A day after Julio Cesar Sosa Celis was shot in the leg by a federal agent while fleeing a traffic stop in north Minneapolis, state and local officials scrambled to respond to a threat by President Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops against protesters in Minneapolis.
The shooting came a week after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Nicole Macklin Good in south Minneapolis.
On Thursday, both the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit in federal court seeking an emergency order to prevent ICE from stopping and questioning people based on their ethnicity and to prevent them from arresting people wrongfully.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who sued the federal government on Monday to try to end the ICE enforcement surge, said he’s ready to go to court again if the president invokes the Insurrection Act to justify sending in the military as well.
The back-to-back shootings left many community leaders and residents reeling and demanding accountability for the actions of the thousands of federal agents who have flooded the Twin Cities in the last month.
“ICE shot a Latino on the leg in Minneapolis today,” Minneapolis Council Member Jason Chavez posted Wednesday night. “It’s despicable. Being Latino is not a crime. The color of your skin is not a crime. Being in this country is not a crime. Our entire community is in complete and utter pain.”
Clashes with protesters on Wednesday night led federal agents to deploy round after round of flashbangs, smoke bombs, tear gas and other chemical irritants. Those lingered in the air Thursday, affecting the whole neighborhood, DFL Sen. Bobby Joe Champion said in a statement.
“They’re not just harming our residents by shooting us, they’re gassing us right now and sowing chaos throughout our city and especially in the Northside,” Council Member Elliot Payne posted on social media Wednesday night.
Emilia Gonzalez Avalos, executive director of Unidos Minnesota, said the immigrant rights group’s phones were flooded Wednesday night with calls from neighbors concerned about their safety with ICE in the neighborhood.
“That’s, you know the new reality of Minnesota right now, it’s unsafe,” she told Sahan Journal. “People don’t feel safe in their communities. It’s violent, and we need this to stop.”
Neighbors clean up
Uptown resident Matt Dawson was one of several people who responded to a social media post asking for help cleaning up the neighborhood Thursday morning.
Wearing a bright orange vest, he used a little machine claw to pick up trash on the corner of Lyndale Avenue and 24th Street N.
“I haven’t been able to do any of the ICE watch trainings, and I don’t want to show up to that stuff unprepared, so I’m looking for ways to chip in and support,” Dawson said. “We’re going to save ourselves, it’s us saving us right now.”
He was near the duplex where a confrontation allegedly occurred with federal agents Wednesday night. The door to the house was boarded up and a second-story window was smashed out Thursday.
“Right now it’s good vibes, just people out here trying to look out for each other and look out for the community,” Dawson said.
People gather at site of Good’s shooting
On Thursday, a handful of visitors stopped at the south Minneapolis site of where Good was killed last week. The memorial at the site where her car crashed has continued to grow, with flowers, handwritten letters and toys covering the snow.
“Renee was just the tip of the iceberg,” said Kadee Ruhland, an Eagan resident visiting the vigil site of the shooting Thursday afternoon. Ruhland, 61, is a retired school teacher who came to the vigil site with her close friend of more than four decades, Darcy Brommer.
Ruhland and Brommer said they both live in the suburbs and expressed feeling “heartbroken” and “helpless.” But seeing the vigil in-person has brought back more interest to help others affected by ICE.
“I think even being here now inspires that even more,” Ruhland said.
Brommer said the second shooting last night felt “inevitable” and more violence will likely break out if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act in Minnesota.
“And until they stop occupying our city, it will continue,” she said.
“Every day I want to get more and more involved,” said Dalton Thibodo, a recent visitor at the vigil site. “Every headline that comes up, I just want to get out there and get into it.”
St. Paul resident Jessica Ramstad said she felt “devastation” when she heard about the Wednesday night shooting. The memorial site is a “beautiful” but also an “awful” reminder of what Minnesotans are facing in the midst of heavy federal enforcement activity.
Three friends of Minneapolis, Heather Pahl, Jessica Stevens and Liz Beam, visited the memorial site Thursday afternoon. They expressed frustration, hopelessness and sadness over Good’s death and Wednesday’s shooting.
“My house is over in the neighborhood where that shooting happened last night and so it’s just getting too close to home and this is not what should be happening in our community,” Stevens said. “Nobody deserves this.”
Volunteers helping deliver food, tow truck companies offering to return vehicles for free and elected officials denouncing ICE in the state have shown that Minnesota is not backing down, Beam said.
“In 2020 with George Floyd’s murder, we showed everyone in the national news that you can stand up to stuff like this, and you can have small victories in the face of terror,” she said.
Early morning protest at Whipple
At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building early Thursday, about 10 protesters had gathered. One protester had a brief encounter with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents pointing a gun at him after he drove his vehicle too close to a convoy of unmarked vehicles.
“None of us should be shocked by what is happening,” legal observer Delta Larkey said. “The United States, the very foundation is [built] on white supremacy and this is what it looks like.”
“What’s so hard and what maybe other people are feeling maybe is the cognitive dissonance. My friend and I are out here, then we have to go to work, then I have to bring my kid to a dentist appointment. Meanwhile, people are being abducted off the street. So how do I take care of myself, how do we take care of each other, when we’re living in occupied cities?”
“There’s nothing normal about this anymore,” said bus stop supervisor Cindy Boldenow.
“No one should be shot for being protective of other people,” she said, referring to Good. “This is getting out of hand and I can’t stand here and watch my neighbors getting kidnapped. My heart is broken.”
She said she planned to attend another protest tonight and is delivering food to neighbors, making whistles with her 3-D printer and doing what she could to keep her friends and neighbors safe.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
