MANKATO — It’s a piece of knowledge that’s a staple in Minnesota: It’s not the cold that gets you, it’s the wind.
That was the experience for over 50 people who took to the corner of Madison Avenue and Victory Drive with below freezing temperatures and wind speeds as fast as 15 miles per hour to continue local protests over the local presence of federal immigration officials.
“It’s really great to just see everybody coming together. A lot of people have been saying that they’re feeling hopeless with everything going on in politics, and it gives us a little voice,” Ashley Mennen said.
Mennen is one of the organizers of the grassroots effort to get people to keep the pressure on ICE. She says that she reached out to Jacob Bases, one of the administrators of the Facebook page Stand Up! Mankato to get the word out to people.
“I figured if I stand out (protesting) I’d invite others to join me,” Mennen said. “I just reached out to the group and (Bases) shared it.”
For his part, Bases says the people protesting are just regular people, hoping to show their support for anti-ICE efforts.
“These are all grassroots activists, just concerned people, who have come together around a singular cause; and this is just a demonstration of our support for the community of immigrants here in Mankato,” Bases said.
Protests like the one that took place on Madison Avenue on Saturday have been happening since the fatal shooting of Renee Good on Jan. 7. Since then, the tides of change have started to turn in favor of community activists. Last week, news came out that the Department of Homeland Security was withdrawing 700 ICE officers from the streets of Minneapolis.
For activists like Bases and Mennen, that makes now the perfect time to keep the pressure on.
“Operation Metro Surge brought about 3,000 ICE agents (into Minnesota). … There were less than 100 ICE agents in Minneapolis (before then) so the idea that 700 is a meaningful reduction is pretty laughable,” Bases said.
Recently, communities across the state, including Mankato, have started passing ordinances to put limits on what ICE is doing. Some of those changes include banning agents from wearing masks to conceal their identities and requiring the use of body-worn cameras. While it’s a start that many wanted, Bases says more needs to be done.
“When you look at body cams … when police departments implement these, that is not an effective deterrent towards police violence. I don’t see why that would be any different for ICE. I don’t see these as effective ends to the violence we’re seeing at the hands of ICE and I want people to stay as engaged as they possibly can until all of these people are gone.”
That claim is backed up by data from the Minneapolis Police Department, as reported on by the Star Tribune. According to that report, body cameras became a requirement for the department in 2014. In that year there were nine fatal police shootings; a metric that wouldn’t see a year with a lower number until 2023.
The department was also forced to strengthen its policy a number of times following incidents where shootings happened while police body cams weren’t being worn, hadn’t been turned on or had been turned off as the incident began.
In the Facebook event Stand up! Mankato shared promoting the protest, Mennen and Bases laid out the only thing they think can truly make the community safer.
“We need to come together to maintain the pressure that brought us this progress to get ICE OUT of our communities for good.”