Minneapolis’ Hotel Workers Are on Edge

There are two things keeping a Minneapolis hotel housekeeper scared this week: the roughly 20 federal immigration agents staying where she works and the threat of pro-immigrant protesters discovering that the agents are there.

“I’m worried that the protesters will show up here and make a mess,” she told NOTUS in an interview. “Did you see what happened at the other hotel?” she asked, referencing the nearby Home2 Suites lobby that protesters trashed Sunday night, breaking things and spray painting “ICE OUT” and “ICE KILLS” on the glass front doors.

“It’s frightening. I understand that they’re trying to support us,” she said. “What can we do? Everything’s gone wrong.”

Hotels temporarily housing federal immigration officers are becoming national flashpoints. Just this week, dozens of protestors were arrested in New York City in the lobby of a Hilton, which protesters said was accommodating ICE. And in Minneapolis, more than 40 protesters were arrested Wednesday outside the Graduate Hotel. Another man was arrested in Portland, Maine, on Tuesday when dozens protested at a Marriott where they believed agents were staying.

NOTUS visited half a dozen hotels across Minneapolis this week, conducting interviews in Spanish and speaking to concierges and cleaning staff to hear from those caught between their customers and protesters. All said that, so far, federal agents staying at their hotels have been respectful — but each one said they had been shaken to the core when some agent inevitably asks, “Where are you from?”

“Why would they ask that? That’s not small talk,” said a second woman at another location, who said she now tries to book all federal agents staying at her hotel in rooms grouped together on the upper floors, to keep them from terrifying guests and to minimize interactions with staff.

Everyone who spoke to NOTUS asked not to be identified by name. But all hotel staffers described the same pattern: Federal agents leave the hotels before dawn in plain clothes, typically lugging around conspicuous black duffel bags, only to return after dusk in the same fashion. Those agents take white shuttle buses that ferry them back and forth to the Whipple Federal Building. The building has become the operations center and a makeshift jail for citizen and noncitizen detainees, according to protesters who’ve been stationed outside there for days and have been monitoring their movements.

At a third hotel, a concierge told NOTUS half the cleaning staff stopped showing up for work when federal agents descended on the city in December. To protect the remaining three housekeepers from getting pulled over by deportation patrols on their commute in each morning, the hotel’s maintenance technician took it upon himself to be their carpool chauffeur — and the hotel is now paying the man extra hours for that work, the concierge said.

But two housekeepers there said the work is still overwhelming, because three employees are making up for four missing coworkers.

“How are they earning money? What are they going to eat?” one housekeeper said.

The fear is palpable. The second woman who spoke to NOTUS said there are constant reminders that hotel staff are at risk, mentioning how earlier on Tuesday federal agents had detained a valet at a nearby hotel.

The first woman, a foreign-born naturalized U.S. citizen, resents how her undocumented coworkers spend their days cleaning the rooms of agents who are “hunting down their family members.”

“When I see them in the hallways, they avert their gaze,” she said of the federal agents in her hotel. “They know what they’re doing is shameful. They’re nearly all Hispanic, but they don’t speak Spanish! They’re the children of illegals. But they forgot where they came from.”

A third woman at yet another hotel, who’s undocumented, said she observed what she called the “typical” racial labor dynamic: a few polite white supervisors commanding Latino men.

“The supervisors are respectful. The agents — they aren’t really officers. These are delinquents,” she said.

This third woman said she feels insulted at the way the Trump administration describes immigrants like her as “freeloaders.”

“I understand the argument that people shouldn’t be a load on the government. But I’m not. I’m a single mom who goes to work and supports herself. I don’t even qualify for free day care, because I was told I earn too much. I just want the government to leave me alone so I could work,” she said.

She said she was concerned Minneapolis has become something of a ghost town since federal agents moved in, and that the experience has weighed heavily on her 7-year-old son, who is now taken to school by a family friend who feels safer driving in public. She said her son cries every day because he’s worried his mom won’t come home from work.

The pair of housekeepers at the third hotel said managers offered the cleaning staff the opportunity to live at the hotel for free to avoid commuting, but the workers declined. They worried that it would only bring them and their children closer to the federal agents.

The Department of Homeland Security waved off the concerns from hotel staff.

“Get a grip. DHS law enforcement holds themselves to the highest level of professional standards,” the agency told NOTUS in an unsigned statement in response to questions.

“Those who are not here illegally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear. Those choosing to fearmonger by distorting reality are doing a great disservice to our country and are responsible for violence against our officers.”

The third woman said federal agents at her hotel are subsisting on microwavable bowls of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, because it’s become so difficult for them to find restaurants willing to serve them.

Trump administration border czar Tom Homan alluded to that when he spoke publicly on Thursday about the toll it’s taken on agents’ well-being, saying that “they’ve been ‘in theater’ a long time,” — using a term that specifically refers to soldiers’ tours in a war.

“Day after day, they can’t eat in restaurants. Day after day having people spit on you, blow whistles at you. … They’re human,” Homan said.

The Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge has flooded Minneapolis and St. Paul with what Homan estimated at 3,000 agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol, housing them at hotels across the region. Local demonstrators have begun to identify these locations and organize impromptu protests where people beat drums, blow whistles and scream.

The scene played out on the street below a Marriott SpringHill Suites on Monday night, where the city of Maple Grove barricaded the hotel with city-owned snowplows and city police in riot gear quickly dispersed the protesters. Federal agents in shorts taunted the demonstrators below, with one bending over and waving his butt while protesters stood in the snow.

The Trump administration’s decision this week to put Homan in charge came with the offer of a potential drawdown in security forces. Homan told reporters Thursday that “rotations happen all the time to get people out of here to go home, get some rest, and see their families,” and he added that there would be “hopefully less now” if local officials agree to cooperate with federal demands.

But some hotel staff are taking matters into their own hands. The concierge at the third hotel said he has been periodically blocking government attempts to rebook another block of rooms weeks ahead of time, telling them that the hotel is at capacity.

“We’re pushing them along,” he said.