Federal raid in St. Paul neighborhood a ‘rude awakening’ for community leaders

About two dozen residents gathered at Marydale Park Thursday to show solidarity with a group of Latino roofers who were detained by federal agents while on a job in the North End neighborhood of St. Paul.

The federal agents are “destroying the fabric of our community in which immigrants are integral,” said state Rep. Athena Hollins, DFL-St. Paul, who represents the neighborhood where the raid occurred at about 8:30 a.m. Thursday. 

The demonstrators listened to speakers, briefly chanted and sang the activist anthem, “We Shall Not Be Moved.” 

Photos and videos taken by St. Paul neighbors showed a number of agents present at the scene early Thursday, including at least one with a vest that read, “POLICE HSI,” indicating the federal agency Homeland Security Investigations. A few agents were wearing face coverings.

The agents arrived in unmarked vehicles and refused to show their identification, according to a press release from the Immigrant Defense Network and Comunidades Organizando el Poder y la Acción Latina, two groups that organized Thursday’s demonstration.

Officials have not shared the identity of the men who were detained, and speakers at Thursday’s vigil said they didn’t know their current status. Hollins said the men — estimate to be six or seven, she said — are believed to be going through processing at Fort Snelling. 

Thursday’s raid is among the thousands of operations targeting immigrants across the country as part of the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportation. 

As Sahan Journal reported this week, “Federal immigration officials announced Tuesday that they recently conducted 900 site visits and in-person interviews across the Twin Cities.” 

Demonstrators held a prayer vigil earlier this week in Appleton, MN, where the Trump administration is considering reopening a 1,600-bed prison in west central Minnesota as an immigrant detention center.

The administration is facing resistance even among unlikely sources, including a Republican-appointed judge this week.  

U.S. District Court Judge William Young, a Reagan-appointee, slammed the Trump administration for using deportations as a way to stamp out the free speech rights. 

On the subject of masked agents, Young wrote, “Masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.”

Mark Sacay, a rapid responder for a local immigrants’ rights group, said he arrived at the scene of the roofer raid just 12 minutes after he received an alert to dispatch. But even by that time, all of the men on the roofing crew were gone, as were the federal agents, Sacay said.

The roofing job looked as if its entire crew had abandoned it, with a ladder still leaning against the house, tarps covering the yard and materials sitting at the peak prepared for a productive day. 

According to a yard sign at the property, Nordic Construction was the roofing contractor.

Sacay said he met one roofer’s wife when he arrived, turned off an idling pick-up truck, attached its trailer and gathered information from neighbors. They told him that about a dozen federal agents came to the house, and there was no indication that anyone had a warrant.

Ramsey County Commissioner Garrison McMurtrey shared his anger and support for the immigrant community with the vigil’s attendees.

“They are trying to get us to divide amongst each other, and we’re saying ‘no’ to all of that,”  McMurtrey said. 

Hollins said the incident should be an awakening and a falling away of the fiction that “this couldn’t happen where we are, [that] this would never happen in our neighborhood.” 

She said she is now organizing an intervenor’s training session to educate residents about how they can help in the midst of a raid. She said she has already hosted events to educate immigrants on their rights.