“Your papers, please” (or “papers, please“) is an expression or trope associated with police state functionaries demanding identification from civilians during random stops or at checkpoints.[1] It is a cultural metaphor for life in a police state.[2][3]
The phrase was popularized as the first line in the classic 1942 movie Casablanca which depicted life in Vichy-controlled Casablanca during World War II. The film opens with a scene of police officers searching a hotel for refugees fleeing from Nazi-controlled territory. The first line of the film is spoken by a police officer to a civilian he stopped on the street: “May we see your papers?” The civilian produces a document, but a second police officer declares that it “expired three weeks ago” and begins to tell the civilian he is under arrest. The civilian attempts to flee the police but a gunshot is heard and the civilian falls to the ground.
ICE has already been shooting and killing people.
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Where are your papers is now happening here, the land of the free, or what used to be the land of the free.
Immigration officers around Minneapolis are approaching people and demanding proof that they’re US citizens
The officers and agents the Trump administration has unleashed in Minneapolis and nearby communities have turned to stopping U.S. citizens, apparently at random, demanding identification and grilling them about their citizenship, residents who have recorded these encounters on video say.
The “show me your papers” encounters are showing up on social media and have even prompted podcaster Joe Rogan, a Trump backer in the 2024 campaign, to ask, “Are we really going to be the Gestapo?”
One man, Gage Diego Garcia, said he was held for six hours on Monday in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, after an encounter with officers that he told NBC News began when he was leaning into his friend’s car in an alleyway.
“They came off pretty aggressive and asking for my ID. I refused because I had done nothing wrong,” Garcia said. He said that, as he started to blow a whistle draped around his neck, agents “got angry and grabbed him.”
Video recorded by a friend shows officers pushing Garcia onto the side of a car and pointing a Taser at him.
… “All I needed was your f—ing ID,” a masked officer said. Garcia responds to the officer using expletives. The officer responds, “You’re a f—ing b— and you are gonna learn the f—ing hard way.”
As officers search his pockets, one finds his firearm, saying, “He has a gun on him! Look at that.” Garcia interjects, saying, “a fully registered firearm ‘cause I’m a U.S. citizen.” Later in the arrest, as the two argue, an officer is heard saying, “You are a f—ing citizen, you shouldn’t have done that.” It’s unclear what the officer was referring to when he said that.
Garcia said that as he was being driven to the Whipple Building in Minneapolis, officers told him in response to his question that he was picked up because he looked like someone who committed a crime. “When I asked what crime, I was told, ‘we’ll figure it out,’” he said.
He also said officers told him, “I could have f—ing smoked you,” and that things “could have gone really south for you like those agents did to Renee Good.”
In one encounter Sunday, a woman was stopped and grilled about her citizenship while walking in her neighborhood. Nimco Omar of Minneapolis said she was confused when, as she started walking after parking her car, she heard commands for her to stop. Suddenly several people she thought were soldiers began running toward her.
“I was like, what’s going on? Did I do something? Is something happening? Is it war?” she told NBC News in an interview in Minneapolis.
She said when she heard someone ask for her citizenship she realized they were immigration officers. Fearing she’d be “kidnapped,” she pulled out her phone to record the encounter.
The video shows a masked officer threatening to put her in a vehicle to ID her if she doesn’t provide identification. Omar calmly responds that she doesn’t need an ID to walk around her city and that she is a U.S. citizen, declining to provide her identification.
The officer continues to insist on identification and says, “We are doing an immigration check. We are doing a citizen check.” He repeatedly asks where she was born and informs her that if she’s lying about being a citizen, she can face federal charges.
Other such encounters were recorded in Minneapolis
Last weekend, officers walked up to a man pumping gas and asked if he was a U.S. citizen, demanding to see documentation. The man responds, “I don’t have to show you.” As with Omar, the officer in this encounter states that the man can show him ID there or he can take him aside. The man provides what appears to be a license, but the officer continues to ask whether he is naturalized, where he was born and when he was naturalized. In another incident, officers questioned a man at a vehicle charging station.
Minneapolis, tribes say
Tribal leaders say Indigenous people have been stopped, questioned, harassed, and, in some cases, detained solely on the basis of their skin color or names.
For hours, Raelyn Duffy searched for any information that could lead to the whereabouts of her son, Jose Roberto “Beto” Ramirez, who that morning had been forcibly removed from his aunt’s car and detained by masked federal immigration officers in Robbinsdale, Minnesota.
Ramirez, 20, is Native American — and a U.S. citizen. But video of his arrest last Thursday shows that the officers were unmoved by his aunt’s panicked screams informing them of his legal status. They yanked Ramirez from the passenger’s seat, slammed him on the hood of another car, handcuffed him and took him away.
Tribal leaders and members who live in the greater Minneapolis area say Indigenous family members, friends and neighbors have been stopped, questioned, harassed and, in some cases, detained solely on the basis of their skin color or their names. Some immigration experts suggested ICE officers might have racially profiled them and mistaken them for being Hispanic.