The Raid That Was or Wasn't
You haven’t heard from me since May 16, because I was on hiatus for two weeks while I was traveling. However, now that I am back, I’m going to take a temporary break from my usual Friday format of summarizing the week’s news to go into a deep dive of an event I witnessed in my own community, right here in Minneapolis.
On Tuesday June 3, I saw armored personnel carriers drive down the streets of my home city of Minneapolis. An angry crowd had gathered on Lake Street, a major thoroughfare in the city, because the street had been blocked off by police and federal agencies. According to a press release by City Council Member Jason Chavez of the 9th Ward, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were present at the scene.
I arrived on the scene at about 12:45 PM, about 10 to 15 minutes before armored vehicles rolled away from the scene while a crowd of outraged members of the Minneapolis community marched and shouted at them. I marched as well, but I was at the edge of the crowd near the sidewalk & mainly focused on trying to take footage with my phone. I still feel like I only caught the tail end of a much larger event that passed me by in a big blur.
I’m still suffering from a “fog of war” effect, where I am only now gradually trying to piece together what happened in the event that I saw a part of unfold before me. According a later article by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the only daily newspaper in Minneapolis, the federal enforcement action that took place at the corner of Lake and Bloomington Streets in Minneapolis was not an isolated event, but part of an operation that included eight different raids.
Federal and local authorities insisted to Council Member Jason Chavez that ICE was not involved in the law enforcement operation, but photographs taken at the scene show that this claim was false. See the ICE patch in the photo below.
In addition, Jamie Holt, the ICE special agent in charge for St. Paul issued a statement to local media that used the word “we” in describing the enforcement action, which strongly implies ICE wanted to share credit for the enforcement operation in Minneapolis. To be specific, the statement from ICE special agent Holt said, “Federal investigators conducted a groundbreaking criminal operation today — Minnesota’s first under the Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) umbrella — marking a new chapter in how we confront complex, multidimensional threats.” [Emphasis added.]
However, when I look on the website formerly known as Twitter, I suddenly discover that a right-wing media narrative is developing about how the enforcement action wasn’t an ICE raid at all, but an overreaction by liberal and left-wing protesters jumping to conclusions. AK Kamara, a black Trump supporter, MAGA TikTok creator, and current Republican national committee member for Minnesota, has already created a TikTok proclaiming the “Minneapolis ICE Raid Hoax.” (Instead of linking to Kamara TikTok or X accounts, I am only posting a screenshot, because I do not want to give the disinformation a broader audience.)
Interestingly, even though the agent in charge of the St. Paul field office of ICE is implicitly taking credit for the enforcement action in Minneapolis, his statement does not appear at all on ICE’s official Newsroom website. Instead, the statement is only available as a transcription buried in local newspaper stories.
The failure to report this event on ICE’s website strikes me as highly suspicious. At best, it is reflective of a complete indifference to keeping the public informed. At worst, it is a deliberate attempt to foster confusion and disinformation.
It also appears that right-wing content creators were embedded with the crowd on Lake and Bloomington Street in Minneapolis. Nick Shirley, an anti-immigrant conspiracy theorist and YouTube content creator, took a different tack than AK Kamara. Instead of calling the event an “ICE Raid Hoax,” he referred to the enforcement operation as a “Suspected ICE, Human Trafficking, and Drug Raid.” However, his goals were the same as Kamara. He is trying to portray opponents of ICE as both overreacting and an implicitly criminal element interfering with legitimate law enforcement investigations. At the very least, Shirley’s presence in Minneapolis for the ICE enforcement action at Lake and Bloomington streets is highly suspicious, because Shirley is a Mormon who is geographically based in Utah. How would he know to be in Minneapolis, Minnesota on the very same corner that armored military vehicles would be if he hadn’t been tipped off in advance?
Nick Shirley has even appeared on Fox News as an “independent journalist” who was granted access to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison where Trump has currently imprisoned over 100 immigrants with no criminal record. Shirley was able to pull off this feat in February 2025, even though a Democratic Senator and a Democratic Congressman were both barred by the El Salvadoran government from doing the same thing. Shirley is only 22-years old, and his media output has exactly the informal, amateurish feel you’d expect from a YouTube “independent journalist,” yet somehow he has access to official spaces that go beyond what even Democratic members of Congress can muster.
Another right-wing content creator who was present for the Minneapolis law enforcement operation is Brooke Jones who tweets on X as @brookerteejones. Jones primarily posts her content from California and occasionally from Chicago, but yet somehow she was also in Minneapolis at the right time.
The Minneapolis City Council has already voted unanimously 12-0 to launch an independent audit of Tuesday’s federal raid in Minneapolis so that the public will have an “after-action report” that hopefully clarifies beyond what we can know today. However, I do think that a significant part of the story is not just the deliberate display of military weapons and military armored personnel carriers by federal authorities, but the use of disinformation as a weapon.
The disproportionate and overly militarized response appears to be deliberately designed to provoke a reaction, which right wing content creators will depict as an “overreaction.” Eventually, the characterization of the crowd’s response as an overreaction will then become the judgment of more mainstream news sources who won’t even realize how they are laundering more right-wing content.
It’s a very pernicious pattern. The government is deliberately unclear with people with the goal of creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Then, when opponents of the government accidentally make understandable but minor errors because the government is deliberately withholding information or creating confusion, those errors are used to discredit the opposition.
The sad part is that it doesn’t even have to be particularly sophisticated for it to work. I have uncovered the involvement of AK Kamara, Nick Shirley, and Brooke Jones, but unless you’re a highly online person, none of these people are household names. They are lower-tier content creators at best. But you don’t high-level, elite media to pull something like this off. YouTube, TikTok, and other social media have made it ridiculously expensive to create a disinformation out of thin air. The problem is that the Trump Administration would rather harness this disinformation as a mode of social control than in keeping the public informed.