The past week in the Greater St. Cloud area has been fraught with fear, confusion, and frustration for many of our residents as a direct result of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge and Operation PARRIS. GMWC has been witness to ICE’s activities over the past month and this recent spike in ICE engagement in our community is entirely unwarranted.
We do not need ICE to make our community safe. In fact, ICE is making our community less safe.
As a center for building worker and immigrant power, we know what it means to build safe, healthy, and dignified workplaces and communities. That is what we have been doing for the last decade here. ICE’s actions are directly opposed to those efforts. They say they are here to protect us, but our elected leaders have stated that ICE does not coordinate with or inform our local law enforcement, countless videos from the community have shown that ICE clearly does not follow local traffic laws, and ICE is indiscriminately raiding communities based on racial profiling and assumptions about individual’s immigration status.
ICE is not protecting us – ICE is terrorizing our community and they must stop.
We have been in relationship with immigrants and workers in Greater St. Cloud for many years and we know our community. We have met with families of those who have been detained. Some are random residents who were traumatized by their temporary detainment with ICE. We know of dozens who have been detained indefinitely and were moved out of state for processing without ever informing their families of where they would be taken.
Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, has stated that these operations root out crime and target criminals and thus is making our community safer. We know that’s not the case. ICE’s presence disrupts our normal working order, undercuts our societal structures and harms local businesses. Our children are afraid to go to school, workers fear they can’t safely go to work, residents can’t even rest in their homes or focus on prayer in their places of worship as ICE has targeted those spaces, too.
We demand full transparency and accountability for ICE operations and all of the agents who have caused harm to our community members and detained our neighbors without due process.
Notably, some local officials representing our community have been out of alignment with what is happening on our streets and in our homes regarding ICE activities. Their absence has meant that we have had to rely solely on the grassroots efforts of numerous individuals and organizations to respond to ICE’s aggression. Concerned citizens have risen to the occasion acting as witnesses and Constitutional Observers to ICE’s overreach. They have recorded ICE ramming observers’ vehicles, arresting observers for exercising their constitutional rights, and threatening to come to observers’ homes or injure them/their family.
We need our local officials to get engaged alongside our community residents; it is a disservice to all of us when you imply that reports from observers on the ground are exaggerated or conflated because you have chosen to close your eyes to what is happening right in front of you.
