Cartoonists Against ICE: Gianluca Costantini and Laura Cappon Tell the Story of Minneapolis – ChannelDraw
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Cartoonists Against ICE: Gianluca Costantini and Laura Cappon Tell the Story of Minneapolis
The American publisher Crucial Comix has released a collection of political comics documenting the impact of immigration enforcement in the United States. Among the 25 contributions is a two-page comic about Minneapolis, written by Italian journalist Laura Cappon and illustrated by Gianluca Costantini.
In January 2026, Minneapolis became the center of a national confrontation over immigration enforcement, civil liberties, and the use of federal power. As immigration agents carried out raids across Minnesota, residents organized protests, documented arrests, and mobilized networks of solidarity. Journalists followed events on the streets, while artists began searching for another way to record what was happening.
Among them were three Minneapolis-based cartoonists, K. Woodman-Maynard, Jason Walz, and Trung Le Nguyen, who launched an artistic initiative called Cartoonists Against ICE. Their idea was to invite cartoonists to document the human consequences of the operations conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal immigration authorities.
What began as an online call for solidarity grew into an international artistic response. In autumn 2026, the independent American publisher Crucial Comix transformed part of that collective effort into a printed anthology, bringing together 25 cartoonists whose work explores fear, resistance, solidarity, and the lives of communities affected by immigration enforcement.
Among the contributions is a two-page comic about Minneapolis, written by Italian journalist Laura Cappon and drawn by Gianluca Costantini, the artist and founder of ChannelDraw.
The collaboration brings together two forms of storytelling: journalism, which investigates and documents events, and comics, which can give those events a visual narrative. Their contribution connects the experiences of Minneapolis to a wider international discussion about immigration, state power, and the responsibilities of those who witness injustice.
The context in which the comic was created was especially dramatic.
On January 7, 2026, Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and mother of three, was fatally shot by an ICE officer. Her death provoked widespread protests and intensified scrutiny of federal immigration operations in the city.
Seventeen days later, on January 24, another Minneapolis resident, 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, was shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol officer during a federal immigration enforcement operation. Pretti worked at a hospital serving military veterans. His death further escalated the confrontation between federal authorities, local communities, and demonstrators.
The two killings became defining moments in a broader crisis that raised serious questions about the use of force, the monitoring of federal agents, and the right of residents to document government operations.
For Laura Cappon, Minneapolis was not simply a distant news story.
As a journalist working for the Italian public broadcaster Rai, she traveled to Minnesota to report on the immigration crackdown for the television program In Mezz’ora. Together with her colleague Daniele Babbo, she accompanied local volunteers who monitored the movements of federal immigration officers and alerted communities to their presence.
On January 25, 2026, while the journalists were traveling in a vehicle with one of these volunteers, federal agents intercepted their car.
In footage broadcast by Rai, officers can be heard threatening to break the vehicle’s window and forcibly remove its occupants if they continued following and recording them. The journalists identified themselves as members of the press.
The incident attracted attention in Italy, where journalists’ organizations expressed concern about the treatment of reporters covering the operations.
It also revealed something about the atmosphere in Minneapolis: journalists documenting public events could themselves become targets of intimidation.
Cappon’s experience gives particular significance to her collaboration with Costantini. The two-page comic belongs to a form of visual journalism in which written accounts and drawings work together to preserve events that might otherwise be reduced to fleeting images in the news cycle.
For Costantini, whose work has long explored political repression, migration, freedom of expression, and human rights, the collaboration continues a sustained investigation into the relationship between drawing and contemporary history.
His approach is rooted in the belief that comics can do more than illustrate information. They can connect political events to individual experiences, make distant situations more immediate, and encourage readers to examine what lies behind the headlines.
The artistic collaboration with Laura Cappon also has an earlier history. In a 2024 interview published on ChannelDraw, Costantini discussed the importance of working with journalists and writers and mentioned a children’s publishing project he was developing with Cappon. The Minneapolis comic represents another expression of that dialogue between reporting and drawing, this time within an international collective publication.
The origins of Cartoonists Against ICE are closely connected to the experiences of artists living in Minnesota.
In January, Woodman-Maynard, Walz, and Nguyen created a recognizable visual template dominated by icy blue tones. They encouraged artists to produce short, personal comics about immigration enforcement in their communities and share them on social media using the hashtag #ICEOUTCOMICS.
The initiative was deliberately accessible. Artists did not need to produce long graphic narratives or follow an established editorial structure. A few panels could be enough to describe an encounter, document a frightening incident, express solidarity, or explain how a community was responding.
The project also emphasized the importance of individual testimony. Rather than attempting to construct a single comprehensive account of the immigration crackdown, it invited hundreds of artists to contribute their own observations and perspectives.
The result was a growing visual archive of experiences from Minneapolis and other American cities.
Cartoonists Against ICE Zine
In an interview published by Crucial Comix in January 2026, Trung Le Nguyen described the fear that had entered his daily life, even though he was an American citizen. Living near George Floyd Square, he explained how the increased federal presence had changed something as ordinary as taking his dog outside.
His contribution illustrated how immigration enforcement could affect not only people facing deportation but also the wider communities around them.
The campaign soon attracted artists from across the United States and beyond. Among the cartoonists associated with the project and its publication are Lucy Knisley, Aubrey Hirsch, Rosemary Mosco, Jason Walz, K. Woodman-Maynard, and Trung Le Nguyen.
Their works move between personal testimony, documentary observation, political criticism, and reflections on solidarity.
The printed anthology published by Crucial Comix brings together 25 contributions in a 50-page zine measuring 5.5 by 8.5 inches. Priced at $12, the publication is designed to remain accessible while helping sustain independent comics and the communities represented in its pages.
The publisher has announced that all profits from the zine will be donated to the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC), an organization involved in defending immigrant rights and supporting community mobilization.
The publication therefore serves a dual purpose: it documents the events of 2026 while also raising money for people organizing in response to immigration enforcement.
Crucial Comix is an independent, cartoonist-run publisher founded in 2024, specializing in nonfiction comics and zines. Its editorial approach emphasizes collaboration, personal narratives, and the ability of comics to address subjects often overlooked by mainstream publishing.
The choice of a small printed zine is itself significant. In an age when political images circulate rapidly through social media before disappearing into constantly changing feeds, a physical publication offers another form of preservation.
The drawings become pages that can be kept, shared, circulated through bookstores, and revisited years after the events that inspired them.
That is particularly important for stories about immigration enforcement, where public attention frequently focuses on spectacular confrontations while neglecting the everyday experiences of people living under uncertainty.
Cartoonists Against ICE brings these experiences into a shared visual space. Its value lies not in offering a single interpretation, but in gathering different perspectives through the language of comics.
The contribution by Laura Cappon and Gianluca Costantini is part of that broader effort.
Two pages cannot tell the entire story of Minneapolis. But they can connect the work of a journalist who documented events in the city with the visual language of an artist who has spent decades portraying political struggles and defending human rights.
The project also connects with Costantini’s wider artistic research, including ICE: Faces Against Erasure, a ChannelDraw initiative exploring how portraits and drawings can confront the human consequences of immigration enforcement.
The Minneapolis story demonstrates that graphic journalism does not need to be monumental to be meaningful. Sometimes a short narrative is enough to preserve a testimony, draw attention to an injustice, or connect people separated by geography.
In Cartoonists Against ICE, the individual voices of journalists and artists become part of a collective record.
What began in Minneapolis as an urgent response to events on the streets has become a publication that carries those stories beyond the city, beyond the United States, and beyond the immediacy of the news.
And among its pages, the words of Laura Cappon and the drawings of Gianluca Costantini contribute to that memory.
Cartoonists Against ICE is published by Crucial Comix and is available through the publisher’s official website.
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