Not on Native land

Indigenous leaders, clergy and immigrant rights advocates gathered outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building on Feb. 7, 2026 for a human rights rally and prayer. The event was co-organized by Rev. Jim Bear Jacobs of Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light, who said he was there “to lift up prayer and ceremony for our relatives who are being inhumanely detained up here on sacred land.”

The Whipple Building has served as headquarters for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) “Operation Metro Surge.”

“When we heard that people are being detained here, at the Whipple Building at Fort Snelling, so many of us as Indigenous people automatically started grieving,” said scholar and historian Dr. Kate Beane. After the Dakota War of 1862, about 1,700 Dakota women, children and elders were removed from the Lower Agency in Southwestern Minnesota and “force marched” to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling.

“The trauma of being told that Indigenous people and our immigrant relatives were being detained at the same location… the land remembers,” said Beane. “We’re going to be here for them. We’re gonna welcome them home. And we’re gonna fight for them.”

Beane’s grandfather died and was likely buried in a mass grave at this location. “We don’t know where his body is today,” she said.

For co-organizer Dr. Kelly Sherman-Conroy – associate pastor at All Nations Indian Church who is a proud member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe and a descendant of the Santee Dakota – this is personal.

“I am a descendant of Dakota families who were imprisoned where we are standing,” she said. Her grandmother was among the 1,700 women, children and elderly who were forcibly removed from their homes and made to live at Fort Snelling.

“This place remembers that. This place lives in my family, it lives in my body, it lives in this land,” said Sherman-Conroy. Her family was also part of the Dakota 38, the men who were hanged in Mankato, in one of the largest mass state executions in U.S. history. They were executed not because justice was served, but because the state wanted removal, control and silence, she said.

“When I speak today, I speak as someone who’s very existence was never supposed to happen.… There was a time in this country when everything about Native people was illegal. Our languages were illegal. Our prayers were illegal. Our gatherings were illegal. Our children were punished for remembering who they were. Their goal was erasure. And yet, we still survived,” said Sherman-Conroy to loud cheers from the crowd.

Her people’s survival didn’t happen by accident, she explained. It happened because her ancestors prayed when prayer was forbidden, remembered when remembering was dangerous and carried the songs, stories, ceremonies and responsibilities forward “even when the cost was unbearable.”

“My very breath is the answer to prayers carried through generations,” she said. “Indigenous people are still here because our ancestors believed that someday their children would stand again on this land – breathing, speaking, praying, remembering that our presence today is proof that erasure failed.”
The significance of this moment for many Native people is profound.

“What we are witnessing now, what we are seeing - the detention the forced removal, the separation, the state violence – is not new. It’s a different time, it’s a different language, but it’s the same story,” said Sherman-Conroy. “What our federal government is doing right now is not making us safer. It does not make anyone safer. What it does do is reveal how fragile power can become when it is confronted by a moral conscience.”

Even Bishop Henry Whipple himself would most certainly be offended by how a building bearing his name was being used. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, Whipple was viewed in 1862 as a leader by individuals and organizations concerned with the “Indians’ welfare,” urging that they be dealt with honestly, justly and humanely. In appeals to the president and press, Whipple expressed his opposition to wholesale executions and extermination or deportation of the Dakota (“Episcopal bishop denounces ICE’s ‘Campaign of Terror’” in the online version of this article).

Its location and the land surrounding it, including Coldwater Spring and the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, is held sacred by the Oceti Šakowin (Seven Councils Fire).

“Remember that this is Dakota land. Bde Mdewakanton Dakota land. Remember that we never gave this land up. And we never will. And one of these days, we’re gonna get this land back,” said Beane.

As of Feb. 4, the White House claimed on its website to have arrested more than 4,000 “criminal illegal aliens” in the Twin Cities metro area during the surge. However, as witnessed by observers, many U.S. citizens (including journalists), people without criminal records, as well as refugees seeking asylum through legal proceedings, have been arrested and detained.

On Feb. 12, Border Czar Tom Homan announced that Operation Metro Surge was ending. On Feb. 13, the City of Minneapolis emailed a newsletter to residents that placed a monetary cost of DHS actions to residents and city operations.

“In one month alone – while up to 3,000 federal immigration enforcement agents invaded neighborhoods – the city experienced an impact of at least $203.1 million. That money represents losses to the economy, community livelihoods, residents’ mental health, food and places to live,” it read. It does not account for the trauma imposed on families who have been separated, the loss of the lives of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, who were fatally shot on Minneapolis streets, nor of Victor Manuel Diaz, who died after being sent from Minnesota to a detention camp in Texas.

At the Feb. 7 rally, 4,000 prayer ties were given to the crowd, who then tied them onto the chain link fence to honor those who have been detained.