Good morning. Saks, the parent company of the luxury department stores Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, filed for bankruptcy last night. The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland will meet with Trump administration officials at the White House today. And China announced the world’s largest trade surplus ever last year, despite challenges posed by U.S. tariffs. We’ll have more news below. But I’m going to start today in Minneapolis.
A city’s limitMinneapolis is on a knife’s edge. One week after a federal agent shot and killed Renee Good, aggressive arrests have enraged residents. The Trump administration has redoubled its effort to deport illegal immigrants, sending officers into residential neighborhoods and the parking lots of big-box stores in search of people to grab. They’ve also detained — and roughed up — several U.S. citizens, and social media is awash in viral videos of the confrontations. Meanwhile, activists have sought to observe, document or impede the agents, Julie Bosman reports. On WhatsApp, neighbors watch out for immigration officers and run from their homes to shout at them. “It feels like our community is under siege by our own federal government,” State Representative Michael Howard, a Democrat, told The Times. The encounters can be terrifying. My colleagues verified images circulating this week that show agents tackling a man at a gas station and shoving Elliott Payne, the president of the City Council. Payne told my colleagues that there were federal agents equipped with assault rifles and combat gear patrolling the streets, repeatedly unholstering their handguns. “It feels like a military occupation,” he said.
Some of the stops go beyond ordinary law enforcement. In a few of the run-ins, you can feel the animosity building between federal officers and citizens they serve. One man The Times spoke to said he was glad that there were other people around to film his encounter with federal agents, which occurred after they rammed their car into his, forcing him to a stop. He said he believed the presence of people with cameras had helped lead the agents to let him go. But as the crowd grew — the crowds always seem to grow now — and began to yell at the officers, he worried that the situation could tip over into something darker, something violent. “It makes them act different, like they have more power,” he said. Urban strifePresident Trump does not seem interested in de-escalating anything in Minneapolis. This week, he said that one justification for the shooting of Renee Good might have been that she had been “disrespectful” to officers. Being disrespectful is a form of speech, though — one protected by the Constitution. Now the government is sending 1,000 more immigration officers to Minnesota on top of the 2,000 already there. The administration also said it would end deportation protections for more than 2,000 migrants from Somalia. The state is home to the largest diaspora of Somalis in the world. Minnesota filed a lawsuit on Monday alongside the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, asking a judge to block the federal government from “implementing the unprecedented surge in Minnesota.” “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA,” Trump wrote on social media yesterday, “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” A tinderbox
It’s worth pausing on these encounters between federal officers and Minneapolis residents. They contain multiple truths. On the one hand are people driving to work, walking out of a store, trying to get home. On the other are federal agents sent to a place they are unwelcome and told to round up people many locals want to protect. Some activists are throwing snowballs at officers, blowing whistles, chanting at them, parking in the way of their vehicles. Residents have honked car horns through the night next to a hotel where agents are staying and followed a commander into the bathroom to shout at him. Agents respond with pepper spray, tear gas or worse. Everyone is just mad — at the injustices they perceive, at the people performing them, at the awful facts on the ground. That’s as true of the masked federal agents as it is of the citizens and noncitizens they face. The steam pipe valve is screwed down tight in Minneapolis. The pressure only goes up. Good is dead, and more may follow. Brian O’Hara, Minneapolis’s police chief, has been warning about this for weeks. More than five years ago, the killing of George Floyd by members of his department tore Minneapolis apart. O’Hara came in afterward to rebuild the force and re-establish trust with the city’s residents. On Monday, Michael Barbaro interviewed him for “The Daily” and asked what his first thought had been when he heard about the Good shooting. O’Hara was measured throughout the interview, and you can hear the pause as he considers the question. “I just thought, Fuck, this is it,” O’Hara said. “You know? This is potentially 2020 all over again.” “George Floyd all over again?” Michael asked. “The destruction of the city,” the chief responded. More coverage
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