Antonia Hylton: ‘It Is Hyper Political … Minnesota Has a Relatively Small Population of Undocumented People’

RUSH EXCERPT:

HYLTON: “It is hyper political. I mean, we knew that from the choice to target Minnesota in this way, because Minnesota has actually a relatively small population of undocumented people and the Somali community there, that has they were sort of the beginning pretext for this whole thing. 90% of them have legal status or citizenship. So this idea that they were a community where, you know, it made sense to send federal agents, thousands of them there, to harass people of that particular background, never made sense to journalists, to longtime residents, organizers on the ground. But the truth is, this kind of political decision making around immigration has been around for a long time. I spent the early part of my career during the first Trump Administration covering immigration, and I was I spent a lot of my time in Texas and the rumor, and it wasn’t really a rumor. It was just sort of what everybody knew about the way the state functioned. There was that a lot of powerful businessmen, people in construction, agriculture in Texas, had relationships with the White House and were kind of like, hey, please leave us alone. Pick somewhere else to do your raids. Pick somewhere else to do. I mean, we’re happy for you to do your your photo op at the border and in front of the wall. But please stay away from our construction sites. That was a known thing, and that it was sort of flowing through Abbott all the way up to the federal government. And so this has been going on for a while now, steph, Minnesota is sort of the the escalation though of a pattern and sort of behind the scenes reality that”