Attorneys General Dan Rayfield and Keith Ellison detail their legal challenges against the Trump administration's Operation Metro Surge, citing paramilitary raids in Illinois and Minnesota that caused economic harm to Minnesota's restaurant sector and trauma near schools. They highlight lawsuits targeting DHS over uncharged detentions and tariffs crushing soybean exports to China, while emphasizing state sovereignty and birthright citizenship protections. Ultimately, this coordinated legal push underscores a broader struggle for constitutional accountability against perceived federal overreach. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Winning Supreme Court Battles00:15:09
Trump says, I'm tariffs on everybody, and then but he doesn't have the authority to do that.
And the person who helped lead the band on that, who'll talk more about that, is Dan Rayfield.
So we thank him for that.
We won in the Supreme Court there.
And I could go on about all the various issues and all the different AGs who lead at one time or another, but we do it together.
Whether it's gender-affirming care, whether it's agriculture policy, whether it's energy policy or supplemental nutrition assistance, we are teaming up together to stand up for the American people.
And let me also say that when we were going through Operation Metro Surge, we took great advice from our colleagues.
You know, before they were in Minnesota with Operation Metro Surge, they were in Illinois with Operation Midway Blitz.
And they showed up there.
You all, some of you may have heard about how they had a helicopter.
Bovino led that one too.
They rappelled down from a helicopter, came down and arrested everybody in the building.
And most of the people were citizens.
And the ones that weren't had a legal status ended up not really arresting anybody for immigration violations.
And yet they did this paramilitary operation within an American city.
And so that's part of the experience that we brought.
Kwame brought those guys to court and got some rulings which actually helped us and positioned us well.
And who can forget when the creative, amazing people of Oregon protested in frog outfits?
And one of those marches that was like 31 below, remember one of those things that we did?
My wife stole my frog hat and she put it on and she marched in that green frog hat.
And I said, that hat looks kind of familiar.
She said, yeah, I borrowed it from you permanently.
So good on her.
She has good taste.
But that is what we have been doing together.
Let me just tell you this.
Right now, we have sued the Department of Homeland Security for the damage it has inflicted on Minnesota because of Metro Surge.
We filed a new and improved complaint last night.
One of the lawyers leading that effort is here tonight.
Brian, do you mind me introducing you to everybody?
Stand up over there, Brian.
Brian Carter, everybody.
I want to say that myself and County Attorney Mary Moriarty are continuing to investigate the cases involving Renee Good and Alex Predi.
The fact that you have not been hearing about those every day does not mean we have not been working on those cases every single day.
We absolutely have been.
We filed a lawsuit to make the Department of Homeland Security share the information that they have been keeping from us so that we can thoroughly investigate those cases.
You know that the guy who led the prosecution, the person who killed George Floyd, is not going to let it go.
Y'all know that, right?
And so we're, and so you know, before you ever see a, you know, my friend Gary Wertz is here.
He's a farmer.
He knows farm stuff.
Before those plants show bloom above the ground, they shoot roots down first, right?
And so that's what we're doing with these cases, okay?
We're getting our groundwork done, and then you're going to see the rest later.
But I want you to know that we're working on it.
Last thing I want to say before I turn the microphone over is that we're now probably 16, 17 months into this administration.
And yes, it's true that we filed a lot of lawsuits.
But I want us to remind everybody, we would be happier if we didn't have to file these lawsuits.
There are plenty of antitrust violations, wage theft violations, consumer scams, environmental problems.
That's what AG's supposed to do.
But he has made us focus our attention because he's depriving the resources that the Congress has devoted to us.
He's trying to take away people's rights like birthrights, citizenship.
And so we have to file these lawsuits.
We don't really have any other choice.
I'd be afraid to see what would happen otherwise.
We invite our Republican colleagues to join us.
We're not excluding them.
We don't see this as a partisan thing.
So far, only them AGs have stood up against the Trump administration.
But it's been to the benefit of the whole country, quite frankly, because they got birthright citizens in their states.
They got supplemental nutrition assistance in their states.
They got tariffs going on in their states that they don't supposed to pay.
And yet we're fighting for them also because they are ultimately our fellow Americans.
And so we're glad to help.
But let me say this as I sit down.
We're not only fighting against the Trump administration.
And the problem with the Trump administration is not that they're only, it's not just what they're doing.
It's also what they're not doing.
Because I'm going to sit down here, but I just want to remind you that just last week, a New York jury, and the case was filed in New York, but all of us were on the case and it involved Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
And we got a jury to find that they had an illegal monopoly that was reusing its market power to dominate not just consumers, but other part, but venues, and they were driving up prices illegally.
And we got that finding of monopoly, which is a big, big deal.
Now, the Trump administration was in on the case too.
But early on, I mean, this year, earlier this year, they said we cut our own little deal with Live Nation, and we're out of this.
Good luck.
Which, quite frankly, friends, it's kind of like the biggest kid in the room says, they're not going to play on our football team this Sunday, right?
We're not playing.
I'm like, oh my goodness, what are we going to do?
Because they're the big dog in the room.
Well, you know what we did?
We looked at each other and we said, you up for it?
You up for it?
And we said, we're up for it.
And we carried on and we did what a lot of people think could not be done is we found this giant behemoth liable for being an illegal monopoly.
And now, now, and if we had a real Justice Department, they would never have bailed on us like that.
So it's not just what they're doing, it's what they're also not doing that is a real problem.
And I hope we talk about a little bit of that tonight.
I'll stop talking right there.
And which one do you guys want to go next?
There you go, Dan.
All right, is this thing on?
You know, A.G. Rowe always says this to me.
It makes me go before him.
So it's the way it always goes, and then he's funnier.
So the first couple things.
You need to know, when A.G. Ellison came to Oregon, I think Oregon clapped almost as loud as everybody here did for him.
There was more whooping and hollering for A.G. Ellison in Oregon.
So you just need to know you have an incredibly amazing, talented, and kind, good human being as an Attorney General.
And people outside your state know it.
And that's why when he asked me to come here, A, he came to Oregon and I felt I really wanted to come to Minneapolis.
I had never been here before.
There is a tremendous amount of similarities between the two.
We both take normal food and make it into weird things.
So we have the voodoo donut, right?
I heard, I'm told there's a, what is it, a loosey, a juicy loosey?
Is this a real thing?
Okay.
I've got to try one.
So I had to be here.
And it's also an incredibly important moment in the time of our country.
As Attorneys General, for more than a year, we've been traveling this entire country, going to each other's states, engaging in conversation with Americans about what we want our country to look like.
What we respectively can do in our own unique roles to turn America into what we know it can be.
And we have a unique set of tools as Attorneys General that we're using in the country right now, but it also takes everybody in rooms like these.
It takes everybody in all of our communities to turn our country into what we know it can be.
So I'm proud to be a part of an amazing team here.
And one of the stories that I like to tell, and I'm going to jump in front of A.G. Raoul.
This is his story, but I'm going to tell it for him so he has nothing to say here in a quick second.
This fight started before the president was inaugurated.
And in the summer last year, you had Democratic AGs preparing and working day in and day out to be ready for what if.
And then the what if came.
And the reason you had to do that is Oregon alone couldn't fight this fight.
Minnesota alone couldn't fight this fight.
Illinois alone could not fight this fight.
The collective resources of all of these Democratic AGs' offices were going to be necessary if we were going to combat the things that the president was talking about on the campaign trail.
Because you remember, it's not like he was hiding these things, right?
And we divided the labor amongst all of the offices to be ready in that moment.
And that's exactly what happened.
What happened within less than 24 hours of his inauguration?
The first lawsuit was filed.
What happened in less than 48 hours?
We had our first positive ruling against birthright citizenship.
And that case has now made its way all the way to the Supreme Court, just like tariffs.
That's what this partnership means.
It means when we have the National Guard and the president's trying to normalize the use of the National Guard, the military in the streets of our cities, I pick up the call and I could talk to A.J. Raoul.
I could pick up the phone and I could talk to A.G. Ellison.
I talked to A.G. Banta to talk about what was the appropriate legal strategy, collectively getting heads together, but then what was the appropriate set of facts that we all collectively shared, but also what we didn't, what was different in our states and how can we be more responsive in our collective states.
That's the level of partnership that we have.
Our staff, more importantly than us, we're mere figureheads on the hood ornament of a car, right?
There's a monstrous machine behind us that works, and that's the staff and the attorneys in each of our offices.
And they have amazing relationships.
That is what you have working every single day behind all of us to defend our community.
So I am proud to be a part of this team, but I'm also proud to be a part of each collective team within the Department of Justice.
Oh, Dan stole my fire.
I mean, I'm thankful for him for his leadership on terrorists, but I'm a little bit upset I did not get a frog hat.
And I do have to say this about my friend Keith Ellison.
I recently got a call from a bar association in Chicago.
It's Kikani Bar Association, the oldest African-American bar association in the country.
And they said to me, well, we need a keynote speaker for our annual event.
And I said, oh, well, you know, yeah, sure, I have never.
Oh, not you.
We want Keith Ellison.
I expect an invitation from a Minnesota Bar Association.
It is good to be back in Minnesota.
We are brethren.
We are family.
We've grown so close over the course of the last two years because as Dan said, you know, our work on this federal overreach started way before Joe Biden was still the presumed candidate for Democrats in 2024 when we began this work.
I want to be clear about something.
I have not filed a single lawsuit because of a policy difference with President Trump.
Now, I don't want you to misinterpret that.
I do have policy differences with President Trump.
But not a single lawsuit was filed because of a policy difference.
We expect to have policy differences.
But we expect for leaders to carry out their desire to implement policy to do so abiding by the Constitution.
And that has not happened over and over and over again.
And for me, this is a little bit personal.
Our very first lawsuit, birthright citizenship, I am a birthright citizen.
My parents were immigrants from Haiti.
My mother was not yet naturalized at the time of my birth.
So when we filed that first lawsuit, it was quite personal to me.
About a month ago, I celebrated my 10th anniversary of being cured of the cancer that took my father and both of my grandfathers.
I've given, I've been spoken a lot publicly about it.
And as a result, I've given advice to other men.
What I've noticed over the course of the last 10 years is that some of my advice has grown stale.
And that's a good thing because it's grown stale because of the advances in medical research that we fund.
And so when we filed the NIH lawsuit for them trying to freeze indirect funds for indirect costs for research, it was personal to me.
Keith mentioned to me that the north side of Minnesota is just like the south side of Chicago, the side of town I grew up in.
When those helicopters descended upon the south side of Chicago, zip-tying people who had done nothing wrong, children even, that was personal to me.
Defending Laws Against Misinformation00:13:23
Now, I went for an appropriations hearing before my former colleagues.
I served in the Illinois Senate for 14 years.
And I got a question from a Republican senator asking, are the resources that you are spending to bring these lawsuits, are they worth it given that you're probably going to lose most of them?
First of all, there's this misinformation about our success rate.
Were cases taken all the way to a decision.
We have won 93% of those cases.
And I'm not sure what the stat is for the state of Oregon or the state of Minnesota, but he asked me whether it was worth it for the citizens of Illinois.
I said, well, at the time I said we've protected over $7 billion of our money because it's not federal money, it's taxpayer money.
We've protected over $7 billion of the state of Illinois.
That has become stale over the last two weeks because our figure now is $8.6 billion that we protected.
When the president was going to deploy the National Guard of Illinois and of Texas into streets of Chicago and surrounding suburbs, we took swift action and we were in communication with both Oregon and California.
I just have to share this one little portion of the judge's order because I think it's so fascinating.
If you ever could just pull it up and read it, you don't have to read the entire order because it's about 60 pages or so.
But just the first two pages.
She goes back to Federalist 29.
The delegates were debating about how much power to give the federal government over the state's militias.
And delegates were saying, well, there may be a situation where one day the militia of one state will be sent into another state.
And Alexander Hamilton, he says, that's preposterous.
That would never happen.
That's impossible.
Well, the impossible is happening to us today, and that's why we are here together, fighting together.
And I'm glad you all are here because it's not just a fight in the courtroom.
It's important for the fight to be in the streets, in the communities, and we need to educate everybody.
We need to take it back to Schoolhouse Rock and educate everybody on the fundamentals of the Constitution.
Thank you.
Thank you, AGs.
And I also want to thank, we have a couple of other elected representatives of our community here with us.
We have City Council Member Pearl Warren is here.
And State Representative Cedric Frazier is with us tonight.
So now we will begin the public comments and questions portion.
So again, like I said, we had a ton of people sign up, and I wish we could get to everyone, but so we have selected some questions in advance.
When you signed up online to speak, you indicated a topic that you wanted to cover, education, immigration, democracy.
And the team took this list and then grouped it by topic and then randomly selected the order for public comment so that we can cover as much and hear from as many of you as we can.
So here's the process.
I'm going to call you up three or four at a time.
When you hear your name called, please line up at the nearest microphone.
I think our flight attendant Matt is going to indicate, is it just this one?
Great.
This is the nearest microphone.
So line up there.
And while you're walking up, I'm going to ask the AGs a question and give them a chance to respond.
And then we'll hear from the folks at the microphones.
When it's your turn to speak, please remember to give us your full name and your affiliation if you're here with an organization.
And you'll have two minutes to give your remarks and or ask your question, and then we'll do our best to respond.
And there will be somebody with a timer to help you keep time and keep us moving.
And just as a reminder, though, nobody needs to hear it, keep your comments respectful so that we can hear from as many people as we can tonight.
So, okay, so let's get started.
The first section is going to be about immigration and operations.
I'm sorry, before you get going.
Would you all mind if I, without mentioning pointing my staff members out because they may not want to be pointed out, would you just join me in thanking them for being here to make this thing happen tonight?
Thank you guys.
Really hard, and I just want them to know I appreciate them a lot.
Brian doesn't mind me pointing him out, but there might be some that are a little funny about it, but I just want them to know that I appreciate them.
All right?
All right, good.
Thank you.
So the first block is going to be immigration and Operation Metro Surge, and we're going to hear from Aaron Rosenthal, North Star Policy Action, Zena Stenvik, the superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, Miguel Hernandez, who's a business owner, and Jamie Martins, who was a Minnesotan assaulted by ICE officers.
And the question for AGs as they assemble is, can federal officials and federal agents be held accountable for breaking state and local laws?
If so, what's being done to bring them to account?
And what are AGs specifically doing to hold ICE accountable for harm to businesses and local governments?
All three of you answer in three minutes or less.
Now, as they, yeah.
The answer is yes, they can.
Now, they do enjoy a certain level of immunity, but that immunity is not absolute immunity.
They have to, they enjoy immunity if they're reasonably carrying out the duty of their federal position as a law enforcement officer.
And what we saw, certainly in Chicago and Minnesota and other in Portland, went beyond the reasonable.
I don't want to create a picture that it's an easy thing.
Like the tremendous job that Keith did holding accountable Derek Chauvin, holding law enforcement officers accountable for overreach is not an easy prosecution by any means.
And certainly the threshold is a little bit higher with federal law, law enforcement officers than it is at the local level.
That doesn't mean it cannot happen.
What we've been doing thus far, similar to Keith, with regards to a civil action that we've taken because of the tactics utilized by ICE officers, is we filed a lawsuit with regards to those tactics, with regards to the sensitive places where ICE went to, they went into our schools, they went to our courthouses,
they went into all sorts of sensitive areas, and they utilize tactics that were not law enforcement tactics.
So we're trying to broadly enjoin any of those tactics from occurring.
We allege that it's an attack on our sovereignty, that it's a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act.
I don't know the respective criminal prosecutorial authority of my colleagues here.
It differs from state to state.
I don't have immediate jurisdiction.
Usually it's what we call the state's attorneys within our counties that have immediate criminal jurisdiction.
There's certain things that we have statewide grand jury authority for.
Those are usually things that occur across county boundaries as well as certain enumerated types of crimes where I would have authority.
Or if there's a conflict for the local state's attorney, then we can step in.
But in addition to that, Governor Pritzker has set up a commission for us to take in evidence from the public at large and so we can utilize that in our proceeding.
Very quickly, yes, states can hold federal agents accountable for breaking the criminal laws of states.
In fact, we are doing an investigation on that activity right now.
You all may have seen Hennepin County actually charge some ICE agents for second-degree assault for a roadway incident for waving guns at some people who are driving down the street.
So they don't have the immunity if they cannot prove that they were on the job doing the job at the time.
Now, even if they were on the job, they got to prove that they were doing something that was necessary and proper in the course of their duty.
And I'll leave you to ask yourself whether shooting Alex Preddy 10 times after disarming him was necessary and proper.
I'll leave you to decide whether shooting Renee Goode in her head as she drove away from him was necessary and proper.
I'll leave you to decide whether shooting Julio Sosa Salis in the back of his body as he was running away into his home was necessary and proper.
All these things will be decided.
I'll simply say that right now in Minnesota, the county attorneys have jurisdiction for these cases, but often the state of the Attorney General and the county will agree to work together.
They can give us the case or they can do it.
We can do it jointly.
That's what we're doing now.
And I think, you know, actually County Attorney Mary Mary Artie deserves a lot of credit for the good work that her office is doing.
And we're doing it together.
And I want y'all to know about that.
And we're way over three minutes, but we were way over three minutes on our introductions, too.
So I'm just going to keep going.
We're off the rails, why not, right?
But I thought what I wanted to add, you heard the civil context, right, which we're trying to have a court order to prevent ICE from using certain tactics.
We're doing that in Oregon as well.
You have the criminal context, because that's really important in this world where you have a federal government that's misstating our immunity laws.
They're doing it intentionally.
Right.
But doing it in a way that creates a culture that we need to stop because that is impacting communities and holding folks accountable, making sure that we're accurately stating the law.
And when they step over the line, having accountability, and again, probably in all of our jurisdictions, it sounds like that is a partnership with local law enforcement, the local DOJ, in the courtroom.
And then there's other things that are going on in the ICE world that I kind of talk about in our state, where it's our sanctuary state laws, right?
Each of us are respectively defending those laws.
Each of us, as the federal government, tries to put terms and conditions of compliance with those laws, we are advising our agencies instructing to or not to do things.
A lot of these have resulted in lawsuits.
You would think about funding for victims' grants.
VOCA funding was withheld to say, hey, you've got to comply with the federal government's rules.
Transportation dollars, money that has nothing to do with these objectives.
They're trying to hold states accountable in this way and try and twist our arms into violating our own state laws and the policy decisions that we've respectively made as states.
So there's a lot of really nuanced ways that we're working together.
Addressing Minnesota's Economic Damage00:03:15
These are just a handful of them.
Sorry.
Gentlemen, I want you to turn those mics off.
We're going to hear from Aaron Rosenthal.
Go, Aaron.
Thank you.
I'm Aaron Rosenthal.
I'm the research director for North Star Policy Action.
We are a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of working Minnesotans.
Since January, our organization has been focused on documenting the economic cost of Operation MetroSurge.
The conclusion of our analysis has been clear.
The economic harm has been profound.
Our most recent analysis found that Operation MetroSurge was deeply implicated in Minnesota's rising unemployment rate in January of 2026, which rose above the national average for the first time in nearly two decades.
We found that job losses were highest in sectors targeted by DHS harassment, like restaurants.
In the first two months of 2026 alone, accommodation and food services lost 4,400 jobs in the state.
That's the industry's largest non-pandemic drop on record.
But unemployment tells only part of the story.
Many workers didn't lose their jobs.
They kept them, but were too afraid to show up.
That fear shows up in a striking number.
On average, Minnesotans worked 32.1 hours in January of 2026.
That is the lowest number on record.
I think that's worth repeating.
Minnesotans spent fewer hours at work in January of 2026 than any month since at least 2007, including the pandemic.
When people don't go to work, they don't get paid.
We estimate that reduced hours among Twin Cities workers led to $106 million in lost wages.
And that $106 million is a floor, not a ceiling.
It excludes lost wages in greater Minnesota, lost business revenue, the estimated $18 million that taxpayers spent each week to fund Operation MetroSurge, and costs that we may not fully understand for years, including the impact on children's schooling and their lifetime earnings.
Most of the human cost cannot be undone.
The fear, the trauma, the disruption to families and communities cannot be reimbursed.
But the economic damage can be addressed.
That's why we've called on the state legislature to provide relief that matches the scale of the harm done.
But of course, in normal times, an economic crisis like this would also bring federal help, as it did during the pandemic.
These, unfortunately, are not normal times.
The federal government is why we're here and why this work is so important.
So we will continue to document the damage from Operation Metro Surge and put the evidence of it in the hands of people like Attorney General Ellison to make sure that the Trump administration answers for what they've done to our communities.
Thank you.
Thank you, Eric.
Good job, man.
Good evening.
ICE Raids Disrupt Schools00:03:33
My name is Zena Stenvik.
I serve as the superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools.
This testimony reflects my first-hand experience with the presence of ICE and its impact on my school community.
In October of 2025, ICE activity began to ramp up in our area.
On January 6th, our first student was taken and detained with her mother while they were on their way to school.
By that afternoon, they had been whisked away to a detention center in Texas.
This was the first of seven of our students who were detained, including five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos.
None of the families I worked with enter this country unlawfully, no.
They were permitted to be here by the United States government.
As I personally saw their legal documentation, it became clear to me that these were not operations targeted towards violent criminals.
Their actions consisted of racially profiling black and brown people who happened to drive by where ICE was staged.
It became a daily occurrence to see multiple ICE vehicles driving in front of and behind our schools, especially during arrival and dismissal times.
There were times we had to pull kids inside from the playground or delay dismissal because of heavy ICE presence in and around our school grounds.
ICE vehicles came onto our school property multiple times.
Because many families were too afraid to leave their homes.
Neighbors transported children to and from schools.
Teachers walked groups of students home as ICE vehicles circled them.
Our PTOs, community members, local food shelves, and churches mobilized to provide safe transportation, food deliveries, rent assistance, and essential resources for families.
Many 16 and 17-year-olds were pulled over by ICE while driving to school by armed men in fatigues with their faces covered.
It looked like a war zone in our peaceful community.
No child and no student of mine should ever be surrounded by a group of masked armed agents on their way to or from school or separated from their family or detained without cause and without due process.
We are observing clear and concerning signs of trauma among our students.
While children are resilient and I am cautious not to generalize trauma, the patterns we are seeing are consistent and significant.
We're seeing increased separation anxiety, heightened difficulty with transitions, and increased stress response behaviors among students who have experienced both direct and indirect trauma.
Students are more fearful of strangers and unfamiliar vehicles, particularly SUVs or people in uniforms.
Children are expressing deep concerns about housing instability, food insecurity, and financial hardship.
Many have experienced abrupt moves, leaving behind belongings and facing uncertainty about their futures.
These experiences are contributing to a profound sense of instability and insecurity.
We are still organized.
We are still vigilant and we will continue to stand against the inhumane treatment of children and families.
Operation Metro Surge will have lasting and deeply harmful impacts on our students, families, and broader school community for years to come.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me back, Keith.
Restaurants Raise the Bar00:02:43
Mr. Ellison, my name is Miguel Hernandez.
I'm the owner of Lidos Burritos.
Thank you.
I didn't really write a speech or anything because I think the testimony that we're having is still ongoing.
But I can try.
I opened Litos Burritos in Uptown in November.
But even before that, I was weighing out going to take people to the Whipple building for their court hearings.
And we'd had to prepare and we had to be on partial because we weren't lawyers.
We were just there just in case they were taken.
These are people who believed in the American Dream asylum cases.
And of the four people I took, only one of them made it back.
Just being there, trying to get people's phone numbers as they're being taken, put me in a point where I wasn't allowed back at the Whipple building.
At the same time, I juggled opening this restaurant, building it with my father.
And as time went on, I saw the pressure cooker.
June 3rd happened on Lake Street.
I would go to these things as part of Activists.
I would go to these places to altercations to respond to ICE early in the summer, and I saw this escalation coming.
So by the time we opened in November, I knew I had to do something.
I knew something was coming much worse than we've seen.
And I asked every employee I hired, I'm going to be vocal about what's happening.
We will have retaliation.
It will come for anyone around me.
I had to ask my parents that, who also owned a restaurant.
And I started taking on interviews.
The more I saw, the more rapid responding I would do.
And it happened.
ICE tapped on my parents' windows for a week straight after the first interview would air.
Every time I'd speak up, we would see people come and drive by Uptown.
As soon as we started doing or taught to abolish ICE, a fund that would give immigrants money for diapers and things like that, along with Rectangle Pizza and Smith Kitten, we saw ICE come and retaliate and just drive around our neighborhoods for no other reason, tear gas our blocks.
And it was just escalating.
I was there when Renee Goode was 10 minutes after Renee Goode was killed, after Alex Peretti, after the gentleman in Northside, because it felt insane to continue making burritos and tacos when people were losing their lives on the streets, when our neighbors were being ripped apart from their families.
I would close when these things would happen out of respect for my staff's safety.
I would close when it was just too hard for my staff to come in.
And all of that is like we spoke in, I think, in January or February.
Community Steps Up to Protect Neighbors00:08:52
Mr. Ellison?
I'm glad you invited me back because the process of healing and taking in that trauma from a community two months later has just begun.
We are barely seeing it.
But with that, I'm extremely proud of Minnesota to show up and show America who we are.
And with that, we've raised the bar what it is to be a citizen of America.
We have raised the bar for everybody.
We have raised the bar for your work to respond to, for every person in Congress, for every house rep. Everybody should step up to this level because we have raised the bar and I'm so happy that you guys are doing that too and doing what you can to do your part just like everybody else should.
Thank you, Miguel.
Hi, I'm Jamie Martins.
I've tried to keep my identity hidden for several months now and those in my community have done a wonderful job of protecting me.
So hello to each of you.
Thank you for holding this space for us, for our communities, to get our stories out there and to feel heard.
So I'm a resident of a wonderful community, St. Peter in southern Minnesota.
We have been, it's been a peaceful community, a supportive community.
We love our immigrant neighbors.
For many of our residents in St. Peter, the community became much smaller come about December of last year.
Many were confined to their homes for months.
Those residents learned to be suspicious of law enforcement, a relationship that our police station has tried to build for years that was wiped away in a matter of weeks.
They were suspicious of their neighbors.
Who are we?
Why are we there?
Can they trust us?
During that time, many of our community members stepped up and stepped in to help protect our neighbors.
That was just what I was doing on January 29th of this year.
I was observing ICE agents as they were targeting and terrorizing our immigrant neighbors.
I'm sorry, and I have a cold, so it's not helpful.
They've been doing this for weeks.
They were following the school buses leaving the elementary schools and middle schools, using our children to drought our immigrant neighbors from their homes.
I was helping to ensure those children made it into their homes unharmed.
On this day, as I was heading to a frequently targeted community to ensure those children got off the buses after school, I found myself surrounded on all sides by ICE agent vehicles while I was driving down a residential street.
I was able to maneuver away from the agents and onto a side street.
That side street was very secluded.
It's very quiet.
Nobody was around.
I became very fearful.
I also made that last second decision to move away from that street because it was just a couple blocks from our elementary school and they were getting out of school.
There would be kids walking on the sidewalks with these ICE agents driving erratically all around me.
There was even a UPS or a truck that got ran off the road on a residential street.
I became fearful because I was isolated.
So I drove as quickly as I could to the nearest busier street and thank God I made it to that street.
There were many of our community members just leaving work from the state hospital which was right up there.
They were able to be there and see what was happening.
I was scared because of the agent or the ICE agents have been operating without impunity.
Nobody is stopping them from what they are doing.
While I did make it to that street, as soon as I turned onto it, an ICE agent maneuvered around me and slammed out its brakes in front of me.
There were three agents that jumped out of that vehicle with guns drawn pointing straight at my head, as well as another agent that jumped out of a vehicle beside me and was right beside my driver's side window with a gun pointed to my head.
I was terrified.
They were able to pull me out of my vehicle and tackled me to the ground.
I had ICE agents, three to four of them, I'm not sure, with their knees pressed into my back, onto my legs, all over me to hold me down.
I was not aggressive.
I just refused to move, leave my vehicles because I was afraid of what they were doing with guns drawn on me.
My husband happened to show up right at that time.
Thank God he was here.
He was there because I don't know what would have happened as he was questioning every single thing they were doing to me.
I had told the agents they were hurting me.
I had just had surgery on my hip right before this.
They handcuffed me, patted me down, all males there, and patted over my breast area.
They didn't care.
I was terrified.
They threw me into the back of a vehicle.
My husband asked them, where are you taking her?
They refused to respond.
They wouldn't respond when I asked them where I was being taken.
They just headed towards the cities.
I was with a group of large men taking me somewhere.
I had no idea where I was going.
And I had already heard stories of what could happen.
About 30 minutes into the trip on Highway 169, they took an exit, a secluded exit.
I was extremely fearful because they didn't make any announcement about what they were doing or where we were going.
Thank God they brought me back to St. Peter.
But they did so with a warning.
That warning wasn't just in their words.
It was their actions that they had shown to this community already, a small, peaceful community.
And they let me know that I better not show up again.
That really put me in a difficult place because I wanted to continue supporting my neighbors.
I wanted to be there for them.
I wanted to be there for the children.
But it was made clear that my presence would be a risk to those neighbors.
And I could no longer do this.
I just have one last thing to say.
They've shown us over and over again that they would show no restraint.
They're operating with an open-ended license to murder, to assault, and to trample on the rights of all of us.
Terrified is an understatement.
My God.
I still have fear.
Am I on a list?
I'm thinking I probably am.
How will this affect me?
How does this affect my children, my family?
But I'm more fearful for our nation.
If this administration continues to operate unchecked, that's a fear that hurts more than any physical injury.
It's an injury that cripples our nation.
And I hope, I really hope that all of you and all of our states can come together and stop this before it gets any worse.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, and thank you to all the speakers in our first block.
China Dominates Soybean Imports00:02:01
We're going to move to our second block, which is about the harm caused to rural communities.
We're going to hear from Gary Wordish, Nicole Helgett, Paul Subaczynski, and Josh Vanderbaum.
We'll actually go right into Gary.
All right.
First of all, I want to thank Attorney General Ellison and the Attorney General for being here tonight, holding this town hall.
I'm Gary Wurdish.
I'm president of Minnesota Farmers Union.
We rent our farm to one of our sons now in western Minnesota.
During the President's first term, before he put tariffs on China, the United States was the number one supplier of soybeans to China.
We are not anymore.
Brazil is now the number one supplier of soybeans to China.
The United States is now considered a residual supplier of beans to China.
China is the world's number one buyer of soybeans, accounting for more than 60% of global imports, which is more than the rest of the world combined.
The U.S. farmers spent decades in a lot of their own checkoff dollars securing and building up the China market.
And just like that, the farmers' investment and money is, as could be said, flushed down at toilet because of the President's love of tariffs.
Since then, China is investing into a lot of infrastructure in Brazil.
The Brazilian farmers are bringing more acres into soybean production, which will not go away.
If some of that land is coming out of the Amazon rainforest, that is problematic for the world's climate.
We will never get that market completely back, and you can't replace the loss of China's huge market of soybeans with other countries.
We are fortunate in Minnesota and the United States in agriculture that we can produce more than we can consume domestically.
Exports are needed and are a viable market for our farmers and ranchers.