FEATURING MARIA BURNS ORTIZ - In the weeks after the January 7th ICE killing of Renee Good, a Minneapolis mother and wife, protests have continued to escalate in response to the violence of federal agents.
Reports of horrific savagery at the hands of ICE agents against immigrants and citizens, women and men and even babies, are emerging. Rightwing agitators such as Jake Lang have also descended on Minneapolis.
Among those who have been witnessing and documenting the chaos on the streets of the twin cities is Maria Burns Ortiz, a nonprofit executive director, game studio founder and former journalist. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and three children and told Sonali Kolhatkar what she's been witnessing over the past two weeks.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So first, tell me what is it that you have witnessed. What we are seeing here in Southern California, where I'm based, or just news reports, are people like yourself, documenting the abuses, posting it to social media, and it looks terrifying to just even walk on the streets of Minneapolis these days. Give us a sense of what it's like right now.
Maria Burns Ortiz: Yeah, you know, I think it's a very scary time here for a lot of people. Normally it's Minnesota in the winter, where it's cold. But… I keep telling people, and I think people kind of don't understand, what you're seeing? It's actually worse. There is fear within, especially the immigrant community here that, that people are terrified. You know, they are staying in houses, they are going into hiding. This is not an exaggeration. People are being grabbed off the streets. They're being taken when they're dropping their children at the school bus. Multiple cases of this have been reported. There are American citizens being ripped out of their cars, as my husband and I and a number of other citizens saw last week, just off of the streets.
And so, I think that … the [ICE] intent, it feels like, as someone living here, is just as too sow terror. But at the same time, I think also looking at the way that the city, the residents here have responded. I think that's a really important part of it as well, because people are not just taking it and accepting that our neighbors and our friends are being literally ripped from their families and their homes.
