The

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at Death Panel underscore. I'm Beatrice Adler Bolton, and today I'm joined by returning guest

and dear friend of the panel, Melissa Jira Grant. Melissa is a journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker. As a staff writer at the New

Republic, she has produced an essential body of reporting covering the intersections of gender,

sexuality, race, health, reproductive justice, and the so-called law with particular focus

through the last few years on legal and legislative attacks on trans life and abortion in the U.S. Melissa is the author of the book, Playing the Horror, the Work of Sex Work, Published by Verso, and is working on her next book, which is forthcoming from Little Brown called A Woman is Against the Law, Sex, Race, and the limits of justice in America. Melissa, welcome back to the death panel and honor as ever to have you join us on the show.

Hey, B. There's no one else I'd rather talk to right now about all of this. Likewise. And, you know, so in some ways today, folks, this is going to be, I guess, a little bit of an unusual episode. I had initially reached out to Melissa to talk to her about reporting that she did in December for the New Republic about resistance to ICE in Chicago. And we're going to talk about that. And we're also going to be talking about some of her recent reporting on Minneapolis. Because as January began, things started really heating up in Minneapolis. The federal government has launched a major immigration enforcement push into Minnesota generally that is historically unprecedented at scale.

What authorities are calling Operation Metro Surge has brought thousands of ICE, customs and border protection officers, and other Department of Homeland Security agents into the Minneapolis-St. Paul and suburbs area.

And the official frame is that

this is a crackdown on alleged fraud and immigration violations, quote unquote, which is the

narrative that's being used to justify the presence of essentially an armed occupying force on the

city streets throughout every neighborhood, pretty much blanketing public space. And as we'll talk

about, this is being driven by also these historic levels of funding that have been recently

siphoned off of social welfare programs like Medicaid and directly injected into ice.

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