24-Foot Quilt of 11,000 Patches Memorializes Minnesotans Disappeared by ICE

Activists unfurled a 24-foot-long quilt protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) violence at the Minnesota State Capitol on Tuesday, September 22. The "Stolen Neighbors" quilt consists of 11,000 individual patches, each representing a person disappeared by ICE in the state. Dozens of volunteers stitched it together over five months.

MIRAC member Owen Lubozynski told Hyperallergic that discussions with fellow activists inspired the project. The goal was to keep people — including key Minnesota lawmakers — engaged after Operation Metro Surge, President Trump's deployment of more than 3,000 Minnesota officers and ICE agents across the state this past year.

The operation turned deadly. ICE agents shot three people, according to the source. Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were murdered on camera while protesting ICE presence in the Twin Cities. Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant, was shot in the leg and survived.

"We wanted to resist a return to normalcy while Minnesotans were still being quietly terrorized," Lubozynski told Hyperallergic. "I thought one way to do that would be to create a visual representation of every stolen neighbor, one that was impossible to ignore."

The unveiling carried its own improvisational drama. Members of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC) had originally intended to hang the quilt over the Capitol mezzanine. Once inside the building, they realized it was too long and risked striking light fixtures. They adjusted.

The activists slowly unfolded the quilt horizontally across the rotunda floor instead, chanting "stand up, fight back" as it spread. A few representatives looked on from the balcony above. Supporters wearing inflatable frog suits stood around them in solidarity.

The quilt's scale is its argument. At 11,000 patches — one for each person disappeared by ICE in Minnesota — the work converts an abstract statistic into a physical mass that a rotunda floor can barely contain. Whether the lawmakers who watched from the balcony respond remains the test the organizers have now set for themselves.