After you're captured by ICE

Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building (EOIR Immigration Court) Credit: Tony Webster

The Contrarian - The killing of Renee Good at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer has focused the nation’s attention on ICE violence. In a new survey, 76 percent of voters said they have watched the footage of her homicide. Seeing the federal killing of a citizen activist is the first time many Americans have felt skin in the game of Trump’s mass-deportation regime.

But there’s another scandal that requires our attention. ICE horrors aren’t limited to snatching community members off the streets in violent arrests (using banned chokeholds) or brutalizing bystanders. The Trump administration is also notorious for its mistreatment of detainees as they’re being held for potential deportation.

Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building (EOIR Immigration Court) Credit: Tony Webster

The Whipple federal building in Minneapolis — where captured immigrants and protesters alike are being detained by federal authorities — is currently a black box. Members of Congress have been banned from oversight. Religious leaders have been blocked from ministering to those jailed there. And the administration’s track record on providing adequate food, water, and hygiene to those swept up in its mass-deportation surges is egregious — as the case of the infamous Broadview facility, near Chicago, demonstrated last fall.

The hostile invasion of Minneapolis — dubbed “Operation Metro Surge” — has seen more than 2,000 federal agents descend on the Twin Cities, a metro about a third the size of Chicago. Agents have been called out for indiscriminate round ups of migrants, of Native Americans, and of activists exercising their First Amendment rights by opposing ICE operations.

The Whipple building at Fort Snelling sits on a narrow swath of land between the airport and the Mississippi River. How many people are detained there? How long do detainees stay? In what conditions? The Department of Homeland Security is not providing details, beyond a rough count of 2,400 arrested in Minneapolis since late November. A CBS affiliate reports that many detainees are eventually shipped to outlying county jails.

When members of Congress sought to perform oversight at the federal facility on Saturday, they were turned away after just 10 minutes — on the basis of a new policy issued by Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem that states Congress must give one-week notice before entering a detention facility funded by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.