Just two days before facing expulsion from a local Signal chat group, I encountered Will Stancil at a lively gathering in the Uptown Minneapolis VFW. The event, hosted by Representative Ilhan Omar, served as a gratitude gala for Minnesotans who have actively opposed ICE operations. The atmosphere was vibrant, filled with tacos, drinks, and dancing, although Stancil himself wasn’t seen on the dance floor. A friend of mine, familiar with Stancil’s work on school desegregation, was surprised by my knowledge of him. She was unaware of his contentious online persona, marked by clashes with leftists on Bluesky and disputes with white supremacists on X. Interestingly, some of his former adversaries now reluctantly view him as an antihero, particularly due to his recent encounters with ICE, where he’s been known to get tear-gassed.

During our meeting, Stancil, who looks remarkably youthful, was in conversation with Brad Lander, former New York City comptroller. Lander had traveled to Minneapolis to observe the local reactions to federal presence. Stancil, ever the open book, invited Lander to join one of his ICE patrols, an activity locals refer to as “commuting.” He extended the same offer to me. This openness with the media led to Stancil’s removal from the Signal group chat, where other commuters prefer to keep a low profile. Stancil has interacted with journalists from numerous esteemed outlets, including CNN, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Economist, and now The Verge.

Stancil’s “commuting” aims to document ICE’s misconduct. Equipped with just a phone camera, he records what many describe as “abductions” by federal agents, often facing violent pushback. Despite being pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed several times, he continues to post about these incidents. Critics argue that Stancil’s actions might be more self-serving, potentially positioning him for another political run after his unsuccessful 2024 State House bid. He denies these claims, insisting his efforts aren’t about personal attention. Additionally, some accuse him of poor operational security, potentially endangering himself and others involved.

The next morning, before dawn, I met Stancil alongside Jack, my photographer, who had been covering Minneapolis for a couple of action-packed weeks. The city was slowly awakening as we made our way from the quiet downtown area to Stancil’s Uptown apartment, passing only a few early risers, likely school patrollers judging by their neon vests. Stancil awaited us in his gray Honda Fit, eager to discuss the intricacies of the Signal chats.

I met Stancil before sunrise the next morning, along with Jack, my photographer who had been in Minneapolis for an action-packed two weeks. The city was just waking up. I saw few people on the street on the short drive from the cultural void that is Downtown Minneapolis to Stancil’s apartment Uptown, and most of those I saw were, I assumed based on their neon safety vests, school patrollers. Stancil was waiting for us, idling in his gray Honda Fit. He really wanted to talk about the Signal chats.

“They said, ‘You broke the rule. The rule is no press ever.’ I said, ‘No one’s ever told me that rule before.’ Then they said, ‘You discussed publicly that you were getting kicked out, and that’s breaking the rules.’” Stancil asked for an appeal. The response, he said, was a shrug emoji. The opacity bothered Stancil. So did the way some of his fellow commuters — his neighbors! — were treating this whole thing. “It’s not a guerrilla organization,” he said. “People want to run it that way, all secrecy and cloak-and-dagger, but the reason it works is because there’s so many people doing it.”

We were in unfamiliar territory. That this wasn’t Stancil’s turf was clear. At one point, he took a left when he should’ve taken a right, and Jack had to tell him Cleveland Avenue was actually the other way. A few minutes later, Stancil went the wrong way down a one-way street, accidentally maneuvering us into oncoming traffic. Stancil’s driving was, for the most part, erratic. He pushed the Honda Fit to its limits, speeding to beat yellow lights and running red ones. “It’s a very Minneapolitan thing,” he told me, “to be like, ‘I’m chasing a federal agent but there’s a yellow light. Oh no, I have to stop!’”

Minnesotans are a polite, rule-following bunch, and they regard traffic laws with quasi-religious reverence. When I visited in 2024 for the state fair, I was simultaneously shocked and delighted by multiple pieces of seed art dedicated to one highway adage: “merge like a zipper, you’ll get there quicker.” ICE agents were identifiable by their disregard for the rules of the road, to make no mention of their unfamiliarity with wintry streets. But commuters had started driving erratically, too — Stancil especially. How would they ever catch up to ICE otherwise?

It was a slow day. We drove around Southside for an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and ICE sightings across the neighborhood were sporadic. There was none of the action Stancil had grown accustomed to seeing. On a ride-along with a reporter a week earlier, Stancil had run into ICE almost immediately after getting on the road and was tear-gassed within minutes of exiting the car. We were, depending on how you look at it, either lucky or unlucky. We drove and drove and nothing happened, giving Stancil plenty of time to talk about previous interactions he’s had with ICE, arrests he’s witnessed, and, of course, about his ejection from the Signal chat.

Every few minutes he’d interrupt himself mid-sentence to listen to the Signal call or focus on a particularly ICE-looking car. An SUV with tinted windows aroused suspicion until we saw the driver: he was alone and smoking a cigarette, so he probably wasn’t a fed. Stancil told me about a Chevy Silverado he’d seen on the street that was “a confirmed ICE vehicle” despite being “highly unconventional.” He had seen it again the previous day while commuting with Brad Lander, who got out of Stancil’s car to greet the two men sitting in the Silverado. “And they just go roaring out of there,” Stancil said, but not before Lander saw the tactical gear they had on. “They’re trying to scope people out or something, because we saw them over and over.” He wanted to see them again today. He wanted to figure out what they were doing. The Silverado was Stancil’s white whale and he was desperate to find it.

We drove past a van that had “NOT ICE” written on it, which could either mean it definitely wasn’t ICE or absolutely was. Agents had reportedly been disguising their cars — adding bumper stickers, installing bike racks — to throw off observers. All this subterfuge had created a culture of paranoia in the Twin Cities and with good reason. Federal officials accused both Renee Good and Alex Pretti of being “domestic terrorists” and suggested that anyone involved in any kind of anti-ICE activity is part of a coordinated criminal operation. Dozens of people have been arrested, some on federal charges, and it’s likely that more are coming: the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed Google, Meta, Discord, and Reddit, asking for the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other information of people who have been tracking ICE.

Will Stancil the person is not dissimilar to Will Stancil the internet personality. Both are frenetic, jumping from topic to topic with an intensity that despite its effortlessness cannot be described as ease. Where Stancil’s online persona seemingly delights in picking and escalating fights with his many critics, the flesh-and-blood Stancil is affable if not necessarily charming. He proffered a kumbaya-esque description of the city’s response to the federal occupation: before ICE came to town, Minneapolis was beset by “horrible factional infighting” between leftists, liberals, and moderates. Now everyone has set their differences aside to vanquish a common enemy. “I know for a fact people who previously hated each other’s guts and are now working together,” he said.

He told me about someone he knows “high up on the moderate Democrat side of things” whose posts now read as if they were written by a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

“Even with me,” Stancil said, “I’ve had people come to me like, ‘You know, I’ve said some things [about you].’ And it’s like, I don’t care. Who cares? I don’t even remember. Set it aside. That’s been nice to see. Hopefully it sticks. It’s been genuinely inspiring to see so many people come together.”

This newfound sense of unity has its limits. Stancil, after all, was removed from the group chat, a point he returned to again and again in our conversation. “One reason I’m a little sad about getting kicked out of the group, and this is corny as all get out, is that there’s something about, they’re coming for my neighbors. They’re coming from my part of town. Over here, the people I see on the street are people I know. Over there, I don’t know them. That’s a really special thing that’s getting a lot of people up in the morning.”

Stancil is exceedingly earnest. He canceled a doctor’s appointment to spend the morning tailing ICE, even in this unfamiliar neighborhood. His outrage at the federal occupation of the Twin Cities is palpable, and in this he is no different from other left-of-center Minnesotans whose politics aren’t exactly radical — he is in some ways, in fact, further to the left than the “Edina wine moms,” in the words of one organizer I met, who have recently found themselves joining the cause — except those other liberal-but-not-leftist Minnesotans tend to keep a low profile both on- and offline, and therefore aren’t getting into fights with socialists and anarchists over things like OPSEC and the efficacy or futility of talking to the media.

Perhaps because of his outsize internet presence, Stancil’s removal from the Signal chat sparked a weeks-long discourse cycle on Bluesky and X that appears to have no end in sight. Throughout it all, Stancil has doubled down. The occupation may have brought together liberals, leftists, and anarchists, but only to a point.

Both on- and offline, people have argued over whether Stancil’s penchant for posting through it — a tendency his supporters consider openness and his detractors consider exhibitionism or perhaps self-centeredness — is detrimental to the cause. The discord has bled out into real life. Some locals I met told me they didn’t have a problem with Stancil letting journalists join him; they had indeed taken me commuting with them. Other organizers told me his antics put everyone at risk. One source said they’d retract their interview if it appeared in the same piece as Stancil’s. And in early February, the week after Stancil and I met, a video circulated online of someone punching Stancil. It’s unclear what led to the confrontation, but the video shows a small group of masked people surrounding Stancil, who mocks his soon-to-be attackers. “Shut up, man. I’ve done so — I’ve done a lot more than you have,” Stancil tells them. “Shut up. Jackass.”

“One thing you’ll hear a lot in left-wing circles is that this proves community policing works,” Stancil said of ICE watches. “I would say the opposite. This is exhausting, inefficient, there’s a lot of false positives, a lot of people get away. It requires massive resources. But we’re only doing it because more traditional mechanisms have broken down here or aren’t available for us. And it has worked because of the scale of it, but you can’t have 5,000 people a day randomly patrolling their neighborhoods. In the long-term, it’s not viable.”

This was one of those slow days that made the whole thing feel futile. We drove in circles in search of ICE and saw nothing, a stillness that implied they were active elsewhere, in another neighborhood or a nearby suburb, even if they weren’t here.

And then he saw the Silverado. I noticed it before he did but wasn’t sure it was the same car — the one he described was green, and this one was a sort of blue, so I said nothing. The Silverado turned left and we turned right and that’s when Stancil saw it. We were in backed-up traffic on a busy two-way road, which Stancil pulled a U-turn in the middle of to get us where we needed to be. The Silverado sped through a light we couldn’t run without getting T-boned, so we waited impatiently as we watched it get away. When the light turned green, Stancil cut off another car in an attempt to catch up. “He’ll think I’m awful rude,” he said, “but that’s okay. I can live with that on my conscience.”