We sat in a parking lot and waited. We watched, knowing we were being watched in return. Two men, masked and presumably armed, idled in a gray SUV. “They’re all on this fucking street now,” Lety, a lifelong resident of the Minnesota suburbs, told me. ICE had been spotted at a gas station and a mobile home park, and they were here with us now, in a strip mall that was home to a dispensary, an auto parts shop, and little else. I stared straight ahead as Lety monitored the Signal chat on her phone. We didn’t speak. A knock on the passenger-side window startled us both. Earlier, Lety had shown me dashcam footage of a pair of ICE agents pulling up in front of her, getting out of their car, and threatening her with bear mace. This time, the figure on the other side of the glass was friendlier: not an ICE agent, just the manager of the auto shop. We were blocking a loading zone, he said, and he was fine with us loitering in the parking lot, but could we move our car up a bit?
Lety was out watching ICE, which she tries to do a couple times a week. Eventually the ICE agents left and we did too. Lety led us to Sunny Acres, the mobile home park 20 miles south of the Twin Cities where there had been rumors of ICE activity earlier that morning. We ran into another patroller and he and Lety exchanged pleasant, cautious hellos, addressing each other by their respective Signal codenames. He hadn’t seen ICE yet, but he worried it was just a matter of time.
Lety called a friend whose parents live in Sunny Acres. She figured they could warn their neighbors, most of whom were probably at work. Lety’s friend agreed to pass along the message. “Are you chasing those motherfuckers right now?” he asked. “You’re crazy.”
This was my sixth day in Minnesota and my first in Lakeville. After days of fruitlessly searching for ICE in Minneapolis, with Lety’s help, I spotted them within minutes of arriving in Lakeville. Lety has lived here her whole life. The reports from the cities had been chilling: ICE breaking people’s windows, shipping children off to jails in Texas. And it was happening here, too, she said. “You always hear about what’s happening in the city,” she told me, “and that’s great. But it’s like, please don’t forget about the suburbs!”
It’s not hard to see why ICE has expanded its reach beyond the Twin Cities. The qualities that have hindered ICE’s operation in Minneapolis and St. Paul — density and walkability; a large, almost exclusively left-of-center population — are absent here. In Minneapolis, I saw patrollers on nearly every street corner. It’s easy to gather for protests or come together to organize a mutual aid network. The sidewalks in Lakeville were deserted, as were the broad streets that led onto the highway. Had there been any bystanders, they may not have wanted to get involved.
“Here, we’re connected enough with these resources, even beyond auditory whistles, that if someone blasts a message in a Signal chat, you’ll get 20 or 30 people showing up at an intersection because they’ve gotten an alert on their phone,” Garrett Guntly, a Minneapolis-based activist, told me. “I don’t think that exists in Lakeville, Prior Lake, any of these larger suburbs that are geographically spread out.”
“I hide my whistle under my clothes when I’m out in Lakeville,” Lety said. Not everyone in town is conservative — it’s closer to a 50/50 split — but unlike in the cities, it would be unwise to assume that everyone here is on the same side.
Minnesota hasn’t gone red since 1972, but its reputation as a Democratic bulwark is largely due to the Twin Cities. The party’s hold on the state grows weaker each year. Where Kamala Harris swept in Minneapolis and St. Paul (receiving just over 70 percent of the vote in Hennepin and Ramsey counties), the election was much closer in Dakota County, of which Lakeville, with a population of just over 74,000, is the largest city.
Photo by Jaida Grey Eagle / The Verge Buck Hill ski area where there ICE activity has been reported in Burnsville, MN on February 5th, 2026. Photo by Jaida Grey Eagle / The Verge
One day earlier, I was at a coffee shop in Uptown Minneapolis when someone came in saying ICE was outside. Word spread quickly: two men in plain clothes, a suspicious-looking car whose plate number was on the crowdsourced database of confirmed ICE vehicles. Within minutes, the shop was empty. Everyone donned their coats and hats and ran out the door. The agents, it turned out, had stopped into a nearby pizza place for lunch. The crowd stood outside and waited, ready to jeer them as soon as their meal ended. The people of Minneapolis would give no quarter to ICE.
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