Here & Gone is a public archive of art and signs that memorialize where ICE abducted neighbors
Here & Gone is a public archive of art and signs that memorialize where ICE abducted neighbors
Embedded Files
Since Operation Metro Surge began in late 2025, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) has detained at least 4,000 people in Minnesota. Community members have marked the sites of these detentions in crowd-sourced databases that map ICE activity. They have also commemorated them more creatively with art and signage. These spontaneous memorials– often made of paper, pen, or paint– are vulnerable to time and weather. Here & Gone collects photos of these ephemeral memorials and maps them on to a publicly-available archive.
As public historians, we understand Operation Metro Surge as embedded in a larger context of historical and ongoing violence and oppression. We recognize the value of mapping this archive at a local scale for community members who have relationships to Minnesota and its neighborhoods, but we also believe that the experience and response of communities here can inform solidarities across the US and beyond.
Marking History and Making Meaning
Marking History and Making Meaning
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This archive is crowd-sourced, and all submitted photos will be made part of the public domain. Public domain works belong to everyone and no one. These photos are shared cultural and intellectual items that are free for anyone to use, copy, modify, distribute, or build upon without charge or permission. Here & Gone was co-founded by a group of public historians at the University of Minnesota, but the archive is built by and for the public. Our hope is that this archive will engage and benefit communities beyond the university, beyond this moment.
For the Community By the Community
For the Community By the Community
For many these memorials do more than document the site of an abduction, they stand as symbols against the deportation of beloved neighbors, they make visible the absence of community members, they mark our grief and our love. Abductions are not endpoints, the absences they create leave marks on their communities and these commemorations can help us understand their afterlives. Communities build collective memory through memorialization, they make claims about who belongs in this place. These memorials demand our attention; they call us to remember. Powered by contributors like you, Here & Gone seeks to build an archive that honors and amplifies this call.
Where are we coming from? What questions motive this project?
We are a group of public historians interested in global migration history. While the primary purpose is to build a crowd-sourced archive for collective use, we are also holding open questions about how Operation Metro Surge and local memory work relate to longer histories of migration and memorialization efforts across the globe. What does mapping tell us about local communities? How does local community response connect to how communities across the world have responded to immigration enforcement? What can a map tell us about how local communities define who belongs there? How can mapping signs in a neighborhood inform national or global historiographies of migration?
Read more about how we are grounding our work:
You told me,
I wouldn’t disappear you.
I sweep the dirt pretty for you.
sprinkle the Earth you walk on with star shine
I want you to feel that you belong
that you can be soft
that you can be still
-Junauda Petrus, Poet Laureate of Minneapolis
from South Side, Soft Side
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