A toy store in Saint Paul is facing its first audit of its employees in more than 27 years of operating after one of the shop’s owners spoke out about US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s aggressive arrests in the Twin Cities and detailed how the business is helping to protect immigrant neighbors.

Abigail Adelsheim-Marshall spoke last week with ABC News about how her family-owned store, Mischief Toy Store, has been giving out 3D-printed whistles to help community members—following the lead of people in Chicago last year—to warn their neighbors when ICE and other federal agents are in the area.

The whistles were designed to be “a nonviolent form of protest and alert everyone around that there’s ICE activity going on,” said Adelsheim-Marshall. “Everyone is looking for anything they can do to help their community right now.”

She added that her community is being “terrorized by ICE” and said demand for the whistles has risen following an ICE agent’s killing of Renee Good.

“ICE is doing far more to hurt our community than immigrants ever have,” said Adelsheim-Marshall. “Almost every customer who comes in tells us about encounters they’ve had with ICE.”

Hours after the interview, in which an ABC News correspondent noted that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) referenced the use of whistles to warn about ICE operations last week in a social media post, two ICE agents arrived at Mischief Toy Store and delivered an audit notice to co-owner Dan Marshall, Adelsheim-Marshall’s father.

Marshall and Adelsheim-Marshall were given three business days to turn over federal I-9 forms to prove their five Minnesota-born part-time employees were hired legally, as well as payroll records, tax returns, and other documents.

“We feel very strongly that we were targeted based on the content of Abby’s interview that day,” Marshall told the Minnesota Star Tribune on Tuesday, as the deadline for the audit approached.

Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, agreed and said the DHS audit appeared to be “immediate punishment for speaking out against the regime.”

Mark Jacob, an author and Chicago-area journalist added that ICE’s targeting of the toy store offered proof that “it’s not about making Minnesota ‘safe’—it’s about making Minnesota subservient.”

A bottomless well of vengeance.

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— Renée Graham 🏳️🌈 (@rygraham.bsky.social) January 21, 2026 at 7:45 AM

Last year, the Mischief owners joined a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s tariffs and Marshall spoke in a TV interview about how the president’s trade was causing anxiety among small business owners.

Following the news of the DHS audit, the Adelsheim-Marshall family and their community have not been deterred from coming to the defense of their neighbors—including the toy store itself.

On Saturday, the day after the ABC News interview and the audit delivery, Marshall told the Star Tribune that the store “sold 250 anti-ICE yard signs in the first three hours that we were open.”

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