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How Phone-Camera Vérité Defeated Action-Flick Propaganda in the War to Define Minneapolis
Photo by Scott Meslow As both a resident of Minneapolis and a film and TV critic, it’s been surreal to see my home city become, over the past few weeks, the kind of place you might see in an especially on-the-nose dystopian satire. As thousands of armed, masked ICE agents roam the streets, in SUVs or on foot, everyday Minnesotans have stepped forward to protect their communities. In the aftermath of horrible disasters, survivors often describe the events they witnessed as being like “something out of a movie.”
Here, as the ICE occupation stretches week after week, with no meaningful de-escalation and no clear end in sight, the movie has become exhaustingly overlong. I walk through empty city streets, past shuttered restaurants, to knock on the locked door of a local burger joint, which is vetting any diners before they’ll open the door. I drop my children off at school alongside parents who have essentially become volunteer security guards, standing at bus stops and doors in case ICE agents arrive. I hear car horns or whistles and know that an ICE convoy must be nearby.
Even if you’re not in Minneapolis, it’s very possible that none of that is news to you, because the narratives emerging from the city have finally broken the Trump administration’s grip on the national conversation about immigration. Anyone following this story knows that the clearest portrait of ICE terrorizing Minneapolis isn’t coming from the federal government, the state government, or even the journalists on the ground. It’s coming from the legions of everyday Minnesotans who are filming ICE’s actions using their cell phones, essentially becoming documentarians in service of a single, vital goal: to tell the truth.
This is a phenomenon that has been playing out, in one form or another, since 2011, when videos spread over social media captured on-the-ground protests in countries like Egypt and Syria—and even here in Minneapolis, where a high school student filmed the 2020 murder of George Floyd, ultimately winning an honorary Pulitzer for her role as a citizen journalist shedding light on police brutality. But until recently, it looked like the Department of Homeland Security’s own propaganda arm might be the most dominant chronicler of Donald Trump’s second presidential term. With the full-throated support of the Trump administration, the government agency has been using its official government social media accounts to post ghastly supercuts designed to venerate ICE agents and humiliate their detainees. One, set to the theme song of the popular anime Pokémon, sneered that ICE has “gotta catch ‘em all.” Another, posted on the White House’s official social media channels, reappropriated a riff from Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno” without the singer’s permission, prompting the singer to hit back at the Trump administration as “disgusting and evil.”
No one would mistake these videos for art, but they do share a distinctly Trumpian aesthetic. They are unapologetically garish, morally repugnant, and obviously designed to appeal to the always-online gang of trolls—for whom everything seems to be buried in several layers of irony—who helped propel Trump to a second term.
Faced with an administration wielding the full force of federal power to, essentially, troll people on the internet, liberals were caught largely flat-footed. Clips of earnest speeches by Democratic politicians and impassioned monologues from the Daily Show set seemed hopelessly overmatched—a relic from a bygone era when “When they go low, we go high” seemed like it might be enough to contain the MAGA movement. Over the past year, horrifying stories have regularly emerged from DHS detention facilities, but the administration’s eagerness to let ICE operate in the shadows—without political, journalistic, or even public oversight—meant those stories were often rendered in text or after-the-fact video interviews, draining some power from their most visceral and immediate details.
But the sheer aggression of Operation Metro Surge—the warzone-like name given by the Department of Homeland Security to the scheme that sent thousands of armed, masked ICE agents into the Twin Cities metro area—has, in just a few weeks, tipped the advantage toward those who oppose ICE and its tactics. If the war isn’t over yet, the legions of protestors and observers in Minnesota have won a major battle.
Their primary tool has been the smartphone. Ironically enough—at a time when concerns about AI deep-fakes are, understandably, at an all-time high—it is the intimacy, immediacy, and breadth of these self-shot videos that have broken through to the mainstream, giving outsiders unfiltered snapshot after unfiltered snapshot about what it’s really like on the ground in Minneapolis.
The result is the inverse of a panopticon: an army of protestors, wielding cameras to collectively surveil a stubbornly non-transparent band of masked government agents. A talented editor could probably compile a remarkably coherent documentary about Operation Metro Surge just by cobbling together publicly available clips filmed by the hundreds and hundreds of observers wielding cell phones.
Their footage, taken collectively, tells a story—one that directly challenges the Trump administration’s narrative, which insists that ICE is in Minneapolis to make things safer and that anyone who challenges them is a domestic terrorist. After the killing of Renee Good, the Trump administration’s official narrative was that she was a domestic terrorist who attempted to run down an ICE agent with her car. Unconvincing as it was on its face, that narrative was obliterated by subsequent angles, which made it clear that the agent was well out of the path of Good’s car.
A similar pattern played out in the subsequent killing of Alex Pretti, described by border control commander Greg Bovino as a man who intended to “massacre law enforcement.” Videos of Pretti’s killing quickly confirmed that the actual events didn’t line up with that story: Pretti never removed his gun from his holster, and an ICE agent took it from Pretti just before two of his fellow agents fired rounds into the back of a man who had, by any reasonable estimation, already been subdued.
Bovino came to prominence in part by embracing the shock-and-awe approach, using his X account to post heavy metal-set supercuts of ICE in action that wouldn’t look out of place in a Michael Bay movie. But it’s impossible to watch these selectively edited videos alongside those shot by ordinary citizens and feel ICE is doing anything but obscuring the truth. On a pure filmmaking level, the sneering videos released by DHS are as slick and disposable as any quick-and-dirty TikTok video designed to capture a captive audience’s attention for 60-odd seconds. But that simple narrative of good soldiers vs. evil criminals has been challenged, and finally undone entirely, because of the sheer amateurism of the cinema verite–like bystander videos that have gone viral. At some point, not even the full, propagandistic might of the federal government can compete with these collective glimpses of unbroken reality.
In that torrent of videos from protestors and observers, a consistent portrait of ICE has emerged. It is, unlike the Trump administration’s rah-rah propaganda, an unimpressive and sometimes disturbing one. ICE agents who slipped on the actual ice in Minneapolis have become a stand-in for the officers’ buffoonery and lack of preparedness. An ICE agent who smugly informed a legally protected observer in Maine that she would be added to “a nice little database” of domestic terrorists has become a stand-in for ICE’s Orwellian overreach. And the recent video of an ICE agent—unmasked, for once—warning a protester “you raise your voice, I erase your voice” feels like a new slogan for an organization that seems arrogant, eager for violence, and unconcerned with stomping on constitutional rights. And these are just the videos that went viral. For anyone who cares to see what ICE is up to on any given day, there are brave, self-deputized filmmakers ready with cameras in real time.
This is how a cultural narrative changes: By chipping away, bit by bit, at the veneer to show what’s actually happening underneath. You can see that the Trump administration knows and cares enough about optics to recognize when a change in strategy is needed; Bovino has been replaced in Minneapolis by Tom Homan, whose goals are similar but whose style is significantly less flamboyant. But it will be hard to shake a portrait that has already been painted so clearly by my fellow residents: the many, many amateur documentarians of Minnesota.
