Hennepin Avenue, sort of the main thoroughfare of my neighborhood. Half the neighborhood in pursuit, they get on the highway. They're gone. As far as I can tell, no one ever figured out who it was. No one knew her. It seems like she had been targeted because they had identified her, maybe, as someone who's walking alone, didn't have anyone there who knew her. So no idea if she's a US citizen. No idea—she may have been out of the country in 24 hours. We just—I don't think anyone knows.

The other one was quite a bit different. I was following on the other side of Uptown, my neighborhood. I was following what was an obvious ICE vehicle—they've gotten a little less obvious over time, but initially they were all very obvious. It was a black SUV, obvious Border Patrol agent in the front seat. Suddenly they pulled to the side, and an agent jumps out. I thought I was about to get caught, but he goes running down the alley. So I pulled into the alley behind him.

There's a second car, I think, in the alley, if I remember correctly. And they're chasing a guy. He's a Latino man. They tackle him, stuff him in the back of the car, and then they just go whipping right into traffic.

I actually had a journalist in the car at this point, who should have some of this on videotape. I don't know, we'll see. I wasn't really able to review the footage myself because it was news policy. So we'll see if it's actually clear enough what happened, but it should be on tape.

Unfortunately, we were able to track the car, but I didn't have the presence of mind to say "What's your name?" before he was in the car. At that point, we were probably the only witnesses, or maybe like one guy in the alley just standing there with no idea what's happening. So as far as I can tell, same thing—they targeted someone who appeared to be walking alone, who was of color. And yeah, it was over in probably 30 seconds, and they're gone.

I followed the car into traffic, and actually tried to—this was crazy of me to do—we were stuck in traffic right in front of the alley. As soon as you leave the alley at the Lyn-Lake intersection, a major commercial intersection, probably one of the most heavily monitored by observers intersections in the city. So I actually got out of the car and left, kind of abandoned my car in the middle of the street, and walked up to the ICE vehicle, which was stuck in traffic. I pointed at it and screamed, "There's a guy in the car! They have an abductee in the car! Follow that car!"

It was very out of character. The thing is, you can't get in front of it, because then you're obstructing, and they will arrest and shoot you. So it was like, pointing, and then they race out. I tried to follow them down Lake Street and was not able to do so. So the guy is just gone, and we have no idea who he is.

So both times—very, very rapid, very aggressive, no indication whatsoever they know who they're taking. And then just gone.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:07:29]**
Yeah, so that sounds terrifying. There's something you mentioned in both of these cases—that you were trying to get the person's name. Why is that important? I think you've talked about this on Bluesky, that it's actually one of the most important things you can do. Why is that?

**Will Stancil [00:07:46]**
You need some sort of identifying information for the person, because this is not a traditional arrest where there's an arrest record. I mean, there may be some record somewhere, but there's not like a public record of arrest. They don't hang out at the scene of the arrest like a police officer would. They don't sit around taking questions, taking statements from witnesses. They don't. You can't walk up and say, "Hey, what's happening here, officer?" If you walk up to them, they're just as likely to mace you or tase you as they are to speak to you, and they're gone in seconds.

If there's no witness—I'm sure there have been abductions in the Twin Cities that we have no idea happened because there's no witness. And so if you don't have a name, you don't have information, you literally have no way of finding out who this person is, what happens to them.

The reports are—although it's unclear—that they are removing people from the country as fast as possible. So these people may just be gone within 24 hours, unless we can figure out who they are and get them a lawyer.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:08:46]**
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like what they're doing is trying to avoid accountability, right? They don't want to show their faces, they don't want to tell you their badge number, they don't want to stick around and talk about it.

**Will Stancil [00:09:00]**
Yeah, they will not answer any questions. No. I mean, it's funny you say "trying to avoid accountability." The language there—I've heard people say that about the Minneapolis Police Department before, which is also in the past tried to avoid accountability. But in this case, it's less they're trying to—I mean, that's true, they're not—they're trying to avoid accountability in the way that, like, Russia invading Ukraine has a "creative interpretation of international law" or something like that.

They aren't just avoiding accountability—they are actively hostile to the notion. They're like an invading force. They're operating like an invading force. They have no notion in the sense that they're accountable to anybody. They certainly don't feel remotely accountable to the people who live here. They treat us as the enemy. And the idea that they would have any obligation to be observed or report to us about anything they're doing is just laughable.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:10:08]**
No, that's right. So I guess we've all heard a lot about these abductions. Are there other things that ICE is doing in Minneapolis right now that people should be aware of?

**Will Stancil [00:10:23]**
Oh yeah. I would say that, in fact, the abductions—while in some ways that's what we're hoping to prevent, because these are people who are gone and not coming back—the abductions are not the majority of what ICE is doing. Partly because they are being, against their will, closely monitored. If they move in any kind of way, the public notices.

What they're doing mostly is just causing fear and chaos. I don't even know how to describe it. They spend vast amounts of time rolling through the neighborhood in various degrees of secrecy, but often, big convoys of armed men—it's not that hard to notice them. And then they will pile out. They will stop at an intersection, they'll pile out of a car. Some people will gather and shout and scream and maybe throw some snowballs or something. And then they will shove people around, pepper spray people, they'll launch tear gas.

I've seen this happen. This happened twice in two days where they stopped at a busy intersection and launched a very large amount of tear gas. Once at the same commercial intersection where I saw the abduction, actually half an hour after that. It was a different convoy, different group of ICE officers who got stuck in the intersection because they had been tailed down Lake Street by a large number of people. They all sort of pulled out of their vehicles, launched tear gas—actually into one of my very favorite local restaurants—and on the street, and then went tearing out of there. They weren't grabbing anyone. There was no one. They were just there to cause chaos.

The next morning, I went out, and it sounds like they'd picked up someone on the Southside of Minneapolis. So I was with a friend, we followed—my friend had his eagle eye, he spotted the convoy with the person in it as we went by. We whipped around to get behind them, followed them back to Whipple, which is their base of operations building, and then we came back to the place they'd been. They were still deployed up in the street along several intersections as the neighbors started to gather. It was a very tense and violent scene. I got video. And then they just sort of stood there. They shot pepper balls at the ground, they got in their cars, and then they just launched a copious amount of tear gas and tore out of there.

It's very hard to see what on earth they're doing other than trying to kick up anger and fear in the neighborhood. If I could sit down with one of these guys—I'd love to sit down with one of these guys—I'd say, "What's your mission here? What are you doing? Tell me, in your view, what you're doing here. Because you keep saying you're doing a law enforcement operation, you're investigating fraud. I don't notice a lot of accountants with you. What are you doing here?" And I'd love to get an honest answer from them what they think they're doing.

They're spending a lot of time, honestly, tracking observers like me and others, many, many others. They're spending as much time hunting us as they are hunting immigrants, which is kind of the idea. I mean, we're fine with that—they can focus on us if they want—but they just don't seem to care who they're hunting, as long as someone's scared.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:13:47]**
So we don't have an ICE agent on the program right now, but I guess I would ask you—as someone on the front lines, but also as an analyst of this era that we're living in—what are they trying to do? What are they trying to do in Minneapolis right now?

**Will Stancil [00:14:04]**
I think, from my view from the ground, the sense is that the idea this has anything to do with immigration is laughable. They are here because Donald Trump desperately wants there to be some sort of violent unrest that he can use as an excuse to militarize domestic federal law enforcement. Insurrection Act, or something of that nature. Stephen Miller goes home every night and practices his speech in the mirror, where he disbands the Congress, declares a national emergency, and has all of the liberals shot. And that is what this is about.

They are trying as hard as they can to pursue aggressive tactics that they think will cause unrest. I think they're in Minneapolis for a few different reasons.

First off, Somalis have become the targeted minority under the Trump administration. Obviously Latinos have a tough time of it too, but I think there's some political inconvenience—there's a lot of Latinos, and they often voted for Trump. But they see Somalis as—Somalis are Black, they're Muslim, and they're immigrants. That makes them a really—they think it's fertile ground for fear-mongering and demagoguery. We also have a large Somali population.

I also think it's the legacy of 2020. They see Minneapolis as a hotbed of rioting and unrest. And they think that if they're sufficiently aggressive here, they can kick that off again. I think a lot of people in the Trump administration—I suspect Stephen Miller thinks this—that they really screwed up in 2020 by not invoking the Insurrection Act, bringing in tanks, running over all the protesters in Minneapolis. And I think they want a do-over on that.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:15:55]**
I think the comparison with the George Floyd protests is very instructive. I was hoping you'd say a little bit more about that—what do they think about George Floyd, and what are the analogies and disanalogies between then and now?

**Will Stancil [00:16:09]**
I was here through the George Floyd protests. People have asked me if it feels similar, and I say that there are some similarities, but it doesn't actually feel that similar.

The main similarity is the atmosphere of fear and paranoia. During the George Floyd protests—and there were the protests, and then there were the riots. It's in vogue to call it the "uprising." It wasn't an uprising. It was rioting. It was awful. The groups doing it were largely not from the neighborhoods where it was occurring. People were coming in because there was a lack of state capacity. Essentially, the cops weren't showing up because, for a variety of reasons, largely because there was a de facto police strike, and then emergency services wouldn't show up. So it was kind of this anarchic environment. Lots of people would come in—if you had any interest, you were a weird political group with any interest, or just a stupid kid who wanted to burn something—you'd come in and just trash stuff all night.

So it was a very terrifying environment. There was a lot of paranoia about the people coming in. There was Neighborhood Watch set up. People were watching for agitators. There were big white supremacist agitators, which were real. I mean, that was confirmed. I think there was a lot of debate about whether that was real—that was a thing that was happening. But the other thing is that it was very difficult at the time to identify anyone. Anyone with an outside license plate, anyone with a big truck was pegged as a white supremacist agitator, and that was certainly not always the case. So that paranoia is back.

The other thing I think is a little similar is the devastating effect on the city. All the businesses in my neighborhood are shutting early. I went to get dinner to support one of my favorite local restaurants last night. Their kitchen was shut because no one shows up. The staff won't show up. The schools are having to shut. Minneapolis is offering distance learning like it's COVID. You have that same shutdown effect on the city, and that's terrible.

What's very different, though, is that I don't think there is the sort of directionless public anger. Everyone knows who the villain is. You go into any public space and people are talking about one thing only, and it's ICE. I was at dinner, and there were like four groups of people there having a beer—since that's all you could get. I realized that every single group was independently talking about ICE. You go down the street, someone says something to you about ICE. You go into the grocery store, the clerk is talking about ICE. They know who the villain is.

We are being—this is being done to us. This isn't like George Floyd, where there's a breakdown in the civic order. This is like we are being targeted for attack from the outside, from our own government.

Another thing—I don't think there's a lot of appetite for that kind of rioting or general violence. Last night there was a shooting in North Minneapolis, and things got a little hairy. But broadly, there's not a ton of appetite for rioting. There's no benefit in burning down an apartment building under construction, or burning down a store right now. We're actually spending a lot of effort trying to protect our stores. We have people posted outside every night to make sure ICE doesn't invade them.

The anger is all directed in one way. I think people broadly understand, especially having been through 2020, that it would not benefit us if things broke into another episode of rioting. I just find it very difficult to imagine, despite their best efforts, that we would see that level of rioting. Is it possible that there's some street combat with ICE, with federal people? Absolutely. Are we gonna see what we saw in 2020? I just can't imagine.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:19:49]**
No, I think that's right. I think you talked about Miller and Trump trying to get a do-over on 2020, that they're trying to learn from their experiences. They want to do it differently this time. They want to seize more power that way. But I think also the resistance has tried to learn lessons from 2020, right, just in terms of how ICE is being confronted, the aesthetics of protest, the organizing choices that people are making. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

**Will Stancil [00:20:23]**
Yeah. I'm not involved much with the protesting and the organizing in that capacity. I know what's going on, and it's important. One of the things I'm very appreciative of is the federal building—there's a nonstop protest in front of the federal building. And the reason I'm appreciative is that they constantly have to deploy a hundred guys out there to block the building. These are a hundred guys I don't have to deal with here in Uptown.

But what I've been involved with is neighborhood rapid response. These are large, mostly decentralized—I don't think anyone's really strictly in charge of all of it—decentralized Signal channels and other channels that people are using to communicate about ICE presence in the neighborhood. But they're fairly structured.

For instance—and I should limit how much I talk about this, but they're all embedded. The feds have people in all of them, and the cops have people in them. For instance, we have a neighborhood Signal channel for my neighborhood. There are, at any given time, somewhere between five hundred and fifteen hundred people in it. There's people who check license plates. There's centralized lists we've assembled of license plates that are known or suspected ICE. People are constantly calling in to check plates or reporting vehicles that just seem suspicious.

I mean, you get an eye for it—two guys in the front seat wearing sunglasses, car's too clean, looks like a rental? Odds are pretty good. So you're calling in constantly reporting. If someone sees something suspicious, they'll say, "Hey, can someone check this out?" and someone goes racing over to check it out. There's people posted on the corners with whistles.

And then there's a live call, for instance, for people who are driving, which is primarily what I've done. Someone's serving as dispatch. I think in order to be official dispatchers there's trainings that they're putting on. It's pretty professional. I mean, it's not fully professionalized, but they're very disciplined.

Like, this morning, I had a question about something. I asked about honking after ICE convoys, which is what I've done traditionally, but apparently they're getting more aggressive about it. I made the mistake of asking in the rapid response chat, and they're like, "Take it to the discussion channel. This is for rapid response." Right, right, I shouldn't have asked it here. Same thing with the voice dispatch—they don't want chatter in there. You report something, you say what's going on, you get off.

And this is just my neighborhood. There's fifteen of these all around the city.

The other thing I'd say is that there's a unity of purpose. No one here is trying to escalate confrontation with the feds. Obviously, following them, photographing them, making noise behind them is inherently escalatory in the sense that they don't want to be followed, so you're forcing that on them. But no one is here trying to say, "Okay, let's fight it out with them." We're not trying to give them a reason.

For instance, the other day when I responded to one of those things where there was tear gassing in the street, one of the things that was coming through on the rapid response was that there were agitators there. There were people there who were throwing ice—like the real ice—at ICE. And there were people there shoving them. And that was something we go and try to discourage—"Don't do that." I think that sentiment is very broadly shared.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:24:11]**
I mean, I've written about this for Liberal Currents, talking about learning from the tactics of the civil rights movement, right? You look at the confrontations at the lunch counters, at the Freedom Rides, at these various schools. Part of the point was to be nonviolent, not just for principled moral reasons, but because it works, right? Because by creating violence against the feds, you kind of undercut your own cause in the popular consciousness, right?

**Will Stancil [00:24:44]**
Well, they also—we can't beat them in combat. I'm sorry, they have a lot of guns. Although I agree with you that nonviolent resistance—and then winning the public to your side by watching what they do to you—is effective, I will say that is not precisely what is happening here in Minneapolis.

What's happening here is more that they cannot operate the way they want to operate in public. They cannot do these snatch-and-grabs in public, under public scrutiny, because they're so violent, they're so out of control.

Generally speaking, what I would describe the tactic as right now—and again, I'm just one guy, it's all decentralized—is that it's smothering them. There's too many eyes on them. There's too many people on them. They show up in public and a hundred people show up. It becomes very, very difficult for them to operate the way they want to operate when there are a hundred people watching at the drop of a hat.

Certainly there may come a point where they blow up and start—go Bull Connor—and start just clobbering protesters or observers, and then that becomes part of a political backlash. But this isn't like the civil rights movement where we're seeking out ways to engage in nonviolent resistance in a way that will then precipitate a backlash that will then win the public to our side.

What's happening here is more that they are attempting to adopt these secret police tactics that rely on being secret, and we are working to make sure that they cannot be secret.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:26:36]**
That's great. I absolutely believe in that. And I kind of want to ask you—you talked a little bit about organizing and how it's kind of decentralized but coordinated. There's a lot of groups, there's a lot of chats, a lot of resources to make this happen. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how that happened. How did we get there? I mean, if somebody else in another city in the future wants to do this...

**Will Stancil [00:27:06]**
I don't actually even know where some of this started. I know that there are some organizers—Defend 612 is a group, someone from Chicago—where they put these things together. So I know that there are people who have done this and helped set this up.

I went to a training. It's funny, I went to this training after I'd done this for a few days and I was like, "I don't know if I have anything to learn from the training." And that was totally wrong. The people were extremely impressive, and I was extremely pleased I went to it.

So there are people that sort of put this together to begin with, but at this point, so much of it is—if ICE disappeared all these people, it would persist. And they would probably keep adding new rapid response channels, new groups, because the people who are doing it are getting enough experience doing it that they could just set it up on their own.

I will say that certain aspects of this, like the vehicle plate list—I don't even really know who maintains that. I'm sure I could find out if I was super interested in it, but I'm a little busy. And so far, it's worked. It's been pretty reliable. Unless it starts getting less reliable, I don't have any real reason to worry about that.

It's pretty decentralized. If you wanted to start this in your own city—and this is what I encourage people to do. People say, "Oh, can we send you money? Can we come observe?" And it's like, we have a lot of observers. I mean, somewhat helpful, but ultimately, a lot of it relies on being really familiar with the neighborhood. So if you're coming in from another city, you're not going to be that useful.

If you want to do something good, what you ought to do is start talking to your neighbors. You don't need an official say-so to do this. Just talk to your neighbors you think are like-minded. Say, "In case what happens in Minneapolis happens here, we need to have rapid response in place." Start a Signal chat. Put a bunch of people in it. I'm sure you could reach out to Defend 612 or some of these other groups to get pointers and trainings on how to do it more effectively. There's lots of little things that we do that people could learn from.

But in general, the most important thing is just having those networks of communication open and ready, because everything else relies on that.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:29:17]**
Yeah. I think that's right, that's great. And one of the things I'm interested by is how there has been this enormous groundswell of organizing from the bottom up, ordinary people like you, united in purpose. And on the other hand, at least from the outside, it feels like the response from the state and the city government—the actual people who are nominally supposed to be organizing these things, the political leaders—feel kind of absent from this. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what the state and city response looks like to you on the ground.

**Will Stancil [00:29:55]**
That's a difficult question. The person I've been most pleased with, honestly—and this is gonna get me canceled—is probably Jacob Frey, the mayor. He's been very aggressive in his rhetoric about what's happening here. He's not mincing words at all.

I got in trouble a little bit this morning on Bluesky actually, talking about—I don't think ICE is getting a lot of assistance from local police. In fact, I think there is a lot of tension and hostility between them. I know that some of the observers have monitored police chatter, and they have gotten the sense that they're generally pretty contemptuous of ICE—they're not saying nice things.

With that said, the police have not—ICE will be out there blowing up a neighborhood, and the police are not there. No one's there. It is really incumbent upon us to restrain ourselves and protect ourselves, because police certainly aren't going to do it for us.

I know there have been some protests where the police have come in and made arrests, in more of a keeping-the-civil-order situation. We can agree or disagree with that. But just regular—the number of times that I've been chasing ICE basically down a road, and gone by a police car going in the other direction, and they just ignore it. They know what's happening. There's all these people honking, and there's ICE, and the police just go on by. "Go after them? We don't care."

That's been a little frustrating, because you want to see your local law enforcement stepping up to protect you. But there is a real issue. I appreciate the political difficulty here—that if there's a sense that the local men with guns are turning on the federal men with guns, you're getting into a really dangerous place. And they outnumber us. There's three thousand ICE officers in the Twin Cities. There's six hundred Minneapolis police officers. I think someone showed a chart—if you add together all the local police departments for the Twin Cities, they're still outnumbered or close to the number of ICE in the area. So it's not even clear that we have more guns.

I sort of appreciate that they're trying to walk a tightrope. The most important thing is that the local government—the police chief and the mayor—have pointed to the rapid response stuff as something that people can do. They are not saying, "Oh, what you're doing is illegitimate." They're saying this is an important thing you can do to help your community. And so I appreciate that.

The governor—there's been a lot of frustration with the failure to deploy the National Guard. I'm not a hundred percent sure what the National Guard would do. People said they could block off the neighborhoods. Well, that hurts the neighborhoods too. That's not a great solution. And you also get into that problem of state and federal armed men fighting each other. It's not a good situation.

I don't really want to—I don't know. You want to see more support from above, but the political sensitivities there are complicated, and I don't quite fully understand them. I'll tell you, my horizon for events right now is the boundaries of my neighborhood. Something will happen across the city, and I'll hear about it like a day later. People assume I'm super plugged in—like, "Oh, I heard this thing happened in St. Paul"—and it's like, I probably didn't even hear about it, because I'm following so many individualized cars within ten blocks of me.

I would love to get some assistance at some point from above. But until that happens, our eyes are on the road.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:33:48]**
So I guess one question I would ask then is—Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner put out a very direct statement. He said to ICE, "If you come to Philadelphia, if you commit a crime, I will charge you, I will arrest you, I will convict you, and you will go to jail. Donald Trump cannot pardon you for state crimes. Don't commit crimes in Philadelphia." And I'm wondering what you think about that kind of statement, that kind of application of state power.

**Will Stancil [00:34:20]**
I'm all for that. And I think, for instance, the state, after some wobbling, is investigating Renee Good's murder independently. The concern, the issue we're having—the reason it would be great if police would come arrest ICE officers who are shooting up intersections or whatever—I don't know how you would arrest them.

I've seen ICE officers commit crimes. I've seen Border Patrol commit what has got to be a crime. Like—I don't know how you would arrest them. First of all, either it happens in seclusion, or there's twenty of them there who are heavily armed. And it's happening all the time, every day, and we don't know who they are.

It's funny, because they say, "We're masking up so you can't dox us." It's like, you're masking up for the same reason criminals mask up—so that you can commit crimes in anonymity.

As a practical matter, the sheer number of agents they have on the ground here, doing this stuff, is a major obstacle to that approach. Hopefully we will get past this, and in the future, the moment will come where we go through and hold them accountable for what they've done. We go through forensically all the vast trove of evidence that has been produced of what they're doing, and then we hold them accountable before the law.

I think the idea that they would kidnap some person, and then an MPD squad car pulls up and goes, "You're under arrest"—I just can't even imagine how that would go. Probably the police officers would end up in federal detention.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:36:01]**
Yeah. I mean, I think there are certain difficulties in imagining that kind of confrontation. We talk about it too often here on Neon Liberalism, but some of the parallels with the pre-Civil War period seem quite pressing, both in terms of the Fugitive Slave Act, the slave catchers working in the North snatching people off the streets, the confrontation between state powers and federal powers that just kind of accelerated prior to the war. So that's one thing.

**Will Stancil [00:36:35]**
I will say one thing—this is important. This is my thing. I'm actually gonna get out of my chair. I'm gonna show you the important thing.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:36:45]**
Oh yeah, I saw that. That's good.

**Will Stancil [00:36:47]**
"There are more of us than them." That is ultimately what—we can talk about the cops, we can talk about, you know, three thousand ICE agents, you only have three thousand cops or whatever. But there are 450,000 people in Minneapolis. There are three million people in the Twin Cities.

The uniform, the kind of community opposition to them means that there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people at any given time that are just inexorably opposed to them. They just do not have enough guys to do what they want to do here against this level of community resistance.

And so that's why the thing that is restraining them, the thing that is suffocating them, is not a police response or government response—as much as that would be appreciated—it's the community response. They can deal with six hundred police officers. They can evade them or threaten them. But they can't deal with fifty thousand people in South Minneapolis that are just refusing to go along with anything they're doing.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:37:57]**
No, I think that's absolutely true. There are more of us than there are of them, and if we can get organized, we can stop them. And one thing I think is also quite striking about this is that right now, ICE is operating all over the country in various ways, but this kind of siege, this kind of attack on a city—they're not doing that across the entire country at the same time, right?

**Will Stancil [00:38:27]**
They can't. I would say that Minneapolis alone is seriously taxing their available manpower. They're having to pull in people from all these different agencies from all over the country.

Yeah, it's horrific. The number of agents on the ground is mind-boggling. Their presence is mind-boggling. And it's horrible to deal with. But ultimately, it's thousands, not tens of thousands, of guys. They can do it to just us at a time, one region, really. And they are still—the number of actual abductions they're making is not that high.

Yeah, they can tear gas an intersection and piss everyone off and make everyone hate them. But I'm not sure what that accomplishes for them. Ultimately, they are just expending huge amounts of resources, huge amounts of effort, huge amounts of manpower to just not get a lot done.

It's horrible for us, and it's going to really mess up my neighborhood and my city. Many of my neighbors are in hiding, and that's awful. But are they really moving the ball forward for themselves in any way? Not really.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:39:36]**
I think they went into this thinking that they were going to break your will, and that by doing that, they were going to break the national will, right? This was a politics of spectacle. "We're going to make an example out of Minneapolis, and after that, everybody will—all the libs will fold, and all the conservatives will love us. And that'll advance the ball down the field for their kind of program."

**Will Stancil [00:40:05]**
I think Stephen Miller clearly thought—I really think all this comes from him. Stephen Miller clearly thought that he was going to be the movie version of an authoritarian. He's gonna crush, like you said, he's gonna crush our will. Everyone will see—they're gonna shoot Renee Good, or someone—they probably didn't specifically think they were gonna shoot her, but I'm sure they knew coming in that someone's gonna get shot, someone's getting killed. And then we'll see how they operate with impunity. And we'll all run away. We'll all go inside our apartments, we'll close our blinds, we'll peek out in terror.

And it's funny because—I mean, the other day when they're tear-gassing Lyn-Lake—yeah, we're running. I see it happening. I start running along with everyone around me. We're not running away. We're running at them. We're running to them. Everyone's running at them, cameras out.

They are so far from getting the response they want, the fearful response. People are mad. People are organized.

And I will say this too: when I've been out there in some of these situations—and this happens pretty regularly now, and I'm going out on patrol in an hour, it'll probably happen again—it's amazing. Afterwards, I'll think about what happened and I'll be like, "Oh, that was scary." But in the moment, it is not scary.

I remember specifically thinking, when the guy got the bear spray in my face—I remember specifically thinking, "It's amazing how unfrightened I am. I feel no fear whatsoever." I'm mad. The main challenge is controlling your anger. But I'm not scared of these guys.

I think they had assumed that they would come in big and tough, armored up, masks and helmets, and everyone would be so scared of them. And it's just not happening.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:41:50]**
So I think that's—I kind of want to ask you to dwell on that a little bit, right? Because like you said, they have killed someone. They've shot other people. They are sixteen or twenty men armed with assault rifles and body armor. What's it like confronting them, right? What's it like confronting that face to face, on a personal, emotional level?

**Will Stancil [00:42:14]**
I just want them to go home. I'm so mad.

The big mistake I made that first time is I just, literally, rather than filming and documenting, I just got out there and I couldn't get my camera up on my phone because I was trying to toggle Signal chat and camera. There's just too much happening all at once, and I just ended up shouting.

I remember there's a guy, the driver of the Ford Expedition that they stuffed the person into. Some guy with sunglasses on and a headset. And I walked to the side of the Expedition, and I pointed, and I said, "Go home. Go home. You don't belong here. Go home." And then I went to each car and did that to every driver and everyone I could find.

And afterwards, I mean—that's not productive, by the way. Don't do that. You're not accomplishing a lot when you do that. They know we're mad. You don't have to reinforce it. If you're on site, do something more productive. Get a recording. Try to figure out the name of anyone who's abducted. Don't just shout.

But that was the reason I did that—that was the overriding emotion I was having, just this complete, unremitting fury that they were here in my city, in my neighborhood, in the place I go every single day, doing this to people that live around me, to my neighbors. And who do they think they are?

It just wipes out completely any fear I had. And if they had maced me or whatever—I did get tear-gassed a couple days ago, and I stopped. I was just out there retching and gagging. But you just don't come away from it scared. You come away from it mad.

Actually, I took a friend of mine out on the rapid response patrols. It's good to have a copilot because you can film and multitask better. And he saw his first big ICE blow-up—one of those things in the intersection. And it was funny because afterwards, he is just like, "It's radicalized me." I mean, he's already a pretty progressive guy, but he's like, "I'm so angry. I'm just so mad to see what they did." And he was just shaking, he's so mad.

I think that is maybe what they missed—that when you come into people's communities and act like tyrants, like—I don't know, there's a lot of history on this. People don't just say, "Oh no, okay, let's hide." They want to kill you. I mean—I'm not a threat. To the ICE agents listening right now, I'm not gonna kill anyone. But I cannot express in words how much I loathe these men and these agencies and this government for doing this. And that is a sentiment that is shared by, I would say, 99.5 percent of the people in my neighborhood, in my city.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:45:07]**
No, I think this is a sentiment shared by Stephen Miller, by authoritarians, by reactionaries all over the world. They always think that we are soft. They think that we are cowards, that we're going to give up. And I don't think we are.

**Will Stancil [00:45:24]**
And the reason I think that is that they're cowards and they're soft. Stephen Miller is a bully. These people are bullies. They're weak people. And they think that the way to be strong is to put on body armor and get a big gun and go kick someone and brutalize someone weaker than themselves.

And they put themselves mentally in the role of that person. They think, "If I was that person, I would lick that boot." And that's what they do. And they assume that we will react the same way, but we're not like them. We aren't weak like they are. And so when someone comes and kicks us and brutalizes us, we fight back.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:46:00]**
No, I think that's a great—

**Will Stancil [00:46:02]**
I'm getting a little too worked up here for your intellectual liberalism podcast.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:46:10]**
No, I think—I mean, we're all human, right? This is real. I don't process anger very well, because I am an extremely angry person.

**Will Stancil [00:46:25]**
I'm not an angry person. I'm really not. And I am really mad.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:46:32]**
Yeah. So I guess a personal question for me is: how do you manage that anger, right? How do you manage that anger and still do something productive when you're confronting ICE?

**Will Stancil [00:46:48]**
That's the challenge. This is why the training was so useful—because it was like, "Here's the order of operations, the things that are most useful when you're there." And you just go home and mentally rehearse in your head over and over what you do when something happens.

The problem, the challenge I'd run into, is productively going through the steps that I need to—get film, get a name, alert people, make a report, get numbers—all that, when this is all happening.

The first time, I was useless. I said—I yelled at people. The second time I saw it, I wasn't as useless because I managed to report it, but I didn't get the name. I didn't get my camera up fast enough. And so next time—hopefully—next time I'll be better.

That is the challenge of it—learning to control the feelings and the tension and the adrenaline and the rage that you're feeling when you're seeing all this.

One thing I used to do a lot of was rock climbing. I used to be a big rock climber until just a few years ago. And especially outdoor rock climbing—a lot of the challenge isn't physical. I mean, it can be pretty challenging physically, but outdoors, it's scary because you're not as well protected. So you will get very strong feelings of fear. And so much of the challenge is just learning to either put that aside or control that and maintain your composure.

And in a lot of ways, weirdly, this reminds me of that. Maintaining focus and composure in a stressful situation is what makes you a productive responder.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:49:16]**
No, I mean, certainly that's—I have also had that experience in the wilderness. But again, I'm also struck by the connection with the civil rights movement, right? That they really believed in training, in having a program. That like you say, maybe you're not going to be the most calm or composed or collected, maybe you're going to screw it up the first time, but you remember the steps. You remember, "What am I trying to do?" And you just keep on doing it, and eventually you start to get it under control, to do what's necessary.

**Will Stancil [00:49:16]**
Yeah. I mean, honestly, I was so glad I went to the training, because they emphasized that. They emphasized going home and practicing that, which I have done.

And they emphasized—the other thing that was really good to hear—is that look, what you're dealing with here is not something that people in the United States have had to deal with pretty much ever within living memory, at least. This is—we've seen this in Chicago and LA, but honestly, it's worse here than it is there. The number of officers compared to the population, the violence of the tactics, the speed—they said one thing in the training, like, "Oh, abductions usually take seven minutes." Seven minutes? No, I've seen them take forty-five seconds. They are speeding it up.

And so we don't—it's normal not to have a perfect response to this ready to go. You are learning as you do it. And so because of that, first off, yes, you do need to practice it and think about it. And then the other thing is, you need to understand that you're not going to get it right the first time or the second time. Not perfect.

And I have to talk some about the other rapid responders. I mean, I have so much admiration for these people. It's funny because I talk about this on Bluesky and everyone's going, "Will this! Will that!" Yeah, whatever. I'm doing a lot, I'm out there. But there are a lot of people out there. I'm not one of the most impressive ones. I'm in the middle of the pack in terms of competence here.

There are people out there—we call them "commuters," the people that follow the cars—it's what I primarily do. There are commuters out there who have so much composure, who have so much poise and presence of mind in these situations. And the problem is they're all anonymous. I don't know who they are, because I'm like one of the only people using their real name on there. So I wish I knew who they were so I could just buy them a beer.

But you'll hear them in a tense situation, chasing after a convoy of four cars solo. Guys are getting out, it's frightening. They get out of the car, they may come for you, you don't know. And they are just reporting calmly: "Four Border Patrol agents. Black Wagoneer, plates SAR 900. Black Expedition, Utah plates." Just over and over. Just—just—just.

And it's amazing to hear. These people are just at the very height of professionalism in a situation where they are the ones that are vulnerable. They are the ones that are facing down, in a civilian car, an armed convoy. And they are just producing useful information, succinctly, reporting consistently, doing exactly the right thing.

I would trust these people with my life. They're insanely good at what they do. And it's just through practice and community organizing. I don't think these people are formally trained in any way.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:52:20]**
I think at the end of the day, they probably say the same thing that you do—that they're just ordinary people who are trying to protect their community against this invasion.

So I know you said that your horizons have constricted somewhat, right down to your neighborhood, down to this action. But I do kind of want to ask you a different question. I think like you said, it's important to be smothering these people. It is important to be stopping what they're doing, to make it impossible for them to operate. But I also would like to get to a situation where we don't need ordinary people to be tailing around federal agents, right? So in your view—how do we get from where we are to a position where we have power to stop this from happening?

**Will Stancil [00:53:12]**
I mean, part of it is—sad to say—winning elections.

There's a crisis happening in Minneapolis right now. It is a crisis that is unlike anything anyone alive in America has ever seen. And it is amazing how little attention we're getting. Yeah, it's in the news. And when Renee Good was shot, it was really in the news. But even now, if you read national coverage, it's just like, "Oh, Minneapolis, and the Renee Good shooting."

Now look, I'm not trying to downplay what happened to Renee Good. It was murder. It was awful. Jonathan Ross should be in jail. But that is one component of a very large set of authoritarian abuses that are happening right now in Minneapolis, that are ongoing every single minute of every single day. We are not—I don't think of us as a city where the feds killed someone. I think of this as a city under siege.

People need to understand that we are being subjected to just unrelenting violence and terror by our own government, very intentionally.

And I think one of the things you see here—and this comes through with the way some of the Democrats have been talking about this—while I respect that the local executives, who are trying to probably not start a civil war with the federal government, are trying to walk a narrow line, the Democrats in Congress—including some of our Minnesota Democrats—they don't have that excuse, because they can't start a civil war and they don't command any police forces.

And so when they say, "Oh, we need to put some restrictions on ICE," like—you guys, you're making a category error about what ICE is. ICE is not an immigration enforcement agency that is acting without enough use-of-force restrictions. ICE is a terror agency masquerading as an immigration enforcement agency. At this point, that is what they're doing. Their primary mission is causing terror, causing chaos, targeting and harming Americans. They are spending more time targeting and harming Americans than they are doing anything with immigrants.

The Twin Cities don't even have that many undocumented immigrants, frankly. Most of our two primary populations of immigrants—we have a large Latino population, but we also have a large Somali population, a large Hmong population. The Hmong population is almost entirely US citizens. They came in the '70s; we're on the second or third generation. They're citizens through and through.

Somalis are largely here as lawful permanent residents or citizens. They're mostly on the second generation. They are—it's probably, I don't know the exact number, but probably in excess of ninety, probably ninety-five percent are lawful permanent residents or citizens. So there's not like a large undocumented population here to even target.

What it is is that this agency is not targeting undocumented immigrants—they're targeting people of color. They're here because they want to harass people of color. Their target is anyone who's not white.

And so when you talk about restraining them, it's like—don't restrain them. Their core purpose is fundamentally misaligned, and they cannot be reformed without tearing the agency down to the foundations and rebuilding it.

I'm not saying eliminate all immigration enforcement forever. Understand that, whatever—politically, say that's unviable—I don't care. I'm not a big fan of it, but whatever. But the agency is twisted and distorted beyond any useful purpose. DHS generally—not just ICE.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:57:03]**
I mean, like, fundamentally, I believe our politics always has to start from the truth. And the truth is exactly what you said—that ICE is not an immigration enforcement agency. It is a terror agency. And once you have this collection of armed men who are willing to go out and deliberately terrorize Americans for the sole purpose of causing terror—what kind of reform is there to do with that, right? You cannot have those people wearing a badge and carrying a gun for the federal government. You just can't.

**Will Stancil [00:57:34]**
And let's talk about Border Patrol for a second, because you do have the different agencies on the ground. It's funny—ICE is like the rag-tag ones. I've got a hilarious picture of an ICE guy coming out. He's wearing like a party shirt with a vest on it. He looks like he was at the casino till 2:30 in the morning, got some hair of the dog, and went up and deported someone's family. Total loser. That's your ICE agent. Or guys wearing a backwards baseball cap—basically recruit them off the streets, they're just coming there to bust skulls.

Then you have Border Patrol. And Border Patrol comes in, and Border Patrol is militarized. They got uniforms, they got guns, they got helmets.

And what is Border Patrol doing in Minneapolis? Our border is Canada. I don't know if we're getting a lot of refugees crossing from International Falls, frankly. Why do we have convoys of Border Patrol rolling through Minneapolis with Bortac in the back? Little short guys hopping out on the street corner and then just shoving people around and launching tear gas. What are they doing? What plausible, possible purpose could Border Patrol have here?

They're like a military detachment that has been sent to my city. And I want to ask the Democrats who are like, "We gotta reform them, change them, put some restrictions on them"—why are they here? Why would you say that they are here? Because there's only one answer to that, and everyone knows what it is. And there are people who say it and there are people who won't say it.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:59:06]**
So I think that is a good note to end on right now. There are some people who will say the truth and some people who are afraid of it.

Thank you so much for coming on. I don't want to keep you from getting back out there and confronting ICE.

**Will Stancil [00:59:23]**
I've heard they're getting more aggressive today with the arrests, so this might be the day. They're gonna get me one of these days. So if this is my last—this is the last interview as a free man—nice talking to you.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:59:36]**
Nice talking to you, Will. I'll see you.