We can see it, Matt, with our eyes, but they immediately tried to argue that he was a domestic terrorist. To me, Matt, this feels chilling, dystopian, like we were living in another world. The scenes on the streets of Minneapolis for some time have felt to me otherworldly. I find it extraordinary, actually, that anyone in a position of power would do anything other than sit back and say, let an investigation take place.
But the reality is if the federal government don't want to do it, then federal officers will be very easily protected in these cases and there will not be justice for either Renee Nicole Good or for Alex Pretty. Hello and welcome to Trump World. I'm Anushka Astana and I'm in Minneapolis. And I'm a try and I'm in warm and slightly grey London. Anushka. I gather it's -18 where you are, but it feels like -27. It is so shockingly cold, I'm basically walking around in full
ski gear. And actually when I was talking to you on the news yesterday, I had to take my thumb out of my glove just to scroll on my phone in case anything changed while I was on air. And I honestly thought I might get frostbite on that farm. On that farm, you need new gloves, those gloves that allow you to score. Now, you've been there. I mean, you've been to Minneapolis quite a few times, but but you've really been there
at a crucial time. It seems to be the epicentre of everything that's going on in Trump's domestic revolution. And yesterday we had a little bit of a change of tune and change of tone from the White House when, you know, there, there were conversations being had. You know, there seems to be some kind of drawback from the Trump administration after the killing of Alex Preti at the weekend. Tell us about that. A very dramatic change in tone
for sure. The Trump administration definitely totally rattled by the reaction to the killing of Alex Preti, which we're going to talk about. I'd like to talk as we go through why Alex Preti has acted as a turning point in a way that Rene Nicole Goode, who was killed here just a few weeks ago when we were here as well, was not. They know they went too far.
They have angered not only their opponents, including the protesters we've seen here on the streets in those bitterly cold conditions that you've mentioned, Matt, but also some of their closer allies, including many in the gun lobby. And again, we've been talking to people on that side of things until now that there's been a kind of guy here who he's either the bogeyman or he's the folk hero, depending how you see him.
His name is Gregory Bovino. He's been leading Border Patrol forces through the streets of Minneapolis. I've been in situations where there have been really tense standoffs between Border Patrol and protesters. The scenes here have looked like a war zone. And to be honest, that's what Donald Trump made clear he wanted. He told his military chiefs at one point there's a war going on with an enemy within.
It's been really shocking. I have been three times in recent weeks here, including before running. Nicole Good was killed. People are hiding. They're hiding in their homes because they are so terrified of being rounded up and taken to the Texas detention center. They say it's all about violent criminals. That's not what I'm seeing, that they're taking people really indiscriminately, or they have been. What is genuine for sure is they know they went too far.
They are withdrawing Gregory Pavino. They are withdrawing a certain number of Border Patrol officers. They are not taking out ICE completely and they are not completely changing this policy. They're sending in Tom Holman who is going to take over in a way from Gregory Pavino. He's the borders are he has had a more measured tone on all of this for sure.
But in the last few days, we've seen shocking comments from members of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller, Christie, no, the vice president, JD Vance. It would be lovely to be a family on the wall right now, Matt, and to see the conversations that they're having in the White House about how they deal with people really
clearly overstepping the mark. And I think the reason why we're seeing some kind of withdrawal, some kind of a draw, and I think, you know, it's very partial and the overall policy probably still stays very much in place.
We're seeing it because we've got the midterm elections coming up in November. And for the first time, really, we're seeing major backlash from Republican congressmen and women and Republican senators who are frankly simply afraid that they're going to lose their seats in the midterm elections if this sort of overt cruelty continues.
Because even though the majority of Americans, you know, voted for Trump largely because of his immigration policy, and they are still in favour of deportation, what they don't want to see is this kind of violence on the streets of America. And, and I think a lot of Republicans fall into the outcome too. But before we talk more about ICE, and I think I'm fascinated by ICE.
ICE, by the way, has the biggest military budget in the world as an enforcement agentry agency, apart from the military budgets of the US and China, 174 billion U.S. dollars in the big beautiful budget. We'll talk about that later.
But I think to get some idea of how important this is, Anushka, just talk us through frame by frame, if you don't mind, what we know about what actually happened to poor Alex Preti on Saturday. I mean, one thing that has happened with the Alex Preti killing is that the initial video that came out was very, very confusing. And then it took us a little bit of time to start to see it as we have done before, from different angles and to see what really happened. So initially the first video,
very confusing, shocking. I was actually in a play centre, a trampoline park in Washington DC as I saw it for the first time. And actually, I thought my son had gone to the loo, but he was standing over my shoulder. He's only seven. He saw a bit of it. I suddenly hid it from him. And later he said to me, mom, I'm really scared in America right now.
It's a shocking video. And, and without even drawing breath, the response that started to come out, including from Donald Trump himself, was this guy came up to a law enforcement person with a loaded handgun with magazines ready to go, brandishing. Some of them said, yeah, Now you see the video. What's really happening in that video, what is happening is that Alex Presti is 1 of what a number of people have been doing here.
One of the people observing, ICE officers and Border Patrol officers, He is holding in his hand not a gun but a phone. He is filming what is going on. He approaches slightly. He steps off onto the road and something happens and one of the officers pushes back a woman. Another woman who's protesting or observing like him, pushes them onto the ground. He turns to try and help her. They both get pepper sprayed in the face. They go down and he then
suddenly gets pulled back. He does not go for his gun at any point. Now that we've watched it frame by frame, he gets pushed onto the floor. At one point, an agent reaches down, takes his gun out of his holster, and actually starts to walk away. And at that very same moment, we hear ten shots fired in five seconds, 10 which shoot him dead. And you can see in the video immediately that he is dead and
he's so shocking. And you know, there is a phrase that we talk about here, which is who do you believe me or your own lying eyes? And the problem with the Alex Preti video and frankly, I think with the Renee Nicole good video. And later we can talk about why that wasn't the turning point that this is is we can see it Matt with our eyes, but they immediately try to argue that he
was a domestic terrorist. And I also think overstepped the mark massively because people in America, and you know this, that they care about their Second Amendment rights. They care about the right to carry a gun. He was carrying with a permit. The only crime he had ever committed previously was a parking ticket, as far as we can tell. And he was gunned down on the
streets. And to me, Matt, this feels or it certainly felt as I was heading here from Minneapolis, chilling, dystopian, like we were living in another world. The scenes on the streets of Minneapolis for some time have felt to me, otherworldly. How does it compare to what you've seen before? How different does this feel? It's remarkably different under Biden and under Obama. Yes, there were plenty of deportations. Obama was known as a deporter in chief.
At one stage, 1000 people were being pushed across the border into Mexico on a daily basis. But they did it quietly. The whole point of Trump is that performance is policy, right? You're doing this so that people can see how brutal you're prepared to be, to push people out, hoping that a lot of people will, you know, as they call it, self deport. But in the process of this, something else has happened.
So ICE was always kind of slightly looked down upon as, you know, the one of the Customs Enforcement agencies. You kind of, you know, it wasn't as glamorous as the FBI. Yeah. It wasn't even as glamorous as the, you know, the direct Border Patrol who kind of see even then under Obama or Biden was seen as the kind of Cowboys on the southern border patrolling, you know, Mexico, Arizona, all these New Mexico and Arizona. The ICE people were a little bit
more low grade. And the main problem that you had as an ICE agent, obviously carrying a firearm was that you would use your firearm in an extreme situation and then you would be held accountable for it. And so the worry with ICE agents, I'm told in the past was that, you know, they didn't use their arms enough, their weapons enough, because they were following the law, constantly aware and told to be aware of the rights of the people they
were arresting. We've had a complete sea change of mentality with an ICE since Trump took office. It's not basically the message is you're acting with our cover. You know, we've got your back, ICE agent, you can more or less act with impunity that, you know, don't worry too much about the law as long as you deliver us the numbers of people that need to be lifted, detained and then deported. This is a numbers game. You've got to fill those quotas.
And remember, the quotas they're trying to fill according to their manifesto pledges is a million a year. They're not going to get there, but they're trying really, really hard. At the same time, ICE, and I mentioned this before briefly, has such a vast budget that this has never been seen before for any law enforcement agency,
whether it's the FBI or the CIA. In the history of the United States, as I said, bigger than the military budget of any country in the world apart from China and the US, the numbers of agents they've recruited has gone from 7000 roughly under Biden to 12,000 under Trump. That's a significant increase.
And then when you look at the specifics of what happened to Alex Preti and indeed to Renee, Good, the minute someone is shot in the past, right when if there was an ICE agent was in the, in the rare position of having shot someone dead, especially immediately, the law enforcement agencies would, would, would gather together in a kind of circle. And we're trying to establish what the evidence was. And the person who did the shooting would then be probably
be investigated. They're not necessarily charged, but they would want to find out what actually happened.
In the case of Renee Goode and the case of Alex Preti, as you know, the evidence on the ground has been seized by the people who committed the killing and the area basically blocked off to the police, the local Minneapolis police, let alone anyone else who was standing by. And I think for ordinary Americans who are wondering about the state of their Republic, you know, this is deeply scary. And remember, as I said, performances, policies, Trump
wants people to be scared. He wants, you know, immigrant families who are undocumented to feel that they might be lifted at any moment because the hope is that they'll self deport. But in many cases, they won't because they've been there for 10 years or 20 years. They've paid their American taxes. And remember, in America, if you're undocumented, if you're there as an illegal alien, there is no path to legality. There is no path to suddenly
getting documented. You have to leave the country and then come back in again and wait for a very long time. And you could say that's just, But if you've been living in America and working and sending your kids to school and your kids have become American citizens because they were born there, then there's a much more complicated situation. And that's why I think you're getting all these citizens on
the streets. Like Alex Preti was out there, concerned citizen with his camera, with his iPhone, trying to make sure that they can enforce some degree of order within their community. And of course you've got pumped up ICE agents, you've got angry local citizens, a clash is almost inevitable. But within that panic, and I'm sure, and you know from the first tape that you referred to, there clearly was panic. Within that panic, some terrible
things have happened. And the guys who I'd love to who, who shot him, did they have the training? Were they, you know, had they been in ICE for a couple of months or for many years? This is all really important, but we don't know the answers to any of it because we're not being told. Anushka, when I was in Washington in the summer, I saw ICE agents on the streets. The thing that really struck me was the fear in the eyes of Hispanic parents taking their kids to school in the morning.
You must have come across so much of that in Minneapolis. Tell us about it. Oh my God, I think the whole city is just kind of reeling. I mean, that point you're making about this being a kind of federal government versus state thing is so like visceral here right now. I mean, I was at the crime scene where Alex Pretti was killed and we saw local officers going to the scene by the time that it had been completely cleared and there was a memorial bear trying
to get evidence. And they hadn't been allowed to go and get evidence before that, which is just totally extraordinary. And the people who are dealing with this as a crisis kind of can't believe that it is a crisis caused by, in their eyes, their own federal government.
But as you say, the human stories are behind the doors everywhere you look here because there are genuinely loads of immigrants hiding in this city, including including immigrants who have completely legal paperwork but who have been taken. And I was with somebody yesterday who was a builder working on a roof, got stopped, had their paperwork, showed their paperwork to the officers. They said this is garbage. They told him, you're effed.
I won't actually say the word. They handcuffed him behind his hand. They got him to climb down a ladder with handcuffs behind his back. I know. And then hit. The handcuffs were on for 2 1/2 hours. The shackles on his legs stayed on for four days. He was put into a Minneapolis detention center where there were dozens of people in a room, no beds. People had to take it in turns to sleep because not everybody could sit or lie down at the same time.
The toilets were open, so you were sitting on the toilet next to someone else. They didn't have a blanket. And it's really cold here. As you've mentioned, they were sent to El Paso in Texas to another detention facility and they were actually like relieved when they got there because they got a blanket, although they were then in a room with 72 people and they were not allowed out to do exercise.
And just bear in mind, you know, this person is legal, has paperwork, is going to be released and has to go through this. They can hardly communicate with their family who are going completely crazy. You know, number of kids here in the US with U.S. citizens who, by the way, are being made to carry their passports when they
go out with them. Because people are so terrified because the only people who are not being taken are the people who don't have their paperwork on them and and paperwork doesn't do it has to be passports. Yesterday was with a Somali family for the second time. We went to see them after Renee Nicole Good she again legal was stopped by multiple cars. Masked men got in her car, took her 45 year old mother of three Maimuna. She was put in a Minnesotan jail for two weeks before she came
home. These are not the kind of violent criminals that Gregory Bevino is has been telling us in press conferences. He's been doing these extraordinary press conferences. He puts up what he calls the worst of the worst. The violent criminals they're taking off the streets. The reality is so many people are terrified. You know, they're not even going to get help. We spoke to someone else. You talk about self deporting, who said I just need to self
deport? And just, you know, I want to ask you what you're making of all this. But predating the stories we've seen since the killing of Renee Nicole Goods, since the killing of Alex Pretti and my moon of the Somali woman said they shot Alex. Why wouldn't they shoot me? We were here in December after Donald Trump and we talked about it on the pod was attacking Somali Americans, listening to people hearing death threats be
called through. I think if you look at the profiling of the people they're arresting, and I'm not talking about the people they're killing, but the people that they're arresting and the people they're deporting, they don't tend to be, you know, white Europeans have outstayed their, you know, their, their Ivs. If you haven't offend, they don't tend to be, I don't know even, you know, Asians from East Asia, they tend to be Hispanics. They tend to be Somalis with
force, with propaganda, you know, with arrests, using the full power of the federal government to basically make the place more white. And now you might say this is ridiculous, but if you look at the, you know, the ICE website, you know, the, the number of kind of messaging messages that have come up, you know, on the ICE website between, you know, ICE departments and ICE agents, the motors that they've used. This is all this is from a different world, Anushka.
This is not the ICE that people knew from, you know, a year ago or three years ago. And you've not seen this before, Matt? Yeah. There's never been a point in America where you felt. Never. Not like this, Not like this. I mean, you know, border control, fine. You know, it's, it's a long border. It's a porous border. Millions of people have come
across that border. They came over under the Biden administration partly because it was the post COVID, you know, need for people either to get out or for New Labour to be found. And actually the numbers of people, you know, went down in the last few months of Biden. His big, big mistake was that he never took the immigration crisis seriously enough. And Trump did and always has
done. It's one of his EDA fix and he acted on it. And the irony is Anushka, the southern border is virtually closed. There's no one coming across. I mean, you know, he has achieved one of his main goals, which is to close that border. Not nobody, a few 1000, a few thousand a month, but yeah, nothing like it was. But hardly anyone is coming across, right. So compared to the numbers we had before, it is tiny. It's a trickle.
But what's so extraordinary is that they've used the, the border is now in every American community. You know, that's where the border agents are acting. And, you know, in Minneapolis, as you know, they're deployed, you know, it's a bit of confusion. They're deployed ostensibly, as Caroline never told us yesterday, because of they're going after these fraud cases, you know, date back to the COVID era. Involving a few dozen Somalis and there are 100,000 Somalis in
this state. Right, and fraud cases are not sold by border agents, right? That that's sold by by people who work for, you know, other departments. So they're really using ICE, I think to create a climate of fear first and foremost amongst the, you know, immigrant community. And you know, we know, I mean, Chris, Senator Chris Murphy was at a Texas, you know, asylum court the other day and put the stuff on social media.
He's, I mean, obviously, you know, the massive critic of, of Democrat hates Trump. But he was describing how families would go into the to the courts to have their asylum cases heard and the ICE agents would pick them up as they came out of the courts to arrest them. And deport the undocumented parent. Often the kids were naturalized Americans because they were born in America. Deport the parent and send them away to a detention center, regardless of whether they had
been approved or not. And so even though we're seeing some kind of withdrawal from the the cruelest part of the policy after the the murder of Alex Preti, because Republican senators and congressmen are wide about losing their seats in the midterm elections. And the opinion polls tell us that this is not popular with the public.
This degree of brutality. The fundamental policy, I don't think will change here because they feel they've got a mandate, they're on a mission and they've got the money to do it.
And again, it's, it's a bit like, you know, what happened after the the murder of Charlie Kirk, what happened after, you know, Renee Goode, this this immediate response from the administration to blame left wing radicals and the Democrats makes me think that the other thing that's lurking behind us, you know, the elephant in the room is the Insurrection Act where you basically use the military use military force to, to, to to end First Amendment, you know, rights of freedom of
speech and freedom to protest ahead of the midterm elections. Everything Trump has said he would do, he is dumb. He is hinted that he might do this. I wouldn't be surprised if he went this far. Watch that space. I mean, do you think I'm overreacting here? What do you think in Oshka? Until, you know, he backed off a bit this week. I certainly thought the interaction act was coming. I think because it's very clear that they feel like they've
overstepped the mark. Things will cool down a little bit. I mean, we've gone from them attacking the governor here, Tim Waltz, relentlessly for weeks on end and the mayor here, Jacob Frey, to him getting on the phone to them and saying, oh, you know, I think we're on a similar wavelength. You know, he's still brutally attacking the representative here, Ilhan Omar, in a very what feels like racist way to me now, suggesting maybe she's involved
in the fraud cases. He's still attacking Somalis. I mean, on that point you made about race, I mean, I had to kind of check this so many times because I thought, is it fake? He's put on Truth Social, the president, a clip of New York in the past with lots of white people walking down the street. And it's like New York in a very different time.
Never forget exclamation mark. And Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, has put that on X. And, you know, I've heard about lots of Stephen Miller conversations behind the scenes. There's no question. In fact, he says it out loud that that he wants to see a country that maintains more of what he sees. I mean, the joke of this as if this is the indigenous American population, but he sees as the indigenous American population, which is basically Europeans who came here, his ancestors,
etcetera. I mean, it feels so blatant where even in 2020 it did not. Even in 2020 when George Floyd was killed on these streets, Donald Trump said we'll get justice for George Floyd's family.
But the reaction, I mean, when Renee Nicole Good was shot 3 times, including from the side when she was unthreatening and had turned her wheel and was moving away, you know, they still felt very comfortable to say that she was threatening his life, that this was all down to left wing activists at the moment. They're still talking about. And there have been some horrible scenes. There have been some scary scenes where a hotel where ICE agents were staying had windows smashed, etcetera.
But largely what we're seeing have been protests that have stayed quite peaceful against people who seem quite scary. They've got masks on. You can't tell quite where they're from. I mean, we're calling them ICE. But actually the kind of architect of this policy, Gregory Bavino, is Border Patrol. Which is a hard the hard the hard the hard lot.
Guys with the guns, someone was saying to me yesterday I saw someone with AK-40 Sevens and I was like, well, they didn't have AK-40 Sevens, but actually when you look at the guns they're holding, they I can see they feel a bit like that. They look that shape. And his policy was these. Are weapons of war in Uska. These are weapons that are supposed to be used on a battlefield somewhere.
And it feels like that and and it was not let's what used to be that ICE collects all the information on people, finds out where you might have someone who's an illegal alien as they would call them, and then they get removed. This idea there was will bring the border to your cities, will be in your cities. And look, there is, you know, he says they're taking violent criminals case after case after case, including one that involved a 5 year old boy who
was also taken with his father. The case, the criminality was the way they had crossed the border, which is a civil case. Yeah, which is an illegal entry into this country. It's not a violent case. And, and actually lots of people came here. They were paid for by the American government to come here on Aun refugee scheme and they fear here. People are telling me with fear that they've handed over the entire list of those people to ICE. Those people are not leaving
their homes. Anyone who's undocumented in America has, you know, is in danger of being deported according to the law. You know, if you're undocumented, your potential deportee. But the problem is, one, the way that the law is being applied by ICE, as we've discussed in this unusually brutal way. And the other really big issue is that because so many of these, I mean, millions upon millions of families, I think we
don't even know the real number. Is it 12,000,015 million had been living in the United States for decades where the parents came over illegally, They walked across the border. The kids were born in America. They are now American citizens. They live in this weird hybrid shadow world, but they've been paying their taxes, you know, they have driving licenses, they're documented in every way other than having citizenship rights or a a legal visa the way that, you know, you and I do
when we go and work there. And, you know, there has to be a path to accommodate these people somehow because they are, whether you like it or not, they have jobs, they're part of the community. They feel as if they're part of the community. And at the same time, if you then try and remove them, you know, that's an incredibly complicated, difficult and brutal thing to do. And it's never been tried before, but we're seeing it now.
Now they are trying it. And I just what I worry about is that, you know, everything from the way the rule of law is applied or not applied to not allowing local law enforcement to get in there to Christie Gnome, you know, claiming stuff that's just blatantly wrong to them, asking us to believe things that our eyes are not witnessing, etcetera, etcetera.
It, you know, it's so dystopian. But I wonder, Anoushka, maybe you got the answer to this, whether you think that any of these people will lose their jobs, Christina, you know, Greg Bavino, I mean, will will any of them be fired for what they've done or not? Well, Gregory Bavino is clearly being removed from Minneapolis. There was a lot of rumor this week that he might be fired, It sounds like.
It sounds to me looking at the people who were saying that, but he's telling people that he is facing a demotion. I mean, the people who have got Donald Trump into trouble on this, if you like, would include him who have been doing these shocking press conferences where he's basically like he said, the victims in this case were the officers, were my ICE officers. They were not essentially Alex Preti. And again, people can see that that doesn't add up at all.
And with Rene Nicole Good, it was a little bit more. There was a bit more of a debate about whether the officer, Jonathan Ross, felt threatened. But to a lot of people, it still looked like a situation in which a person did not need to be killed. Christy Noem, who's the Homeland Security secretary, came out almost immediately and said the guy was a domestic terrorist. And Kash Patel, the director of the FBI said, no, you can't carry a loaded gun up to law
enforcement officers. Well, here's the thing, Matt, it might feel really weird to you and I from the UK, but it it turns out you can carry a gun and when you are around law enforcement, you are allowed to film what they are doing. And I think that's why this has felt like such a difficult and clear cut case for the White House and they were mistaken to so quickly, you know, make a judgement.
I find it extraordinary, actually, that anyone in a position of power would do anything other than sit back and say, let an investigation take place. But the reality is if the federal government don't want to do it, then federal officers will be very easily protected in these cases and there will not be justice for either Renee Nicole Good or for Alex Preti and. Of course, it sets up, you know, a clash between state law enforcement and federal law enforcement.
This is something that never ends very well. And and, you know, this is the comparison with George Floyd when he was murdered in 2020. Immediately the local police, you know, started to investigate. He was, you know, he, he had to stay at home. Then there was a trial, You know, justice, you know, even after this horrible murder, justice was served eventually. We're getting no evidence that any of this has happened so far.
And I don't think, frankly, that any of the people who are having difficult conversations with Trump at the moment are going to get fired because the difference between the last Trump administration and this one is that in the first one, you either got fired or you walked out. And in this one, everyone is slavishly loyal to the boss.
So far, no one has got fired. And, you know, they've been quite a few things that have been done wrong, including by P Texas, Dean of the secretary of war, not fired very much in office because he's got his loyal team around him. Even Christie Noem, the former governor of South Dakota, who when she was in that position, shot her own dog. So, you know, in this country, I think as someone who does. That and wrote about it. What? And wrote about it. And wrote it proud enough to
write about. It wrote, it shot her own dog and then wrote about it in her autobiography. Anyway, so different kind of people we're dealing with, I suppose. Anyway, tell us about your guest. Yeah, here. I went up to the emergency operations centre here where it's quite interesting. They wouldn't let us film it, but you can see they've got huge screens with maps of the city. They're tracking what's happening. Normally they're dealing with natural disasters.
Right now they're trying to deal with the fallout of the crisis that they say has been caused by the federal government. And I spoke to its director, Rachel Say. Just tell me what your role entails. Yeah. So as the Emergency Management Director, I make sure that our city is ready and prepared for any sort of large scale emergencies, disasters, that we respond as a whole city and that we can recover.
Is this an emergency like that? What we're experiencing here are large scale impacts to our community and those impacts are need to be urgently addressed. They include things like people need food, they need help making their rent this month, they need help with mental health resources. So those kind of impacts are really immediate and must be addressed. And impacts that are not from a natural disaster, but are from the federal government and its policy. That's right, That's right.
What we're experiencing is a situation in which there are masked agents in the street and people are afraid to go outside. They're afraid to go to the grocery store. They're having to make impossible decisions. You know, 16% of our city lives below the poverty line already, which means meeting basic needs already is extremely difficult. When you take away their ability to go to their job, their decisions get even harder every single day. Am I feeding this child or am I going to my job?
How do I make that happen if I can't go outside? And how many people are not going outside? Do you have any sense? No, we don't know specifically, but I can just tell you in my conversations, it's so widespread. Businesses are closed. We're hearing from emergency rooms and healthcare providers that less people are coming to their appointments. We're hearing, you know, people are again, afraid to send their
kids to schools. That's why our many of us public schools made the decision to have a virtual option. And I do want to make clear that our city remains open and vibrant. You know, we have an incredible food scene here. People are ice skating, you know, enjoying the winter even in this freezing temperature. We have incredible numbers of community members who have gone
out and protested. So it's both, you know, we're experiencing this impact and I can't tell you a single friend or family member or neighbor who's sleeping right now, The mental health impacts of this have just been. Everyone you know is having sleepless nights. Everyone, are you having sleepless nights? Absolutely. Yes, how bad? It depends on the day, but I it's impossible not to wake up and just immediately go into what's happening right now.
You know, is my family safe? What's happened in the hours I've been able to sleep? How can I help my community? What's going to happen to my neighbors tomorrow? I mean, these are just feel like, again, impossible questions that you can't escape from because it's all we know right now. It is all we can think about. And I have to say, when I was seeing people protest this week, I thought to myself as I spoke to different people, that wasn't
speaking to many immigrants. That's presumably because this is disproportionately affecting immigrants here in Minneapolis. Absolutely, absolutely. And again, you know, everyone's making that individual decision for themselves, and that's a conversation that's being had and we're really trying to center everyone who's most impacted, right? What do you need if you're not safe to go to the house?
Our community is mobilizing to make sure you still do get the food you need, that we can get somehow healthcare to you. But everyone needs to make the decision for themselves on what's safest. Do you include, when it comes to healthcare people, for example, a woman who might be pregnant? Do we know what is happening? Are people coming to the hospital to give birth to their children?
Yeah, we know that that's an absolute need is there are people who are pregnant who are afraid to get healthcare and that is absolutely unacceptable. So we are working, our health colleagues, we're working on what can we do, How can we knit together the incredible response in our community, the incredible network of mutual aid that has really re energized and is taking care of each other. How can we link that with different resources that are available?
And you have previously worked in war zones and in countries that have suffered from that natural disasters. Tell me where you've worked. Yeah. So I've worked in Haiti most recently. I've worked in Yemen for a long time. Yemen still has my heart. Syria, northwest Syria, Ukraine at the start of the most recent war and what I saw there, the impacts are the same impacts that we have here.
Again, people afraid to go out and go about their daily lives, to access food, to decide to send your kids to school or not. Those are the same choices that people in conflict zones make on a regular basis. Does it feel like this is a war zone? Again, we're we have a vibrant city, right? Our incredible small businesses are, I'm biased to the best in the country. We have award-winning restaurants. We have such a vibrant community of immigrants and communities.
We are active, we are out, we are supporting each other more than ever. And we have these awful things that is, that is making us afraid, that is making us tired, that we're having to navigate. But you're essentially comparing your work in war zones to what is happening in Minneapolis in America in 2026. Yeah, I do feel like my experience working in conflict zones around the world has prepared me for ensuring that I keep our focus on what is
happening to our community. How do we meet the needs? What are the needs, needs how? What is most urgent to attend to and make sure that we can do what we can to keep us safe and keep us thriving. And do you see those masked agents you talked about in the city as comparable to the types of militia, for example, you've seen elsewhere in the world? I think that, you know, no one deserves to go outside and not
know what they're going to face. I was calling earlier this morning how when we're little in school, you know, we have police and fire come visit us. And the reason they come and visit us is that we understand what they look like and what they do. We were never educated on masked agents coming into our city and and doing the things they're doing. That's not something that we grow up here learning about because it's not something that has happened here and it's not OK.
And what sort of stories are you hearing? Can you give me a few examples of the things you're seeing behind closed doors? Well, so one of the things that is just, again, back to the mental health needs that are just across the board, you know, here we always say how are you to start a conversation? No one's saying that anymore because there's no answer that is possible. We're starting conversations with how are you holding up? Or I have no words. And that is just in itself.
So not us, not American, certainly not Minnesotan, we're starting our interactions with, you know, hugs and and ending them with this just anger and fear and the desperate desire to hope for something to change. We just want to go back to our amazing breweries to, you know, all of the activities that we have here and feel like our choices right now are go outside and maybe run into those masked agents or your neighbors about
to take it away. Or do I go protest and make sure that everyone knows what's happening here? Are a lot of people in hiding? I think that there is a significant amount of people who are not going outside based on what we're hearing about food banks. Their food shelves are not being emptied right now, which is a change. Because people are scared of going to a food bank. Yes. And when you say you're responding to all of that, can you just give me an example of the things you're doing, like
how much food is going out? What else are you supporting the people with? How are you getting them to healthcare? Yeah, So Minneapolis has such an incredible vibrant mutual aid community. So that means that we have hyperlocal communities block by block, neighbor by a neighbor, really making sure that people are taken care of. Schools are an incredible network for that resource. Various community organizations are doing just amazing work. Our, our cultural communities
are leading the way. So we as a city, we're making sure that people have a virtual resources, especially, again, for those people who are most vulnerable and unable to leave their home. So we have stood up minneapolismn.gov/ice. It has a link to our virtual Resource Center. So you can go on there. We have mental health that's free that you can access from
home. We have links to legal resources to information such as if you are tear gassed, here's what to do. So we're really making sure to continually share information about what's out there. And what do you say to the Trump administration when they argue this is all about getting violent criminals off the streets? And actually, if officials in Minnesota, in Minneapolis would work with us, this would be much
calmer. So we do and have worked with the federal administration for a very long time for always on violent criminals. That is ongoing work. But that's not what this is. We are, I am now focused on the impact to our community because our neighbors are disappearing because there are residents who are holding up a camera and instead of just being allowed to use their camera like anyone in anywhere in the world, they're having a gun pointed at them by a masked agent. That's not OK.
So you just do not buy the argument that this is targeted at violent criminals. It's impacting everyone. If that's actually the target, it's impacting absolutely everyone. This is a city that has just been through so much. Does that impact how you're dealing with this now? Yeah, yeah. So I am hearing from communities that everyone is becoming familiar with this term of compounded trauma, which is just a tragic thing alone to have to understand what that means.
But it means, you know, it's just been thing after thing. And that's not fair. It's not OK. And I mean just finally you work. In emergency responses, and like I said before, you've dealt with war zones, you've dealt with natural disasters. It seems to me that what what you're saying is that Minneapolis is essentially in that situation because of a crisis caused by the federal government. I mean, can you get your head round that?
And what is your message to the federal government as someone who's in, you know, in charge of looking after people here in terms of an emergency response? Yeah, yeah. So I grew up here in Minnesota and one of the things I was raved on, raised to do was just love my neighbor, take care of my neighbor. So that's my my ask has just let us love each other, let us take care of each other and just let us have have our lives. That's all we want.
Do you accept what they say? That lots of people want this. I have not seen what they are trying to say. We want that. We want in Minneapolis. We want to go back to the way our lives have been. And what disasters would you be coping with then? What would you like to be focused on? Yeah, well, I never would wish a disaster upon us, but the things we usually face here are extreme weather, so extreme cold, like
we've had recently. We prep every summer for a tornado season, you know, minor flooding. That's the kind of thing that we usually deal with here. And this must be expensive. How much is it costing the city from the state but the city in your case to deal with this? Yeah, we're working to figure that out. And the reality is with these kind of large scale situations, we're not going to know until quite after the fact, right? Rent is due on February 1st. We're going to not know the full
scale of that until after. And we start seeing people who have to leave their home because they couldn't make rent. I would say in real terms right now, it's costing us things like my team is responsible for the severe warning sirens in the city, and we have not had time to do the maintenance needed to make sure those are ready ahead of tornado season. So it's having that kind of real impact now. Wow, so you're worried about dealing with other issues?
Absolutely. We have a lot of ongoing work that has all been on pause since this has occurred. Rachel, thank you very much. Thank you so much. Actually, the interview you just did with her reminds me of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 when America looked like a war zone. And, you know, the law enforcement agencies responded to it really badly. George Bush was really slow in his own response.
And finally, that did more damage to George W Bush than even the Iraq War and and ultimately led to the victory of Barack Obama at the next presidential election. So when America, a country that likes to keep wars very much on the other side of oceans, begins to feel like a war zone at home, then there is political trouble. And it is something that is quite extraordinary and head spinning for the people who are trying to run this city and this state.
I think they're hoping that Minnesota and Minneapolis will stop being quite such a flashpoint, but we must keep in touch with the people we've been meeting here to see whether that really happens. And it's only just the end of January, Anoska. Oh my goodness. Is it only just the end of January? It is I, I I I Oh my. Goodness, you thought it was your day into. Spring. What have we had? Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, Greenland. Davos.
NATO. And by the way, as we speak, and this will be, you know, next week's subject, I'm sure, the USS Abraham Lincoln. And you know, it's battles battle group, which is basically a, a Navy that in it, this little, this group, this flotilla, this Armada of ships moving towards the Gulf is bigger than the Navy of the vast majority of countries in the world moving towards the Gulf. I have a friend who lives in Abu Dhabi. He's been told to basically come home.
Flights have been cancelled by a number of International Airlines, including American Airlines. Watch that space. Donald Trump is not done with January yet, Anushka. We will see you next week when I think it will be February, won't it? It will be. See you then. Bye.