by Stefano Vaccara
NEW YORK (UNITED STATES) (ITALPRESS) – In Minneapolis, a few blocks from the place where five years ago the killing of George Floyd lit the mesh of the Black Lives Matter movement, the city returns today to the center of a national storm. A 37-year-old woman was killed during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation. There is a video, the versions are opposite and the voltage is very high. According to the Internal Security Department, an agent would open fire because the woman would “use the vehicle as a weapon” to try to invest the agents. But the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, has severely denied this reconstruction in a press conference just ended, defining it without means terms “bullshits” (stronzate!) and talking about “considered use of the power of the feds who led to the death of a person”. A frontal accusation, addressed not only to the ICE but also to the administration of Donald Trump, which in these weeks has intensified federal immigration operations. The episode occurred in a middle-class residential neighborhood, about a mile from where Floyd was killed by the police in 2020. Hundreds of people gathered on the spot, chanting to ask federal agents to leave the city. The Democratic MP Ilhan Omar, who represents the district, called the victim a “legal observer”, adding an additional fracture element to the federal version. The context makes everything even more explosive.
Minneapolis and Minnesota have been living for months a strong tension climate, also fueled by racist comments and attacks from the White House against the Somali community, very numerous in the state. To this was added the scandal on some foundations accused of defrauding state welfare programs: a case that the White House used to justify a federal maxi-intervention. According to the administration, up to 2,000 agents could participate in the operation, destined to last weeks. The local authorities, however, now appear on an open collision with Washington. Minneapolis City Council President Elliot Payne called the ICE “an escalation factor” and explicitly asked that federal agents leave the city. Several democratic representatives of the state also accused the ICE of “seminating chaos”. Governor Tim Walz invited to calm, but without hiding the gravity of the moment. During the press conference, Mayor Frey launched a double message. On the one hand, a very hard political warning to ICE and Trump “gotevene affanc…lo from Minneapolis and Minnesota” on the other an appeal to citizens: responding to hatred and violence not with other violence, but with love. Words that closely resemble the moral lexicon emerged after the killing of Floyd, but that today resonate in an even more polarized climate. The question now is what will happen.
In recent months federal agents engaged in immigration operations have been involved in several shootings, from Chicago to Los Angeles. At least ten cases have been reported by the media since Trump returned to the White House. Minneapolis risks becoming the new epicenter of an institutional and social clash that goes far beyond the borders of the city: a force test between federal government, local authorities and a community that still brings open scars of 2020.
– photo IPA Agency –
(ITALPRESS).
