I met Will Stancil two days before he got booted from his neighborhood Signal chat. We were at the Uptown Minneapolis VFW at an event hosted by Rep. Ilhan Omar, a thank-you party for Minnesotans who fought ICE in ways big and small. There were tacos and drinks, and dancing, though I never saw Stancil dance, which is not to say it never happened. A friend of mine who knows of Stancil from his work on school desegregation was surprised I knew who he was. She had no idea he was a combative, divisive online personality. She didn’t know about his arguments with leftists on Bluesky or his fights with white supremacists on X, or about the fact that some of Stancil’s erstwhile opponents have, in light of his new proclivity for chasing and getting tear-gassed by ICE, begrudgingly accepted him as a sort of antihero.
When I approached Stancil, who is almost shockingly boyish-looking in person, he was talking to former New York City comptroller Brad Lander. He had flown to Minneapolis that day to learn about the local response to a federal occupation. Stancil offered to let Lander tag along on one of his ICE patrols — a practice locals now call “commuting” — and said I could join them if I wanted. It’s this openness to media attention that got Stancil kicked out of the Signal group, where many commuters are wary of press, hoping to not draw too much attention. Stancil has talked to, and in some cases been joined by, reporters from CNN, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Economist, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Minnesota Reformer, Racket MN, Mpls. St. Paul Magazine, the Toronto Star, and now The Verge.
For Stancil, the goal of commuting is to create a record of ICE’s abuses. Armed with a phone camera while federal agents are armed with weapons, he’ll record arrests in progress — what everyone now calls “abductions” — and agents’ often violent reactions to being observed. He has taken pepper spray and tear gas to the face on numerous occasions, most of which he has recorded and posted about after the fact. Stancil’s critics, however, think that in making himself a spectacle, he’s putting everyone else at risk. Two major charges have been levied against Stancil. The first is that he’s in it for the attention, perhaps to boost his profile if he runs for office again. (Stancil unsuccessfully ran for State House in 2024. “I’m not saying, ‘Look at me!’ It’s really not about that,” he told me.) The second is that he’s practicing bad OPSEC, not only endangering himself but other members of his community.
He really wanted to talk about the Signal chats
So he was banned from the Signal chat the night before I was scheduled to engage in that rite of passage for out-of-state journalists who had parachuted into Minneapolis: a ride through the neighborhood in Stancil’s Honda Fit. Stancil was apologetic, but more importantly, he was aggrieved. We quickly worked out other arrangements. He was allowed into the Southside Signal group, which has a more open media policy than the Uptown chat from which he’d been ousted. The moderators had asked him to send me a press agreement beforehand. I promised to keep all statements made on the call off-the-record and not to record audio or video of the chat.
Stancil with his Honda Fit. Photo by Jack Califano / The Verge
I met Stancil before sunrise the next morning, along with Jack, my photographer who had been in Minneapolis for an action-packed two weeks. The city was just waking up. I saw few people on the street on the short drive from the cultural void that is Downtown Minneapolis to Stancil’s apartment Uptown, and most of those I saw were, I assumed based on their neon safety vests, school patrollers. Stancil was waiting for us, idling in his gray Honda Fit. He really wanted to talk about the Signal chats.
“They said, ‘You broke the rule. The rule is no press ever.’ I said, ‘No one’s ever told me that rule before.’ Then they said, ‘You discussed publicly that you were getting kicked out, and that’s breaking the rules.’” Stancil asked for an appeal. The response, he said, was a shrug emoji. The opacity bothered Stancil. So did the way some of his fellow commuters — his neighbors! — were treating this whole thing. “It’s not a guerrilla organization,” he said. “People want to run it that way, all secrecy and cloak-and-dagger, but the reason it works is because there’s so many people doing it.”
We were in unfamiliar territory. That this wasn’t Stancil’s turf was clear. At one point, he took a left when he should’ve taken a right, and Jack had to tell him Cleveland Avenue was actually the other way. A few minutes later, Stancil went the wrong way down a one-way street, accidentally maneuvering us into oncoming traffic. Stancil’s driving was, for the most part, erratic. He pushed the Honda Fit to its limits, speeding to beat yellow lights and running red ones. “It’s a very Minneapolitan thing,” he told me, “to be like, ‘I’m chasing a federal agent but there’s a yellow light. Oh no, I have to stop!’”
Minnesotans are a polite, rule-following bunch, and they regard traffic laws with quasi-religious reverence. When I visited in 2024 for the state fair, I was simultaneously shocked and delighted by multiple pieces of seed art dedicated to one highway adage: “merge like a zipper, you’ll get there quicker.” ICE agents were identifiable by their disregard for the rules of the road, to make no mention of their unfamiliarity with wintry streets. But commuters had started driving erratically, too — Stancil especially. How would they ever catch up to ICE otherwise?
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