Amelia Schafer
ICT
If you know anything about Minnesota history, then you know about Fort Snelling, said Robert Rice, the owner of Powwow Grounds Coffee Shop.
Fort Snelling was a concentration camp used by the United States during the Dakota Indian Wars to imprison thousands of Dakota and Ho-Chunk people in abysmal conditions.
In early 2026, the Bishop Henry Whipple Building, located in Fort Snelling, Minnesota, emerged as a major center for immigration enforcement detainment processing, but the site has a much longer and more complex history.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration Enforcement Control programs have long used the Whipple building as a headquarters for its operations in the Twin Cities.
In 2019 local residents first raised awareness over concerns regarding its use for detainment.
As historic immigration raids emerged in the city in early 2026, the building has once again become a center for the processing of detained immigrants and in at least two confirmed cases, detained Indigenous people.
Jose Ramirez, Red Lake descendant, said he was held at the site for six hours following a confrontation with immigration officials resulting in his detainment.
Most recently, a Dakota woman was held at the site, council members from the Oglala Sioux Tribe told ICT. Reports have surfaced that four Lakota men were detained and held in Fort Snelling, though the tribe has been working to verify the information.
But prior to the building’s existence in 1965, the Fort Snelling area has long been the site of both creation and genocide for Indigenous people, said Kate Beane, executive director at the Minnesota Museum of American Art.
Bdóte, the place where the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers meet, is a creation site for the Dakota people, said Beane, a Mdewakanton Dakota citizen of the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe and a Muscogee descendant.
But in 1862, during the Dakota Indian Wars, that site was also where the United States constructed Fort Snelling, a concentration camp used to house Dakota and Ho-Chunk people before they were shipped to reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska.
The Whipple building, a federal administrative building in Fort Snelling where United States immigration agents have been holding individuals for processing and detainment, sits on that former site, Beane said.
The building was named after Bishop Henry Whipple, a vocal opponent of Dakota removal and genocide and religious leader during the 1800s.
“I’ve been in a different state of consciousness,” Beane said. “This is a space that’s so important for us. This is a place of love and beauty and our very makeup of who we are as humans, as people. Our grandparents were murdered there, we were imprisoned there, and now we’re worried about our family members being imprisoned there again.”
Beane grew up hearing about how her great-great-grandfather, Cloud Man, or Maȟpíya Wičhášta, was killed at Fort Snelling. Cloud Man, a significant Mdewakanton Dakota chief, died during the winter of 1862-1863 from the conditions at Fort Snelling.
“We don’t know where his remains are,” she said. “The place is literally scattered with graves.”
Today, Fort Snelling houses the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, Fort Snelling State Park, several federal buildings including the Whipple building and the recreation of the historic Fort Snelling. The Whipple building is less than a mile from the Historic Fort Snelling complex.
The physical fort was built by the United States in 1805 in an effort to “stop fighting” between the Dakota and Ojibwe people, but that wasn’t the truth, Beane said.
“What we know today is that that military fort was put there to steal our lands,” Beane said. “It was put there as a place to assert power and to essentially have a central operation of a space to exert power. It was put there as a place to assert power and to essentially have a central operations of a space to exert power, dominate, and inflict genocide amongst Dakota people.”
Just under 60 years later, thousands of Indigenous people would be imprisoned at the site.
Famine, disease and malnutrition killed approximately 300 Dakota prisoners, a majority of which were women and children.
“What’s interesting is that what we’re seeing is history repeat,” Beane said. “And we know that history is a series of patterns. We as Dakota people know what this site has stood for since time began. We also know what it represents to the American government.”
Beane said she felt as if a blanket were dropped over her, covering her senses, when she first heard that Fort Snelling was being used as a detention facility. She felt numb. And she’s not alone.
“That’s what they did with our ancestors, put them in that concentration camp,” Rice said, who is White Earth Ojibwe. “And they’re sending people there now. There’s just nothing you can say about that. It’s terrible. It’s inhumane.”
The past few weeks have been traumatic for the community, Beane said. Aside from the knowledge that the former Fort Snelling grounds once again were being used to imprison Indigenous people, Beane said there’s an added sense that Native people in the Twin Cities are being hunted.
“We’re constantly on alert,” she said. “We have to carry documentation. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Our people are targeted. And for us as Indigenous people, the immigrants who are being detained within that space are our neighbors. Those are our relatives.”
For Indigenous people, the land is a moving living being, Beane described. Dakota people have been in the Minneapolis area for thousands of years, it’s one of their sites of creation, but that site isn’t exclusive to just the Pike Island area where the two rivers meet, she said. The whole area has been the site of Dakota life since time immemorial.
“That’s [detainment] not the integrity of this site,” she said. “The land is hurting, the land itself. She is who we were put here to protect. And as Dakota people, we’re never going to stop doing that no matter what.”