I live in Minneapolis. I grew up not far from here, in a suburb of St. Paul; after stints on both coasts, my wife and I settled here to raise our daughters in a freezing state that had always welcomed us warmly. As the ongoing occupation by over 3,000 ICE agents stretches into its third week — with no clear end in sight — I’ve received a steady string of messages from increasingly concerned friends across the country. They all start the same way: Uh… is this really as bad as it looks from the outside?
My answer to that question is easy: no, it’s worse. Not since the pandemic has my daily life been ruptured in such a frightening and surreal fashion. Then, at least, there was a semblance of the country being united. Morons who rallied against masks and vaccines aside, most Americans could at least agree that the world would be a better place if Covid-19 didn’t exist.
There’s no such comfort with ICE, which is quite literally a hostile, heavily armed, masked police force violently occupying Minneapolis. No one — certainly not the ICE agents themselves — is even really bothering with the pretext that they’re here to make the city safer. This is Donald Trump’s revenge campaign, and they’re the foot soldiers.
Unfortunately, their obvious incompetence and buffoonery does not make them less dangerous. The killing of Renee Good was bad enough, but the blatant lies DHS Secretary Kristi Noem spun about the incident — and the FBI’s refusal to share evidence that would allow the state of Minnesota to investigate the death of one of its own citizens — made it clear, to both sides, that ICE would face no consequences for anything they did, at least not while Trump is in the White House.
In the days since, ICE agents have acted accordingly. We know they are often under-trained, wear masks to avoid being identified, and have the unquestioning support of an administration almost openly pushing for violence in the streets of Minneapolis. At the time I’m writing this, Trump is still toying with invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying 1,500 paratroopers to the city. How worried am I about what ICE will do to those who oppose its tactics? Enough that I considered whether I should publish this story anonymously.
And so the second question people are texting me — Are YOU okay? — is harder to answer. I guess that’s because the answer is no. Call me naïve, but despite plenty of evidence for the ghoulishness and cynicism of the Trump administration and its operatives, I was not prepared for them to unleash this level of chaos and violence on my city.
The presence of ICE is not an abstraction to the people who live here. It’s a constant threat requiring constant vigilance. Our public schools were closed because the state government could not guarantee students would be safe. Many stores and restaurants, including 80 percent of immigrant-owned businesses, are not open, protecting both staff and patrons from the threat of an ICE raid. Many nonwhite Minnesotans — regardless of whether they are citizens or not — are essentially sheltering in place, skipping grocery runs and doctors’ appointments to stay at home, where ICE (theoretically) needs a judicial warrant to harass them.
There is a right-wing trope, frequently employed by Trump, that anyone who resists ICE must be a paid protestor. Of course, the reality is the opposite. Many of us have families, most of us have jobs, and all of us have bills to pay. None of that has changed, but the task of protecting our community still requires many, many unpaid hours. As a white U.S. citizen, I’m one of the “lucky” ones: ICE may still detain me, as they have many other lawful protesters, but I’m much less likely to be actively targeted. I’ve also been lucky in another sense: So far, I haven’t run into any truly bad situations with my young children in tow. But I expect that luck to run out soon.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve become a volunteer driver, shuttling nonwhite people between their homes and their jobs. My passengers put up the hoods on their winter coats before they get out of the car to hide their faces, walking into homes still bearing cheerful Christmas lights and wreaths. I don’t leave until they’re behind locked doors.
With no alternatives, parents have gotten organized via platforms like Signal and WhatsApp. Working in tandem with people around my community, I’ve taken shifts as a security guard, waiting outside schools, daycares, and community centers to send a rapid-response alert if ICE arrives. I’ve marched and fundraised, while boycotting stores like Target, a Minnesota-based company without the courage to issue even a tepid, mealy mouthed defense of Minnesotans.
None of what I’m doing is enough. But all of it, I reassure myself, is better than nothing. The most heartening thing about this deeply disturbing moment is seeing how consistently and forcefully Minnesotans of all demographics have been pushing back. It has been galvanizing and radicalizing in ways I’m not sure anyone outside the city can truly understand. High schoolers across the Twin Cities metro area have organized walkouts. Parents who might normally be busy with PTA duties are patrolling their neighborhoods, trailing ICE agents while honking car horns, and blowing whistles to warn the community of their presence. My father-in-law, a devout Catholic in his 70s, made a cardboard sign that read “Love Thy Neighbor” and joined the thousands who rallied against ICE on a frigid afternoon in Powderhorn Park.
This has been an especially difficult year for Minneapolis. The assassination of Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman, and Donald Trump’s characteristically callous response to it, is still an open wound. Many yards still contain pink lawn signs created as a sign of community support after the deadly shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in August. The murder of George Floyd, never far in the background of the city’s collective memory, has returned to the surface, as one needless murder in the streets recalls another. How much can one city take?
I guess we’ll all find out. Over the past two weeks, I wake up more enraged than exhausted and go to bed more exhausted than enraged. I’m eating more restaurant takeout than I should, but it feels like a good time to support local businesses — even if many of them remain closed. I bought a pack of whistles and texted some neighbors to see if anyone needed one. Nobody took me up on it; they’d all bought packs of whistles too.
The community is united in outrage, action, and, remarkably, even good humor. A variety of local businesses, including the Detroit-style pizza hub Wrecktangle and the sex shop Smitten Kitten, have become hubs for resources and community activism. We share ICE sightings over Signal and trawl r/Minneapolis. When conservative influencer Jake Lang — pardoned by Trump after spending four years in prison for assaulting Capitol police officers with a baseball bat — announced an anti-Muslim march in Cedar-Riverside, group chats across the Twin Cities lit up with the same Tom Hardy GIF. We’ve already experienced enough to know when ICE and their allies are trying to bait us.
We talk, optimistically, about the money ICE is burning through every day and how difficult it will be for them to sustain this full-scale assault in the weeks and months to come. We hope that Trump’s distaste for anything complicated means he’ll get frustrated by the stalemate between ICE and the people of Minneapolis or that his toddler-esque obsession with new, shiny things means he’ll just get bored and order his minions to do something else.
We also know that we’ll win. Time is on our side. ICE may have the inflated salaries and the backing of a tyrannical federal government, but we’re the ones who live here, and as the city’s greatest musician Prince once said, the cold keeps the bad people out. And when the ICE agents finally take off their masks, leave their shitty chain hotels, and fly back to wherever they were before they came to terrorize us, we’ll still be here.
Here’s the last thing I text anyone who checks in with me: Wherever you are, get organized now. Figure out who your likeminded neighbors are. Set up your Signal chats. Get some whistles (I can spare a few if you need them). This administration has made it clear that Minneapolis is just the beginning, and when they come to your city, you’ll want to be ready.
