2 hours ago
5
I knew they would come here.
If you’re a president hell-bent on retreading 2020 and retaliating against your enemies, the midwestern state that started the George Floyd protests, with a generous social safety net and diverse population, governed by a vice-presidential candidate you vehemently hate, is a certain target.
But I don’t think most people thought it would look quite this bad, quite this fast, for quite this many people. I don’t think we could have fathomed what 3,000 agents would look like in a smaller city – the relentlessness of their presence – or the level of violence they intended to bring.
And, I don’t think the Trump administration realized just how much the people of Minnesota would not stand for it. Or how the rest of the world, viewing repeated video footage of agents’ brutality as they killed two US citizens, would cheer the people on.
I have documented Donald Trump’s retaliation agenda since he took office last year, talking to people who have been targeted directly by the president. Democratic-led cities weighed heavily into his campaign promises – he would go after them, “fix” them. Now, my life – the lives of Minnesotans – are the story. I’m reporting on a political retribution campaign, disguised as immigration enforcement, in the community where I live.
This state has been hit with tragedy after tragedy in the past year: the targeted killing of a state lawmaker and her husband, a shooting at a Catholic school and, now, the deaths of two Minnesotans, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, at the hands of federal agents, and the swift detentions and deportations of likely thousands of people, many without criminal records.
The administration talks about a US city like it’s a war zone. Tom Homan said agents were “in theater”. I’ve heard Republican lawmakers call for a “tactical pause”.
But in my daily life, every conversation I have with another local starts with: “How are you?” After the initial: “I’m doing OK,” the conversations turn into how we’re actually all not OK, but for now we’re safe, and we’ll deal with the fallout later, when there’s more time. Minnesotans, many of them Nordic, can be stoic and indirect. Not now. I have cried with more people in the space of a month than I probably have collectively in my life until now. I heard about their loved ones being taken, their kids being afraid and confused, their schools half-empty, their physical and psychological injuries after ICE encounters.
Unless you’re here, you don’t really understand how consuming this is, how fried people’s nerves are, how frequently we’re sending around GoFundMe links and mutual aid drives, how many restaurants and storefronts are closed or reconfigured to be donation collection sites. I tried to keep a daily diary of all I was seeing and hearing, and it quickly became too much to document. My colleagues from around the country have come to town to cover what’s happening to the community, and how people have worked to help each other.
I live in an inner-ring suburb, and while most of the videos you’ve seen are in Minneapolis, the suburbs have been hit hard, too, and often don’t have the density or rapid response networks of the city. You drive around scanning for SUVs with blacked-out windows driving erratically. “Down the road, I’m going to be in a psychiatrist’s office with one of those blob pictures like, what do you see? Out-of-state plates on a Jeep Wagoneer,” one woman joked to me recently. I heard a car alarm going off the other day from inside my house and immediately jumped up, unsure whether it was an accident or someone alerting neighbors to agents.
Most people are a part of the resistance here, doing at least something to help their neighbors or fight against ICE. This is not a time for fence-sitters. I keep thinking of what a city council member told me soon after the Good shooting: “We’re not going to go quietly. I like that about us.”
There is no helplessness.
People have taken breaks from assisting the community – to care for loved ones, to attend funerals, to get treatment for illnesses, to get medical care after ICE roughed them up. One woman, wearing a coat she had written “Granny Against ICE” on the back of, cared for her sick father until he died, and then she went right to the streets to start protesting. If you have small children like I do, you’re parenting around a crisis, missing bedtimes and quieter moments, unable to fully explain to a toddler why you’re preoccupied.
I have seen videos and images and heard stories that will be burned into my brain forever: Liam Ramos in his blue hat. Good saying: “I’m not mad at you, bro.” Cecilia’s parents both being taken, after nearly three decades in Minnesota, on their way to work as cleaners. People released into subzero temperatures in the dark of night from a federal detention facility, left to fend for themselves.
But I’ve also seen the very best of us. Outside the Whipple building, a woman stood up an operation quickly to help people leaving detention get coats, phones and rides, after her son found two women without coats left outside. Natalie Ehret, who started Haven Watch, teared up talking about the detainees she’d seen – some US citizens, some not.
Until recently, her last panic attack was three years ago, on the day she found out her son had brain cancer. Then, a couple days ago, she had another, after interviewing a young man who had left detention and was getting help from Haven Watch. The man reminded her so much of her son when he was a teenager.
“I came out of that interview and I was, like, yelling: ‘What are we doing?’ What are we doing to these young people, this 20-year-old boy, and he was so broken and hurt. He was traumatized, but he felt so hurt by us,” she said.
Some of the stories she’s heard have changed her. They should change you, she said.
Even if ICE leaves tomorrow, the long threads of what has happened here will reverberate. These kids will remember. The families torn apart will never be the same. The people hiding out at home – when will they feel enough trust to leave again? I don’t know how you unwind this. I do know there’s a broad community of people that will help figure that out.
On the day Good was killed, I stood on a snowbank outside the police tape line, watching as loads of federal agents poured onto the scene.
Dozens of Minneapolis police also lined the area. When police finally got federal agents to leave, those agents were met with people screaming at them, calling them murderers. The agents gassed people at close range, spraying chemicals from inches away into people’s faces. They volleyed pepper balls into the crowd. They were liberal with the “less-lethal” weapons in a way I had never seen before, but have seen many days since.
“What is this? What is this for?” I said out loud to myself as I watched, and I have been thinking it every day since.
