POTTSTOWN — Looking back on his trip last week to Minneapolis to assist activists resisting federal immigration enforcement efforts, Pottstown Councilman Josh Kagi is only now realizing how dangerous a thing it was to do.
He was on a plane leaving Minneapolis when he first saw the news about the killing of protester Alex Pretti by a group of federal agents.
But he also mused on the fact that those resisting the actions of the agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Border Patrol in Minneapolis face that danger on a daily basis.
In addition to representing Ward 5 on borough council, Kagi is also the president of American Baptist Churches USA, an international organization of Baptists based in King of Prussia. It is in this capacity that he answered the call from other religious groups to travel to Minneapolis to witness the ICE immigration enforcement push initiated by President Donald Trump, and to provide relief and support to those resisting it.
And while the trip may have been short, the impact on Kagi has been significant, he told The Mercury after returning.
“The surprise for me was the way the community in Minneapolis has responded,” Kagi said. “This is not as political as many of us have been told. This was people protecting their neighborhood.”
By way of example, he said there is a resident of a largely immigrant neighborhood there who flies a Confederate flag from his house. “But he signed up for a shift, and he walked kids to their door to make sure they got home safely from school, and he stayed there until ICE left,” Kagi recalled.
The Minneapolis community, having endured the unrest and engaged in the protests that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police; are sensitized and loosely organized to respond when what they see as injustice arrives in their town, Kagi said.
“It’s really very organic,” Kagi said he observed during his time there, cut short by the need to get home ahead of the pending arrival of a significant winter storm here in Pennsylvania.
“I was surprised how universal the reaction was. It’s not exactly leaderless, but there are all these small groups. They don’t have regular meetings or anything like that, but they all naturally respond when the need arises and the lesson I took away from that is that this is a community working to build peace.”
“The response, the scale of it, was incredible, and truly inspirational,” he said. “And I suppose there is a certain ‘safety in numbers,’” Kagi said, but as Pretti’s death has made clear, even a preponderance of camera-toting witnesses is no guarantee of protection from harm.
Kagi was among more than 200 faith leaders who were called to a “Selma-like gathering” on Jan. 17 by MARCH (Multifaith Anti-Racism, Change, and Healing), “a Minneapolis-based coalition of multiracial clergy and faith leaders organizing for justice and liberation,” according to the website.
After arriving and being given a tour of the immigrant neighborhoods where ICE has concentrated its efforts, Kagi and those with him and were then trained in the observation, recording and resistance tactics that have been used to such great effect in Minnesota’s largest city.
Many stores in the immigrant neighborhoods were closed, “or their doors were locked, and they would only unlock them for you after they had given you a good looking over,” he said.
And although he did not personally witness any confrontations with ICE while on patrol, others from his group patrolling a few blocks away did.
“They saw a vehicle with out-of-state plates and tinted windows, so they stayed and watched. When a minivan drove up, the vehicle rushed in and blocked it, and then several vehicles rushed in and boxed her in,” Kagi said he was told. “A pregnant woman got out and seven agents surrounded her,” and people from his group “starting blowing their whistles like we were trained to do, to let the neighborhood know something was going on. After about 90 seconds, they left.”
He said those with his group “went over to check on her, and she was shaking, and then they saw she had a child in the back seat.”
“Maintaining that kind of hyper-vigilance 24/7 can be exhausting,” Kagi said, so the prime purpose of those who came to lend a hand was to give those who have been doing it for many days straight a break from their efforts.
“We had about 1,000 faith leaders show up,” he said.
And what happens if Philadelphia and its environs are the next area to be targeted? Kagi said he hopes to see a similar response as the one he saw in Minneapolis and said he would be happy to be involved in providing the kind of training he received.
This week, members of the Philadelphia City Council introduced legislation that could severely restrict the abilities and reach of ICE agents, PATCH reported
The proposed new rules, said to be a direct response to the shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, would prohibit ICE from using unmarked vehicles, wearing masks, using city property for staging raids, and would prohibit city agencies, including police, from collaborating with the federal agency.
