00:02This is Skye in a yellow balaclava.
00:14She's part of a group of volunteers in Minneapolis
00:17who drive around the city following ICE agents
00:21to record their behaviour.
00:27In this moment, they've just boxed her car in.
00:33And they're violently arresting her.
00:37What's really galling about this footage?
00:44Apart from the fact that they smashed the window in,
00:47they're screaming, they're heavily armed.
00:50Put the car barking on your guard!
00:55You know the Marine Corps veteran.
00:57I don't care what you want.
01:04As if you listen carefully,
01:05you can hear what the officer says to her friend
01:08who's sitting next to her and filming.
01:11You fucking knew that fucking taser!
01:13You fucking knew that fucking taser!
01:15Get the fuck out of the door right now!
01:16He gives her contradictory orders.
01:19Stay put or be tasered.
01:20Get out of the car or be tasered.
01:29I met Skye, who's a disabled Marine veteran,
01:32and she told me that even weeks later
01:34she's still terrified.
01:36She was manhandled, taken to a federal detention centre,
01:42held, finally released,
01:44but she doesn't know if she's got charges against her.
01:46She left the city for a week to have a low profile,
01:49and when she came back,
01:50she found ICE agents parked outside her building.
01:53One of them approached her and started filming her.
01:56She was a disabled man.
01:59She was a disabled man.
02:01This is what Minneapolis feels like right now.
02:04Fear and suspicion crackle in the streets.
02:08It's actually quite terrifying.
02:12There were multiple protests
02:14just in the short period of time that I was in Minneapolis,
02:17and they were large.
02:18There were thousands,
02:19if not tens of thousands of people in the streets,
02:21and it's bitterly cold.
02:23It was absolutely freezing.
02:24Keeps us safe!
02:25We keep us safe!
02:27Who keeps us safe?
02:28We keep us safe!
02:29And people were out with signs saying ICE OUT,
02:33with signs in support of the various different communities
02:35that have become the focus point of this crackdown.
02:38And that was also an incredible thing to witness.
02:41The demand of the people is to get ICE OUT for good.
02:46The resounding message for everyone I've spoken to
02:49is that they don't feel safe in the streets right now
02:52with the mass deployment of these federal agents.
02:55They want them to leave,
02:56and they want this to be a safe and welcome community for all.
03:07Vicious.
03:08Many of them murderous.
03:10These are all out of Minnesota.
03:12Just Minnesota.
03:13Donald Trump sent over 3,000 federal agents
03:16to the Minneapolis area.
03:18That, as far as I'm aware, is pretty unprecedented.
03:22When I was speaking to the Department for Homeland Security,
03:25they told me that this is 100% about illegal immigration,
03:29that they had arrested more than 3,400 violent criminals,
03:32that this was about keeping America safe.
03:34And that any allegations, to the contrary, were false.
03:38And that word false in the email was written in capital letters.
03:42They were very adamant that this was an inaccurate description of what was going on.
03:47Nobody in the White House, including President Trump,
03:50wants to see people getting hurt or killed in America's streets.
03:54But when I'm talking to people who live in Minneapolis
03:57and those who are being targeted by this,
03:59they say it's not really got to do with immigration.
04:01They believe that because of the huge levels of arrests,
04:06the aggressive tactics used by ICE agents
04:09is actually more of an attempt to subdue Minneapolis,
04:13which is a city that is well known for protests against the Trump administration.
04:17So the people that I spoke to felt like it was more to do with that
04:20than it was to do with immigration.
04:21Hands up!
04:22Go shoot!
04:23Hands up!
04:24Go shoot!
04:25In terms of what it felt like in the streets,
04:27by the time I got to Minneapolis,
04:29the more dramatic raids had been scaled back
04:31because of this video footage going viral.
04:35What was left was a sense of real fear.
04:43What was amazing to watch were volunteers like Sky
04:46and also Will Stamcil, who I also filmed with.
04:50I accompanied him for a day.
04:52They call themselves the ICE Commuters.
04:54Yeah, so right now we're patrolling for ICE.
04:56We're in uphill Minneapolis.
04:58You know, I've been done this 21 days in a row.
05:00We just drive around looking for cars that we think are ICE.
05:03What they basically have are these encrypted groups
05:05where they crowdsource information of where ICE agents are located.
05:12So it's effectively like a radio station, like a walkie-talkie.
05:16It's an encrypted group phone call.
05:20No one knows each other's names.
05:22They all go by code names.
05:23There's a dispatcher who is managing the call.
05:26And then citizens who have jobs, they have children,
05:30they have things to be doing, but they're taking time out of that
05:32to drive around, identify ICE vehicles, and legally tail them.
05:36They're allowed to, under American law, as long as they don't impede any of the operations
05:42or get in the way or break any traffic laws.
05:43Are you following me?
05:45I am following you.
05:46I have a constitutional right to do so.
05:47This is going to be your only warning.
05:48I'm going to keep following you.
05:49So if you're going to arrest me for following you,
05:50you may as well do it right now.
05:50This is going to be your only warning.
05:51I don't follow us.
05:52You impede an operations, right?
05:53I will continue to follow you.
05:54I have a constitutional right to do so.
05:55And we actually got stopped by ICE, who said that they would arrest us
06:00because we were following them around.
06:02Why you should arrest me now?
06:03Because I will continue to follow you onto the highway to the 42nd Street.
06:07I will continue to follow you.
06:09You can arrest me now.
06:10This is the two-point area.
06:11Oh, they're not going to do it?
06:12No.
06:13Okay.
06:14When I was asking Will, I said, you know, what is the purpose of doing this,
06:17apart from just documenting what they're doing,
06:19he said that it actually acts as a deterrence
06:21because the federal officers are less likely to be violent
06:25or less likely to potentially break the law
06:28if there is someone there filming them.
06:30And as we were driving on the streets, I looked left,
06:32and there was the foot patrol, because they have foot patrols as well.
06:35So these are people, just normal residents, wearing high visibility vests,
06:39some of which literally have the words,
06:41don't shoot on the back, holding whistles.
06:43So they then start whistling.
06:45And as we went around the corner, because we were near a school
06:47and there's been people taken from the streets around schools,
06:50including children, there was a third patrol of teachers and volunteers
06:55who were effectively protecting the school.
06:57So in the space of a single street, we had three to four different groups
07:02of volunteers activated to monitor the behaviour of this ICE agent.
07:06They were hanging out by an elementary school while they were doing student drop-off.
07:09That's why there were so many people on foot around there.
07:11They've been hanging out at schools and just lurking around schools with masked men.
07:14No one can figure out why they're doing it other than just to terrify students and parents.
07:18I mean, it's an intimidation tactic.
07:19And it's particularly concerning around schools because, you know,
07:22there's been multiple children that have been detained by ICE on the way to school drop-off.
07:28Most famously, a five-year-old boy called Liam, whose photo went viral
07:33because he was taken away by ICE agents without his parents,
07:36whilst he was being dropped off to school by his dad.
07:38A federal judge today ordered the release of five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father.
07:43The boy's detention, as you may remember, on his way home from preschool last week,
07:48sparked international outcry.
07:52I usually cover crisis and conflicts.
07:55So even though it's not somewhere that I would normally be deployed to,
07:58it really had echoes of some of the countries that I've covered in places like the Middle East.
08:06That sense of fear and suspicion, concern of a government crackdown,
08:13concern about the behaviour of a security force,
08:16fear that you might be arrested for just being on the streets at the wrong time
08:22and the wrong place.
08:24And also the use of lethal force,
08:27with the killings of Renee Goode and Alex Pretty.
08:31A new video begins seconds before the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Goode,
08:36apparently filmed by the immigration officer who killed her.
08:41There were two shootings and two killings of two white US citizens
08:46who were effectively acting as observers.
08:49And the footage directly contradicted what the federal agents said had happened.
08:57The officer appears to swear at Goode after shooting her.
09:01You can see in the footage they were observing the situation
09:04and then ICE officers opened fire.
09:07In the case of Alex Pretty, I understand that as many as ten shots were fired.
09:11Both of Pretty's hands are visible.
09:13One holds the phone, the other he held up seemingly to protect himself from pepper spray.
09:18Three officers grapple with him until he's taken down and held on the frozen pavement.
09:22Almost simultaneously, the first shot is fired.
09:26Officers step back.
09:28Within five seconds, nine more shots.
09:31Pretty died at the scene.
09:34Without those videos, without the evidence, without those witness accounts,
09:39there's a fear that there will be no proper investigations into those killings.
09:44We actually got exclusive footage of an attack against Alex Pretty by ICE agents
09:50a few days before he was actually shot dead.
09:52And that also shows you just how heavy-handed the response has been.
09:57It takes place days before he was shot, a killing that was caught on camera.
10:03And they are once again following ICE and documenting what ICE was doing.
10:09Alex kicks in the tail light of an ICE car.
10:11That upsets the federal agents who jump out of the car.
10:15And there's about four to five officers who pin him to the ground.
10:20Witnesses who were present in the scene who took that video footage said that it was quite aggressive.
10:25And we understand that he may have even had his rib broken at that moment.
10:28And then the officers fired lots of tear gas into the passers-by and the observers,
10:34the other people who were on the street.
10:41It kind of reminded me of 2011 in Egypt when I went to the revolution.
10:49And there were citizens again filming law enforcement who were coming under fire,
10:56both lethal and crowd control tactics like tear gas.
10:59So for me to be in the US but having those kind of memories of uprisings against authoritarian regimes in
11:08the Middle East
11:08was quite a moment of cognitive dissonance.
11:11It was quite concerning and also extremely telling because it tells you the situation that America is in right now.
11:21So I was with a church, a Latino church, in the southwest of the city with a pastor called Pastor
11:29Sergio.
11:29He was actually a Trump supporter but has now done a 180 since this had happened.
11:36Latino churches in Minnesota are down 80% because people are afraid to come out.
11:42Half of my congregants are born in the US and they're still afraid to come out.
11:46So this is not just immigrant, this is affecting the whole community.
11:50So he's now feeding families who are too afraid to even go to the grocery store.
11:56This is despite the fact that at least half his congregation, for example, he says are born in the US,
12:02so we'll have US passports.
12:03So what he does with a team of volunteers is effectively drive around delivering essential supplies to these people.
12:11So I went with him and I met Maria, who that's not her real name.
12:17I'm using a pseudonym for her because she's too frightened to be identified.
12:21She hasn't left her house in five weeks.
12:25She was in absolute floods of tears.
12:27She was completely terrified when we went to her house.
12:30We had to be really careful because the pastor says he gets followed by ICE
12:34because they know that he's going to people's homes, some of whom have legal paperwork, some of whom don't.
12:40When he parks the car outside of Maria's home, you know, we're looking up and down the street to see
12:45if there's any parked ICE vehicles,
12:48if anyone might have, he recognizes any vehicles from before, has he been followed?
12:53We get to the front door of Maria's apartment building and there was a guy outside who was behaving kind
12:59of strangely,
13:01saying that he was an Uber Eats driver, but he was quite aggressively trying to get into the building.
13:06So at one point, the pastor is like concerned that this might be an undercover ICE agent.
13:10Maria's on the other side of the glass, like in absolute floods of tears, terrified to open the door.
13:14In the end, we manage to calm the situation down, the man leaves, she opens the door and she talks
13:21to me.
13:22I feel very afraid and I feel very stressed and very depressed.
13:29You said you're suffering from PTSD and anxiety.
13:33Yeah.
13:34Can you explain that?
13:36Sometimes I have panic attacks or anxiety attacks.
13:41Yeah, but I have some medicine to control, but that's very difficult.
13:47So she's sitting in her flat all day, every day.
13:50She's got a small dog that's going crazy because it's not being properly walked,
13:53hasn't properly left the house in weeks.
13:56And she's basically waiting for Pastor Sergio and the volunteers to come with their box of supplies,
14:02food and other supplies, because she can't go outside.
14:05And she told me that she'd never experienced this in the 25 years that she's lived in the US.
14:11She feels like she's already in prison in her own home.
14:14And this was echoed across the community.
14:17For people like Maria, it doesn't feel like this is going to end anytime soon.
14:20For her, the only way to survive is to rely on the lifeline from her church and from her pastor.
14:33Let your kingdom come, let your will be done, Lord, here in this house as it is in heaven.
14:38But treat her very nice, or you'll be done.
14:41And she's coming to go on.
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