Commentary: Emilia Gonzalez Avalos Speaks About Human Rights Violations Report

June 18 — Human Rights Watch unveiled a 180-page report today that offered testimony, data, and recommendations in response to human rights violations and immigration enforcement abuses from the Trump administration’s deployment of thousands of federal immigration agents to Minnesota between December 2025 and March 2026.

The report, “‘A Manufactured Crisis’: Minnesota Communities Terrorized by the Federal Government,” was the result of Human Rights Watch interviews with more than 130 people — immigrants, human rights defenders, lawyers, healthcare providers, educators, current and former government officials, and others with first-hand knowledge of Operation Metro Surge and its impact — as well as other documentation from videos, photos, media reports, public health records, and more.

The report will be unpacked here with other supplemental information in the coming days. The following are comments made by Unidos MN executive director Emilia González Avalos during a panel discussion about the report held at the University of Minnesota. It is related to our ongoing “250 Years” series.

 

 

Comments by Emilia González Avalos

 

“My job in this panel is not to give you more numbers, it’s to help give you their meaning and the mandate that follows from them, because the report has a title that tells you everything: a manufactured crisis. So, let us be precise about what was manufactured.”

Somali neighbors were slandered as a pretext to send 3,000 federal agents, to the Twin Cities. “Our own Attorney General said it plainly — not for safety, but for retribution.”

She notes that what is not manufactured in the report are the expressions of grief and trauma, including the deaths of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents, as well as Victor Diaz, who died in ICE custody. Children in hiding were forced to miss classroom settings, people held at the Whipple building were denied lawyers, a federal judge’s court orders were broken, again and again. “That was real. That was a crisis, and it was done to us by a government sworn to protect us. This report is the record.”

In a federal government report of 94 pages, there were “two words they could not stop using. One was conspiracy, the other one was propaganda. They looked at neighbors speaking, neighbors raising money for one another, neighbors photographing license plates, and called that propaganda. They called community defense a criminal enterprise.”

She indicated that the federal government report is not pointing blame because organizing failed, but “because organizing worked. … When you do not want people to see your hand, you make them look somewhere else. They want our eyes in the courtrooms in Minnesota, the 15 names [of protestors detained this week in Minnesota], the spectacle of a trial, so that our eyes are not on the cages. So let us look at the cages.”

González Avalos noted that people held in the Whipple Building without access to lawyers were often deported to Texas and Louisiana without due process. She said 30 people died in ICE custody in 2025, and physicians determined 95 percent of those deaths were preventable. “Nearly three out of four have never been convicted of any crime. They were not dangerous. They were sick and they were ignored until they died.” Government news releases merely indicated that a human being was “an illegal alien who passed away.”

She also noted that there have been many cases of sexual abuse happening in immigration detention, with only a small fraction investigated. “Pregnant women were left to sleep on concrete floors at a single facility in California. In a single year, there were seven reports of rape. The private company that runs [that facility] decide whether or not to investigate itself. Government quietly ordered that every pregnant migrant girl in custody be sent to one facility in one town in Texas — a facility [that already had been cited for] failing to care for pregnant children — more than a dozen girls, some of them 13 years old, at least half of them pregnant because they had been raped, sent on purpose to a state where they could not get the care they needed. … Every headline about a conspiracy in Minneapolis is a headline that is not about a 13 year old in Texas.”

She said the government is sorting people — “the protesters and the people they will cage. … You do not have to agree with how someone resists an occupation to defend their right to resist.”

González Avalos quoted Alice Walker: “The most common way people give out their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

 

She pointed out that the federal government has organized billions of dollars for illegal actions. “We have organized people, which has beat organized money every time it has mattered in this country. They have a federal army; we have a movement that does not disband when the cameras leave. They have a Supreme Court clearing their path; we have the court of public opinion, and in that court, the people are the jury. They use their power to silence; we use the Constitution to be free and to stay free.”

“This year, they will dress themselves in white, red, and blue, and ask us to celebrate 250 years of America. So let us read our own founding document: 250 years ago, people declared independence from [the British] government. These are their words, not mine. ‘Send hither swarms of officers to harass our people, a government that kept standing armies without the consent of our legislatures, a government that made the military superior to civil power.'”

She noted that the swarm of government officers the United States declared independence from in 1776 is what the U.S. government is now disavowing. “The founders called that tyranny, and they signed their names to resisting it.”

With today’s government, “They called us the criminals, but they pardoned 1,500 people who stormed the Capitol and then reached into public treasury to pay them. They called us violent, but they sent 3,000 armed agents into our neighborhoods. They called us illegal aliens. They say we eat dogs. They branded our Somali neighbors terrorists. Every name they threw at us was a mirror. The lawlessness was never ours. The violence was never ours. We were the ones holding the Constitution. They were the ones breaking it.”

“Let us be the verdict in this 250 years. Let us be clear about which side of that founding promise we stand on. They have the army; we have the people. They have the pardons; we have the truth. And now we have it in writing [in this report]. They manufacture a crisis; we are creating architecture for a movement. When they send their swarms [of agents], we send each other. When they write 94 pages to frighten us into silence, we read it out loud together, and then we go and organize.

“This country does not get to turn 250 years and call itself free until it’s finally [acknowledged] the people it keeps trying to erase. So, my message against those who use political repression is this: we will be standing here together long after the storms are gone. This is how Minnesota answered. This is how America will continue to answer. And this is how a country finally becomes worth its 250 years.”

Find the report here

 

To support our ability to cover this movement: