We can see it, Matt, with our eyes, but they immediately tried
to argue that he was a domestic terrorist.
To me, Matt, this feels chilling, dystopian, like we
were living in another world. The scenes on the streets of
Minneapolis for some time have felt to me otherworldly.
I find it extraordinary, actually, that anyone in a
position of power would do anything other than sit back and
say, let an investigation take place.
But the reality is if the federal government don't want to
do it, then federal officers will be very easily protected in
these cases and there will not be justice for either Renee
Nicole Good or for Alex Pretty. Hello and welcome to Trump
World. I'm Anushka Astana and I'm in
Minneapolis. And I'm a try and I'm in warm
and slightly grey London. Anushka.
I gather it's -18 where you are, but it feels like -27.
It is so shockingly cold, I'm basically walking around in full
ski gear. And actually when I was talking
to you on the news yesterday, I had to take my thumb out of my
glove just to scroll on my phone in case anything changed while I
was on air. And I honestly thought I might
get frostbite on that farm. On that farm, you need new
gloves, those gloves that allow you to score.
Now, you've been there. I mean, you've been to
Minneapolis quite a few times, but but you've really been there
at a crucial time. It seems to be the epicentre of
everything that's going on in Trump's domestic revolution.
And yesterday we had a little bit of a change of tune and
change of tone from the White House when, you know, there,
there were conversations being had.
You know, there seems to be some kind of drawback from the Trump
administration after the killing of Alex Preti at the weekend.
Tell us about that. A very dramatic change in tone
for sure. The Trump administration
definitely totally rattled by the reaction to the killing of
Alex Preti, which we're going to talk about.
I'd like to talk as we go through why Alex Preti has acted
as a turning point in a way that Rene Nicole Goode, who was
killed here just a few weeks ago when we were here as well, was
not. They know they went too far.
They have angered not only their opponents, including the
protesters we've seen here on the streets in those bitterly
cold conditions that you've mentioned, Matt, but also some
of their closer allies, including many in the gun lobby.
And again, we've been talking to people on that side of things
until now that there's been a kind of guy here who he's either
the bogeyman or he's the folk hero, depending how you see him.
His name is Gregory Bovino. He's been leading Border Patrol
forces through the streets of Minneapolis.
I've been in situations where there have been really tense
standoffs between Border Patrol and protesters.
The scenes here have looked like a war zone.
And to be honest, that's what Donald Trump made clear he
wanted. He told his military chiefs at
one point there's a war going on with an enemy within.
It's been really shocking. I have been three times in
recent weeks here, including before running.
Nicole Good was killed. People are hiding.
They're hiding in their homes because they are so terrified of
being rounded up and taken to the Texas detention center.
They say it's all about violent criminals.
That's not what I'm seeing, that they're taking people really
indiscriminately, or they have been.
What is genuine for sure is they know they went too far.
They are withdrawing Gregory Pavino.
They are withdrawing a certain number of Border Patrol
officers. They are not taking out ICE
completely and they are not completely changing this policy.
They're sending in Tom Holman who is going to take over in a
way from Gregory Pavino. He's the borders are he has had
a more measured tone on all of this for sure.
But in the last few days, we've seen shocking comments from
members of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller,
Christie, no, the vice president, JD Vance.
It would be lovely to be a family on the wall right now,
Matt, and to see the conversations that they're
having in the White House about how they deal with people really
clearly overstepping the mark. And I think the reason why we're
seeing some kind of withdrawal, some kind of a draw, and I
think, you know, it's very partial and the overall policy
probably still stays very much in place.
We're seeing it because we've got the midterm elections coming
up in November. And for the first time, really,
we're seeing major backlash from Republican congressmen and women
and Republican senators who are frankly simply afraid that
they're going to lose their seats in the midterm elections
if this sort of overt cruelty continues.
Because even though the majority of Americans, you know, voted
for Trump largely because of his immigration policy, and they are
still in favour of deportation, what they don't want to see is
this kind of violence on the streets of America.
And, and I think a lot of Republicans fall into the
outcome too. But before we talk more about
ICE, and I think I'm fascinated by ICE.
ICE, by the way, has the biggest military budget in the world as
an enforcement agentry agency, apart from the military budgets
of the US and China, 174 billion U.S. dollars in the big
beautiful budget. We'll talk about that later.
But I think to get some idea of how important this is, Anushka,
just talk us through frame by frame, if you don't mind, what
we know about what actually happened to poor Alex Preti on
Saturday. I mean, one thing that has
happened with the Alex Preti killing is that the initial
video that came out was very, very confusing.
And then it took us a little bit of time to start to see it as we
have done before, from different angles and to see what really
happened. So initially the first video,
very confusing, shocking. I was actually in a play centre,
a trampoline park in Washington DC as I saw it for the first
time. And actually, I thought my son
had gone to the loo, but he was standing over my shoulder.
He's only seven. He saw a bit of it.
I suddenly hid it from him. And later he said to me, mom,
I'm really scared in America right now.
It's a shocking video. And, and without even drawing
breath, the response that started to come out, including
from Donald Trump himself, was this guy came up to a law
enforcement person with a loaded handgun with magazines ready to
go, brandishing. Some of them said, yeah, Now you
see the video. What's really happening in that
video, what is happening is that Alex Presti is 1 of what a
number of people have been doing here.
One of the people observing, ICE officers and Border Patrol
officers, He is holding in his hand not a gun but a phone.
He is filming what is going on. He approaches slightly.
He steps off onto the road and something happens and one of the
officers pushes back a woman. Another woman who's protesting
or observing like him, pushes them onto the ground.
He turns to try and help her. They both get pepper sprayed in
the face. They go down and he then
suddenly gets pulled back. He does not go for his gun at
any point. Now that we've watched it frame
by frame, he gets pushed onto the floor.
At one point, an agent reaches down, takes his gun out of his
holster, and actually starts to walk away.
And at that very same moment, we hear ten shots fired in five
seconds, 10 which shoot him dead.
And you can see in the video immediately that he is dead and
he's so shocking. And you know, there is a phrase
that we talk about here, which is who do you believe me or your
own lying eyes? And the problem with the Alex
Preti video and frankly, I think with the Renee Nicole good
video. And later we can talk about why
that wasn't the turning point that this is is we can see it
Matt with our eyes, but they immediately try to argue that he
was a domestic terrorist. And I also think overstepped the
mark massively because people in America, and you know this, that
they care about their Second Amendment rights.
They care about the right to carry a gun.
He was carrying with a permit. The only crime he had ever
committed previously was a parking ticket, as far as we can
tell. And he was gunned down on the
streets. And to me, Matt, this feels or
it certainly felt as I was heading here from Minneapolis,
chilling, dystopian, like we were living in another world.
The scenes on the streets of Minneapolis for some time have
felt to me, otherworldly. How does it compare to what
you've seen before? How different does this feel?
It's remarkably different under Biden and under Obama.
Yes, there were plenty of deportations.
Obama was known as a deporter in chief.
At one stage, 1000 people were being pushed across the border
into Mexico on a daily basis. But they did it quietly.
The whole point of Trump is that performance is policy, right?
You're doing this so that people can see how brutal you're
prepared to be, to push people out, hoping that a lot of people
will, you know, as they call it, self deport.
But in the process of this, something else has happened.
So ICE was always kind of slightly looked down upon as,
you know, the one of the Customs Enforcement agencies.
You kind of, you know, it wasn't as glamorous as the FBI.
Yeah. It wasn't even as glamorous as
the, you know, the direct Border Patrol who kind of see even then
under Obama or Biden was seen as the kind of Cowboys on the
southern border patrolling, you know, Mexico, Arizona, all these
New Mexico and Arizona. The ICE people were a little bit
more low grade. And the main problem that you
had as an ICE agent, obviously carrying a firearm was that you
would use your firearm in an extreme situation and then you
would be held accountable for it.
And so the worry with ICE agents, I'm told in the past was
that, you know, they didn't use their arms enough, their weapons
enough, because they were following the law, constantly
aware and told to be aware of the rights of the people they
were arresting. We've had a complete sea change
of mentality with an ICE since Trump took office.
It's not basically the message is you're acting with our cover.
You know, we've got your back, ICE agent, you can more or less
act with impunity that, you know, don't worry too much about
the law as long as you deliver us the numbers of people that
need to be lifted, detained and then deported.
This is a numbers game. You've got to fill those quotas.
And remember, the quotas they're trying to fill according to
their manifesto pledges is a million a year.
They're not going to get there, but they're trying really,
really hard. At the same time, ICE, and I
mentioned this before briefly, has such a vast budget that this
has never been seen before for any law enforcement agency,
whether it's the FBI or the CIA. In the history of the United
States, as I said, bigger than the military budget of any
country in the world apart from China and the US, the numbers of
agents they've recruited has gone from 7000 roughly under
Biden to 12,000 under Trump. That's a significant increase.
And then when you look at the specifics of what happened to
Alex Preti and indeed to Renee, Good, the minute someone is shot
in the past, right when if there was an ICE agent was in the, in
the rare position of having shot someone dead, especially
immediately, the law enforcement agencies would, would, would
gather together in a kind of circle.
And we're trying to establish what the evidence was.
And the person who did the shooting would then be probably
be investigated. They're not necessarily charged,
but they would want to find out what actually happened.
In the case of Renee Goode and the case of Alex Preti, as you
know, the evidence on the ground has been seized by the people
who committed the killing and the area basically blocked off
to the police, the local Minneapolis police, let alone
anyone else who was standing by. And I think for ordinary
Americans who are wondering about the state of their
Republic, you know, this is deeply scary.
And remember, as I said, performances, policies, Trump
wants people to be scared. He wants, you know, immigrant
families who are undocumented to feel that they might be lifted
at any moment because the hope is that they'll self deport.
But in many cases, they won't because they've been there for
10 years or 20 years. They've paid their American
taxes. And remember, in America, if
you're undocumented, if you're there as an illegal alien, there
is no path to legality. There is no path to suddenly
getting documented. You have to leave the country
and then come back in again and wait for a very long time.
And you could say that's just, But if you've been living in
America and working and sending your kids to school and your
kids have become American citizens because they were born
there, then there's a much more complicated situation.
And that's why I think you're getting all these citizens on
the streets. Like Alex Preti was out there,
concerned citizen with his camera, with his iPhone, trying
to make sure that they can enforce some degree of order
within their community. And of course you've got pumped
up ICE agents, you've got angry local citizens, a clash is
almost inevitable. But within that panic, and I'm
sure, and you know from the first tape that you referred to,
there clearly was panic. Within that panic, some terrible
things have happened. And the guys who I'd love to
who, who shot him, did they have the training?
Were they, you know, had they been in ICE for a couple of
months or for many years? This is all really important,
but we don't know the answers to any of it because we're not
being told. Anushka, when I was in
Washington in the summer, I saw ICE agents on the streets.
The thing that really struck me was the fear in the eyes of
Hispanic parents taking their kids to school in the morning.
You must have come across so much of that in Minneapolis.
Tell us about it. Oh my God, I think the whole
city is just kind of reeling. I mean, that point you're making
about this being a kind of federal government versus state
thing is so like visceral here right now.
I mean, I was at the crime scene where Alex Pretti was killed and
we saw local officers going to the scene by the time that it
had been completely cleared and there was a memorial bear trying
to get evidence. And they hadn't been allowed to
go and get evidence before that, which is just totally
extraordinary. And the people who are dealing
with this as a crisis kind of can't believe that it is a
crisis caused by, in their eyes, their own federal government.
But as you say, the human stories are behind the doors
everywhere you look here because there are genuinely loads of
immigrants hiding in this city, including including immigrants
who have completely legal paperwork but who have been
taken. And I was with somebody
yesterday who was a builder working on a roof, got stopped,
had their paperwork, showed their paperwork to the officers.
They said this is garbage. They told him, you're effed.
I won't actually say the word. They handcuffed him behind his
hand. They got him to climb down a
ladder with handcuffs behind his back.
I know. And then hit.
The handcuffs were on for 2 1/2 hours.
The shackles on his legs stayed on for four days.
He was put into a Minneapolis detention center where there
were dozens of people in a room, no beds.
People had to take it in turns to sleep because not everybody
could sit or lie down at the same time.
The toilets were open, so you were sitting on the toilet next
to someone else. They didn't have a blanket.
And it's really cold here. As you've mentioned, they were
sent to El Paso in Texas to another detention facility and
they were actually like relieved when they got there because they
got a blanket, although they were then in a room with 72
people and they were not allowed out to do exercise.
And just bear in mind, you know, this person is legal, has
paperwork, is going to be released and has to go through
this. They can hardly communicate with
their family who are going completely crazy.
You know, number of kids here in the US with U.S. citizens who,
by the way, are being made to carry their passports when they
go out with them. Because people are so terrified
because the only people who are not being taken are the people
who don't have their paperwork on them and and paperwork
doesn't do it has to be passports.
Yesterday was with a Somali family for the second time.
We went to see them after Renee Nicole Good she again legal was
stopped by multiple cars. Masked men got in her car, took
her 45 year old mother of three Maimuna.
She was put in a Minnesotan jail for two weeks before she came
home. These are not the kind of
violent criminals that Gregory Bevino is has been telling us in
press conferences. He's been doing these
extraordinary press conferences. He puts up what he calls the
worst of the worst. The violent criminals they're
taking off the streets. The reality is so many people
are terrified. You know, they're not even going
to get help. We spoke to someone else.
You talk about self deporting, who said I just need to self
deport? And just, you know, I want to
ask you what you're making of all this.
But predating the stories we've seen since the killing of Renee
Nicole Goods, since the killing of Alex Pretti and my moon of
the Somali woman said they shot Alex.
Why wouldn't they shoot me? We were here in December after
Donald Trump and we talked about it on the pod was attacking
Somali Americans, listening to people hearing death threats be
called through. I think if you look at the
profiling of the people they're arresting, and I'm not talking
about the people they're killing, but the people that
they're arresting and the people they're deporting, they don't
tend to be, you know, white Europeans have outstayed their,
you know, their, their Ivs. If you haven't offend, they
don't tend to be, I don't know even, you know, Asians from East
Asia, they tend to be Hispanics. They tend to be Somalis with
force, with propaganda, you know, with arrests, using the
full power of the federal government to basically make the
place more white. And now you might say this is
ridiculous, but if you look at the, you know, the ICE website,
you know, the, the number of kind of messaging messages that
have come up, you know, on the ICE website between, you know,
ICE departments and ICE agents, the motors that they've used.
This is all this is from a different world, Anushka.
This is not the ICE that people knew from, you know, a year ago
or three years ago. And you've not seen this before,
Matt? Yeah.
There's never been a point in America where you felt.
Never. Not like this, Not like this.
I mean, you know, border control, fine.
You know, it's, it's a long border.
It's a porous border. Millions of people have come
across that border. They came over under the Biden
administration partly because it was the post COVID, you know,
need for people either to get out or for New Labour to be
found. And actually the numbers of
people, you know, went down in the last few months of Biden.
His big, big mistake was that he never took the immigration
crisis seriously enough. And Trump did and always has
done. It's one of his EDA fix and he
acted on it. And the irony is Anushka, the
southern border is virtually closed.
There's no one coming across. I mean, you know, he has
achieved one of his main goals, which is to close that border.
Not nobody, a few 1000, a few thousand a month, but yeah,
nothing like it was. But hardly anyone is coming
across, right. So compared to the numbers we
had before, it is tiny. It's a trickle.
But what's so extraordinary is that they've used the, the
border is now in every American community.
You know, that's where the border agents are acting.
And, you know, in Minneapolis, as you know, they're deployed,
you know, it's a bit of confusion.
They're deployed ostensibly, as Caroline never told us
yesterday, because of they're going after these fraud cases,
you know, date back to the COVID era.
Involving a few dozen Somalis and there are 100,000 Somalis in
this state. Right, and fraud cases are not
sold by border agents, right? That that's sold by by people
who work for, you know, other departments.
So they're really using ICE, I think to create a climate of
fear first and foremost amongst the, you know, immigrant
community. And you know, we know, I mean,
Chris, Senator Chris Murphy was at a Texas, you know, asylum
court the other day and put the stuff on social media.
He's, I mean, obviously, you know, the massive critic of, of
Democrat hates Trump. But he was describing how
families would go into the to the courts to have their asylum
cases heard and the ICE agents would pick them up as they came
out of the courts to arrest them.
And deport the undocumented parent.
Often the kids were naturalized Americans because they were born
in America. Deport the parent and send them
away to a detention center, regardless of whether they had
been approved or not. And so even though we're seeing
some kind of withdrawal from the the cruelest part of the policy
after the the murder of Alex Preti, because Republican
senators and congressmen are wide about losing their seats in
the midterm elections. And the opinion polls tell us
that this is not popular with the public.
This degree of brutality. The fundamental policy, I don't
think will change here because they feel they've got a mandate,
they're on a mission and they've got the money to do it.
And again, it's, it's a bit like, you know, what happened
after the the murder of Charlie Kirk, what happened after, you
know, Renee Goode, this this immediate response from the
administration to blame left wing radicals and the Democrats
makes me think that the other thing that's lurking behind us,
you know, the elephant in the room is the Insurrection Act
where you basically use the military use military force to,
to, to to end First Amendment, you know, rights of freedom of
speech and freedom to protest ahead of the midterm elections.
Everything Trump has said he would do, he is dumb.
He is hinted that he might do this.
I wouldn't be surprised if he went this far.
Watch that space. I mean, do you think I'm
overreacting here? What do you think in Oshka?
Until, you know, he backed off a bit this week.
I certainly thought the interaction act was coming.
I think because it's very clear that they feel like they've
overstepped the mark. Things will cool down a little
bit. I mean, we've gone from them
attacking the governor here, Tim Waltz, relentlessly for weeks on
end and the mayor here, Jacob Frey, to him getting on the
phone to them and saying, oh, you know, I think we're on a
similar wavelength. You know, he's still brutally
attacking the representative here, Ilhan Omar, in a very what
feels like racist way to me now, suggesting maybe she's involved
in the fraud cases. He's still attacking Somalis.
I mean, on that point you made about race, I mean, I had to
kind of check this so many times because I thought, is it fake?
He's put on Truth Social, the president, a clip of New York in
the past with lots of white people walking down the street.
And it's like New York in a very different time.
Never forget exclamation mark. And Stephen Miller, his deputy
chief of staff, has put that on X.
And, you know, I've heard about lots of Stephen Miller
conversations behind the scenes. There's no question.
In fact, he says it out loud that that he wants to see a
country that maintains more of what he sees.
I mean, the joke of this as if this is the indigenous American
population, but he sees as the indigenous American population,
which is basically Europeans who came here, his ancestors,
etcetera. I mean, it feels so blatant
where even in 2020 it did not. Even in 2020 when George Floyd
was killed on these streets, Donald Trump said we'll get
justice for George Floyd's family.
But the reaction, I mean, when Renee Nicole Good was shot 3
times, including from the side when she was unthreatening and
had turned her wheel and was moving away, you know, they
still felt very comfortable to say that she was threatening his
life, that this was all down to left wing activists at the
moment. They're still talking about.
And there have been some horrible scenes.
There have been some scary scenes where a hotel where ICE
agents were staying had windows smashed, etcetera.
But largely what we're seeing have been protests that have
stayed quite peaceful against people who seem quite scary.
They've got masks on. You can't tell quite where
they're from. I mean, we're calling them ICE.
But actually the kind of architect of this policy,
Gregory Bavino, is Border Patrol.
Which is a hard the hard the hard the hard lot.
Guys with the guns, someone was saying to me yesterday I saw
someone with AK-40 Sevens and I was like, well, they didn't have
AK-40 Sevens, but actually when you look at the guns they're
holding, they I can see they feel a bit like that.
They look that shape. And his policy was these.
Are weapons of war in Uska. These are weapons that are
supposed to be used on a battlefield somewhere.
And it feels like that and and it was not let's what used to be
that ICE collects all the information on people, finds out
where you might have someone who's an illegal alien as they
would call them, and then they get removed.
This idea there was will bring the border to your cities, will
be in your cities. And look, there is, you know, he
says they're taking violent criminals case after case after
case, including one that involved a 5 year old boy who
was also taken with his father. The case, the criminality was
the way they had crossed the border, which is a civil case.
Yeah, which is an illegal entry into this country.
It's not a violent case. And, and actually lots of people
came here. They were paid for by the
American government to come here on Aun refugee scheme and they
fear here. People are telling me with fear
that they've handed over the entire list of those people to
ICE. Those people are not leaving
their homes. Anyone who's undocumented in
America has, you know, is in danger of being deported
according to the law. You know, if you're
undocumented, your potential deportee.
But the problem is, one, the way that the law is being applied by
ICE, as we've discussed in this unusually brutal way.
And the other really big issue is that because so many of
these, I mean, millions upon millions of families, I think we
don't even know the real number. Is it 12,000,015 million had
been living in the United States for decades where the parents
came over illegally, They walked across the border.
The kids were born in America. They are now American citizens.
They live in this weird hybrid shadow world, but they've been
paying their taxes, you know, they have driving licenses,
they're documented in every way other than having citizenship
rights or a a legal visa the way that, you know, you and I do
when we go and work there. And, you know, there has to be a
path to accommodate these people somehow because they are,
whether you like it or not, they have jobs, they're part of the
community. They feel as if they're part of
the community. And at the same time, if you
then try and remove them, you know, that's an incredibly
complicated, difficult and brutal thing to do.
And it's never been tried before, but we're seeing it now.
Now they are trying it. And I just what I worry about is
that, you know, everything from the way the rule of law is
applied or not applied to not allowing local law enforcement
to get in there to Christie Gnome, you know, claiming stuff
that's just blatantly wrong to them, asking us to believe
things that our eyes are not witnessing, etcetera, etcetera.
It, you know, it's so dystopian. But I wonder, Anoushka, maybe
you got the answer to this, whether you think that any of
these people will lose their jobs, Christina, you know, Greg
Bavino, I mean, will will any of them be fired for what they've
done or not? Well, Gregory Bavino is clearly
being removed from Minneapolis. There was a lot of rumor this
week that he might be fired, It sounds like.
It sounds to me looking at the people who were saying that, but
he's telling people that he is facing a demotion.
I mean, the people who have got Donald Trump into trouble on
this, if you like, would include him who have been doing these
shocking press conferences where he's basically like he said, the
victims in this case were the officers, were my ICE officers.
They were not essentially Alex Preti.
And again, people can see that that doesn't add up at all.
And with Rene Nicole Good, it was a little bit more.
There was a bit more of a debate about whether the officer,
Jonathan Ross, felt threatened. But to a lot of people, it still
looked like a situation in which a person did not need to be
killed. Christy Noem, who's the Homeland
Security secretary, came out almost immediately and said the
guy was a domestic terrorist. And Kash Patel, the director of
the FBI said, no, you can't carry a loaded gun up to law
enforcement officers. Well, here's the thing, Matt, it
might feel really weird to you and I from the UK, but it it
turns out you can carry a gun and when you are around law
enforcement, you are allowed to film what they are doing.
And I think that's why this has felt like such a difficult and
clear cut case for the White House and they were mistaken to
so quickly, you know, make a judgement.
I find it extraordinary, actually, that anyone in a
position of power would do anything other than sit back and
say, let an investigation take place.
But the reality is if the federal government don't want to
do it, then federal officers will be very easily protected in
these cases and there will not be justice for either Renee
Nicole Good or for Alex Preti and.
Of course, it sets up, you know, a clash between state law
enforcement and federal law enforcement.
This is something that never ends very well.
And and, you know, this is the comparison with George Floyd
when he was murdered in 2020. Immediately the local police,
you know, started to investigate.
He was, you know, he, he had to stay at home.
Then there was a trial, You know, justice, you know, even
after this horrible murder, justice was served eventually.
We're getting no evidence that any of this has happened so far.
And I don't think, frankly, that any of the people who are having
difficult conversations with Trump at the moment are going to
get fired because the difference between the last Trump
administration and this one is that in the first one, you
either got fired or you walked out.
And in this one, everyone is slavishly loyal to the boss.
So far, no one has got fired. And, you know, they've been
quite a few things that have been done wrong, including by P
Texas, Dean of the secretary of war, not fired very much in
office because he's got his loyal team around him.
Even Christie Noem, the former governor of South Dakota, who
when she was in that position, shot her own dog.
So, you know, in this country, I think as someone who does.
That and wrote about it. What?
And wrote about it. And wrote it proud enough to
write about. It wrote, it shot her own dog
and then wrote about it in her autobiography.
Anyway, so different kind of people we're dealing with, I
suppose. Anyway, tell us about your
guest. Yeah, here.
I went up to the emergency operations centre here where
it's quite interesting. They wouldn't let us film it,
but you can see they've got huge screens with maps of the city.
They're tracking what's happening.
Normally they're dealing with natural disasters.
Right now they're trying to deal with the fallout of the crisis
that they say has been caused by the federal government.
And I spoke to its director, Rachel Say.
Just tell me what your role entails.
Yeah. So as the Emergency Management
Director, I make sure that our city is ready and prepared for
any sort of large scale emergencies, disasters, that we
respond as a whole city and that we can recover.
Is this an emergency like that? What we're experiencing here are
large scale impacts to our community and those impacts are
need to be urgently addressed. They include things like people
need food, they need help making their rent this month, they need
help with mental health resources.
So those kind of impacts are really immediate and must be
addressed. And impacts that are not from a
natural disaster, but are from the federal government and its
policy. That's right, That's right.
What we're experiencing is a situation in which there are
masked agents in the street and people are afraid to go outside.
They're afraid to go to the grocery store.
They're having to make impossible decisions.
You know, 16% of our city lives below the poverty line already,
which means meeting basic needs already is extremely difficult.
When you take away their ability to go to their job, their
decisions get even harder every single day.
Am I feeding this child or am I going to my job?
How do I make that happen if I can't go outside?
And how many people are not going outside?
Do you have any sense? No, we don't know specifically,
but I can just tell you in my conversations, it's so
widespread. Businesses are closed.
We're hearing from emergency rooms and healthcare providers
that less people are coming to their appointments.
We're hearing, you know, people are again, afraid to send their
kids to schools. That's why our many of us public
schools made the decision to have a virtual option.
And I do want to make clear that our city remains open and
vibrant. You know, we have an incredible
food scene here. People are ice skating, you
know, enjoying the winter even in this freezing temperature.
We have incredible numbers of community members who have gone
out and protested. So it's both, you know, we're
experiencing this impact and I can't tell you a single friend
or family member or neighbor who's sleeping right now, The
mental health impacts of this have just been.
Everyone you know is having sleepless nights.
Everyone, are you having sleepless nights?
Absolutely. Yes, how bad?
It depends on the day, but I it's impossible not to wake up
and just immediately go into what's happening right now.
You know, is my family safe? What's happened in the hours
I've been able to sleep? How can I help my community?
What's going to happen to my neighbors tomorrow?
I mean, these are just feel like, again, impossible
questions that you can't escape from because it's all we know
right now. It is all we can think about.
And I have to say, when I was seeing people protest this week,
I thought to myself as I spoke to different people, that wasn't
speaking to many immigrants. That's presumably because this
is disproportionately affecting immigrants here in Minneapolis.
Absolutely, absolutely. And again, you know, everyone's
making that individual decision for themselves, and that's a
conversation that's being had and we're really trying to
center everyone who's most impacted, right?
What do you need if you're not safe to go to the house?
Our community is mobilizing to make sure you still do get the
food you need, that we can get somehow healthcare to you.
But everyone needs to make the decision for themselves on
what's safest. Do you include, when it comes to
healthcare people, for example, a woman who might be pregnant?
Do we know what is happening? Are people coming to the
hospital to give birth to their children?
Yeah, we know that that's an absolute need is there are
people who are pregnant who are afraid to get healthcare and
that is absolutely unacceptable. So we are working, our health
colleagues, we're working on what can we do, How can we knit
together the incredible response in our community, the incredible
network of mutual aid that has really re energized and is
taking care of each other. How can we link that with
different resources that are available?
And you have previously worked in war zones and in countries
that have suffered from that natural disasters.
Tell me where you've worked. Yeah.
So I've worked in Haiti most recently.
I've worked in Yemen for a long time.
Yemen still has my heart. Syria, northwest Syria, Ukraine
at the start of the most recent war and what I saw there, the
impacts are the same impacts that we have here.
Again, people afraid to go out and go about their daily lives,
to access food, to decide to send your kids to school or not.
Those are the same choices that people in conflict zones make on
a regular basis. Does it feel like this is a war
zone? Again, we're we have a vibrant
city, right? Our incredible small businesses
are, I'm biased to the best in the country.
We have award-winning restaurants.
We have such a vibrant community of immigrants and communities.
We are active, we are out, we are supporting each other more
than ever. And we have these awful things
that is, that is making us afraid, that is making us tired,
that we're having to navigate. But you're essentially comparing
your work in war zones to what is happening in Minneapolis in
America in 2026. Yeah, I do feel like my
experience working in conflict zones around the world has
prepared me for ensuring that I keep our focus on what is
happening to our community. How do we meet the needs?
What are the needs, needs how? What is most urgent to attend to
and make sure that we can do what we can to keep us safe and
keep us thriving. And do you see those masked
agents you talked about in the city as comparable to the types
of militia, for example, you've seen elsewhere in the world?
I think that, you know, no one deserves to go outside and not
know what they're going to face. I was calling earlier this
morning how when we're little in school, you know, we have police
and fire come visit us. And the reason they come and
visit us is that we understand what they look like and what
they do. We were never educated on masked
agents coming into our city and and doing the things they're
doing. That's not something that we
grow up here learning about because it's not something that
has happened here and it's not OK.
And what sort of stories are you hearing?
Can you give me a few examples of the things you're seeing
behind closed doors? Well, so one of the things that
is just, again, back to the mental health needs that are
just across the board, you know, here we always say how are you
to start a conversation? No one's saying that anymore
because there's no answer that is possible.
We're starting conversations with how are you holding up?
Or I have no words. And that is just in itself.
So not us, not American, certainly not Minnesotan, we're
starting our interactions with, you know, hugs and and ending
them with this just anger and fear and the desperate desire to
hope for something to change. We just want to go back to our
amazing breweries to, you know, all of the activities that we
have here and feel like our choices right now are go outside
and maybe run into those masked agents or your neighbors about
to take it away. Or do I go protest and make sure
that everyone knows what's happening here?
Are a lot of people in hiding? I think that there is a
significant amount of people who are not going outside based on
what we're hearing about food banks.
Their food shelves are not being emptied right now, which is a
change. Because people are scared of
going to a food bank. Yes.
And when you say you're responding to all of that, can
you just give me an example of the things you're doing, like
how much food is going out? What else are you supporting the
people with? How are you getting them to
healthcare? Yeah, So Minneapolis has such an
incredible vibrant mutual aid community.
So that means that we have hyperlocal communities block by
block, neighbor by a neighbor, really making sure that people
are taken care of. Schools are an incredible
network for that resource. Various community organizations
are doing just amazing work. Our, our cultural communities
are leading the way. So we as a city, we're making
sure that people have a virtual resources, especially, again,
for those people who are most vulnerable and unable to leave
their home. So we have stood up
minneapolismn.gov/ice. It has a link to our virtual
Resource Center. So you can go on there.
We have mental health that's free that you can access from
home. We have links to legal resources
to information such as if you are tear gassed, here's what to
do. So we're really making sure to
continually share information about what's out there.
And what do you say to the Trump administration when they argue
this is all about getting violent criminals off the
streets? And actually, if officials in
Minnesota, in Minneapolis would work with us, this would be much
calmer. So we do and have worked with
the federal administration for a very long time for always on
violent criminals. That is ongoing work.
But that's not what this is. We are, I am now focused on the
impact to our community because our neighbors are disappearing
because there are residents who are holding up a camera and
instead of just being allowed to use their camera like anyone in
anywhere in the world, they're having a gun pointed at them by
a masked agent. That's not OK.
So you just do not buy the argument that this is targeted
at violent criminals. It's impacting everyone.
If that's actually the target, it's impacting absolutely
everyone. This is a city that has just
been through so much. Does that impact how you're
dealing with this now? Yeah, yeah.
So I am hearing from communities that everyone is becoming
familiar with this term of compounded trauma, which is just
a tragic thing alone to have to understand what that means.
But it means, you know, it's just been thing after thing.
And that's not fair. It's not OK.
And I mean just finally you work.
In emergency responses, and like I said before, you've dealt with
war zones, you've dealt with natural disasters.
It seems to me that what what you're saying is that
Minneapolis is essentially in that situation because of a
crisis caused by the federal government.
I mean, can you get your head round that?
And what is your message to the federal government as someone
who's in, you know, in charge of looking after people here in
terms of an emergency response? Yeah, yeah.
So I grew up here in Minnesota and one of the things I was
raved on, raised to do was just love my neighbor, take care of
my neighbor. So that's my my ask has just let
us love each other, let us take care of each other and just let
us have have our lives. That's all we want.
Do you accept what they say? That lots of people want this.
I have not seen what they are trying to say.
We want that. We want in Minneapolis.
We want to go back to the way our lives have been.
And what disasters would you be coping with then?
What would you like to be focused on?
Yeah, well, I never would wish a disaster upon us, but the things
we usually face here are extreme weather, so extreme cold, like
we've had recently. We prep every summer for a
tornado season, you know, minor flooding.
That's the kind of thing that we usually deal with here.
And this must be expensive. How much is it costing the city
from the state but the city in your case to deal with this?
Yeah, we're working to figure that out.
And the reality is with these kind of large scale situations,
we're not going to know until quite after the fact, right?
Rent is due on February 1st. We're going to not know the full
scale of that until after. And we start seeing people who
have to leave their home because they couldn't make rent.
I would say in real terms right now, it's costing us things like
my team is responsible for the severe warning sirens in the
city, and we have not had time to do the maintenance needed to
make sure those are ready ahead of tornado season.
So it's having that kind of real impact now.
Wow, so you're worried about dealing with other issues?
Absolutely. We have a lot of ongoing work
that has all been on pause since this has occurred.
Rachel, thank you very much. Thank you so much.
Actually, the interview you just did with her reminds me of
Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 when America looked like
a war zone. And, you know, the law
enforcement agencies responded to it really badly.
George Bush was really slow in his own response.
And finally, that did more damage to George W Bush than
even the Iraq War and and ultimately led to the victory of
Barack Obama at the next presidential election.
So when America, a country that likes to keep wars very much on
the other side of oceans, begins to feel like a war zone at home,
then there is political trouble. And it is something that is
quite extraordinary and head spinning for the people who are
trying to run this city and this state.
I think they're hoping that Minnesota and Minneapolis will
stop being quite such a flashpoint, but we must keep in
touch with the people we've been meeting here to see whether that
really happens. And it's only just the end of
January, Anoska. Oh my goodness.
Is it only just the end of January?
It is I, I I I Oh my. Goodness, you thought it was
your day into. Spring.
What have we had? Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro,
Greenland. Davos.
NATO. And by the way, as we speak, and
this will be, you know, next week's subject, I'm sure, the
USS Abraham Lincoln. And you know, it's battles
battle group, which is basically a, a Navy that in it, this
little, this group, this flotilla, this Armada of ships
moving towards the Gulf is bigger than the Navy of the vast
majority of countries in the world moving towards the Gulf.
I have a friend who lives in Abu Dhabi.
He's been told to basically come home.
Flights have been cancelled by a number of International
Airlines, including American Airlines.
Watch that space. Donald Trump is not done with
January yet, Anushka. We will see you next week when I
think it will be February, won't it?
It will be. See you then.
Bye.