Charlie Triballeau/ Getty Images
Operation Metro Surge has traumatized Minneapolis. “Witness Project” seeks to preserve and share your stories about this occupation. What encounters with ICE stick with you and why? How did your actions impact your friends and neighbors? Has this trauma personally impacted your health and welfare? Your anonymous responses will be collected and shared so that others will understand this moment in our collective history.
Record an Audio Story
Share a story by recording your voice
Submit a Written Story
Share a story to be read aloud by an actor
Quotes from Submissions
“When ICE started coming to the city I suddenly felt my health decline severely, I became a shell of the person I was […] I had to drop out of school.”
“I was tear gassed just 10 minutes from where I live at the site where Alex was killed. It all has been devastating.”
“It is tragic that the deaths of compassionate individuals became a turning point. […] I can’t help but ask: where was this same energy when my people and other BIPOC were being targeted and killed?”
Objectives and Outcomes
Witness Project will have two outcomes. First will be a publicly available anthology of your audio and text submissions as well as the text of in-person interviews. The second will be an artwork publicly available at a local cinema that explores the emotional power of your stories.
Victor J Blue / Bloomberg
Compiling your anonymous responses into an archive will allow us to better understand each other and help us heal. Recording them now is vital to preserving your thoughts and feelings while they are fresh. The stories we collect will be compiled and released publicly as an audio anthology. This community has an experience that should be processed, preserved, and shared – not only as an expression of our own trauma, but as a resource for others in resisting fascism globally.
Our Private Cinema, Gerald Smith, 2025
If the “eyes are the windows to the soul”, what might they reveal in the eyes of masked federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis and St. Paul? Perhaps they showed suspicion, intimidation, ridicule, hatred, and malice. What were your eyes saying in return?
This project will curate a selection of your stories about facing the eyes of those menacing agents. These stories will be audibly reenacted by professional actors and listened to by volunteers whose own masked emotional eyes will be videotaped and presented in a cinematic venue.