Today’s post is off topic. I’m supposed to write about Britain here. Sorry, but I’ve been watching the US, the country I grew up in and thought I knew, teeter on the edge of authoritarian* rule, so what the hell, let’s throw my self-inflicted rules out the window and talk about what’s happening in Minnesota. 

Minnesota’s in the middle of the continent and so far north that it hangs off the clothesline of Canada, gathering icicles until March. Or is that June? I’ve been gone so long that I forget. Until recently it was known primarily for being cold and bland. People talk about Minnesota Nice, which you could define as a culture of overwhelming politeness and an allergy to confrontation. I lived there for forty years, and spiky New Yorker that I am, I didn’t do well with all that  blandness and the confrontation allergy–or the cold. I wouldn’t have picked it as the most likely place to face down an occupation by heavily armed federal agents and do it with resilience, with grief, with compassion, and with flashes of humor. But it has. I’m in awe of the people I know there and of all the ones I don’t.

If you follow the news, you’ll know that some 3,000 of Trump’s federal agents were dropped into Minnesota–mostly to Minneapolis, but they’ve made forays into its sister city, St. Paul, into the suburbs, and into a few rural towns. They’re not all from ICE–Immigration and Customs Enforcement–but let’s use it as shorthand. 

Embarrassingly irrelevant photo: I did have some shots of Minneapolis in more peaceful (and warmer) times but I seem to have deleted them in an effort to free up some space on my phone. So here’s a photo or a prehistoric stone quoit in Cornwall. Anyone can spot the connection, right?

If you believe the governmental noise, they’re there to detain the most dangerous illegal immigrants, but they’ve swept up the legal as well as the undocumented. They’ve swept up people with a criminal record and people who have none, citizens and non-citizens, immigrants and the native born, always focusing on people with brown and black skin, although they’re not above snatching the occasional Asian or (irony with never die) Native American. They’ve been stopping cars and pulling (literally pulling) people out, smashing windshields while they’re at it, and bundling them into unmarked cars. They’ve been grabbing people at work, at home, in parking lots, at bus stops, on the way home from school or the supermarket, at school. They’ve been detaining children. 

I could go on but if you follow the news you know all that. I could also fill a post with the ways they’re breaking the law, violating the constitution, and ignoring court orders, but I’m working hard not to rant here, and not to tell you too much of what (I hope) you already know. 

What I want to do instead is draw on what friends have told me about living through this moment, which a lot of them are calling an occupation.

Kids living in the cross-hairs

A white friend has two children whose father, her ex-husband, is latino. She’s terrified for the kids, although last I heard she hadn’t started keeping them home from school. They’re native-born citizens but they look latino and ICE agents are not known for caring about niceties. So the kids carry copies of their identity documents with them and their mother drills them on what to do and  what to say if they’re stopped. She loses sleep over how to reclaim them from the system if they are taken, and whether she’ll be able to reclaim them. When their father, her ex-husband, picks them up, she asks him to keep his papers on the front seat because if he’s stopped they won’t give him time to open the glove compartment. Last time I talked with her, she was thinking it would be safer if he didn’t see the kids up for a while. He’s a naturalized citizen but that may not protect him. They could easily sweep him up and they could take the kids with him. It’s dangerous to be in the car if you’re latino. It’s dangerous to be on the street. 

Some time after the occupation started, the kids asked what they could do to look more white. 

Let that sink in. It’ll break your heart.

Their mother also loses sleep over whether she’ll have to scoop the kids up and flee. 

How likely is she to have to do that? No one knows. That’s why, at 3 a.m., people make plans, or at least understand how unprepared they are. The central issues are where they could go and how, but another one is what to do with their much-loved dog. They can’t abandon her. They might not be able to take her. 

At a time when we’re all feeling helpless, I was able to do one thing: email friends and ask if they’d be on standby to take the dog and either keep her or find her a home where she’d be loved. Without hesitation, they said yes, as I’d known they would. Everybody exchanged phone numbers. It’s one less middle-of-the-night worry for a mother stretched almost to the breaking point.

It was a small thing, but I felt like I’d done a good day’s work. 

My friend’s family is safer than many, but their story gives you a sense of what people are living with.

Legal observers

I used to live in South Minneapolis, close to where Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by federal agents. It seems to be the epicenter of the conflict. Some people I know are acting as legal observers. These are ordinary people, giving up their time and risking detention and, it turns out, death, to protect their immigrant neighbors. What they can do is limited, but they patrol the streets armed with phones and whistles. If they see ICE stopping a car, watching a playground, cornering someone, chasing someone, beating someone, dragging someone into an unmarked car, they blow their whistles, they record what’s happening, and they use social media–encrypted neighborhood chat groups–to alert the neighbors. They record license plates. They escort kids to school and stand by to make sure they get on and off their school buses safely. It sounds like nothing, but they make what’s happening public. ICE hates them. 

And the people ICE hates aren’t just the people patrolling the streets. When whistles start to blow, neighbors come outside. They yell. They watch. They record. They blow more whistles. More heavily committed people are on neighborhood chat groups that formed in the wake of the George Floyd killing and that now carry alerts about local raids, so they hear about them that way. So when ICE stops, people gather. 

George Floyd? He was the man whose death sparked off the Black Lives Matter movement. That also happened in South Minneapolis.

Two observers have been killed and some uncounted number that we’ll just call a lot have been dragged into cars and detained, then eventually photographed, occasionally told they’ll be added to a list of domestic terrorists, and released into the cold–it’s been -20 F. for part of this time; cold enough to turn your thoughts to ice–with no coat, no phone. A person could freeze out there, but a group of volunteers, Haven Watch, has formed to meet released detainees, bring them into their cars  to warm up, and give them coats, a hot drink, and a burner phone, then find them a way home.

Ilhan Omar, one of Minnesota’s senators, sent out an email mentioning a legal immigrant–a refugee–who was “visited by ICE and swiftly taken away. Her children produced paperwork proving their mother was in the country lawfully. ICE ignored them, shackled [her],and flew her to a detention center in Texas. Days later, they released her in Texas with nothing but the shirt on her back. Family and friends had to help her get back home to Minnesota.”

And those are the lucky one–the people ICE releases. The undocumented and some random number of people who are in the country legally are moved into detention centers, where conditions are reported to be horrible and elected officials are only occasionally allowed in.

One woman who hadn’t been detained wrote that “agents showed up outside my home. They didn’t approach the house, but they parked there, watching. They’ve taken photos of me, they know my car, and they followed me to intimidate me. It worked. I ended up removing my children from our home out of fear. . . . This is the reality we’re living in. Families trying to help other families are being harassed and intimidated. Our rights are being stripped away in plain sight.”

If you’re connected to the right people, Facebook has become a useful forum for people to exchange information, personal testimony, the occasional rant, and news articles and commentary published by smaller magazines. One reporter wrote, and someone copied onto Facebook, that what he was seeing in Minneapolis looked a lot like what he saw during the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square. It was spontaneous, it came from the grassroots, and it wasn’t centrally organized. 

Flashes of hope

That people continue to turn out in huge numbers–one estimate is tens of thousands–is a massive sign of hope, but there are less visible ones. A friend who lives in an old people’s housing complex organized a letter writing session. She drafted sample letters to the governor, Minnesota’s senators, corporations who’ve visibly supported ICE. Chaos ensued. People couldn’t get online. People confused links and email addresses. People stopped writing to declaim, as my friend said, “About how awful this all was. I felt like a Kindergarten teacher who lost control of her class.”

Still, letters were sent. 

Elsewhere, both individuals and organizations collect and deliver food to people whose situation makes them vulnerable and who are afraid to go out. Local cafes, coffee shops, and restaurants offer free drinks and soup to frozen legal observers. You can’t understand the value of that until you’ve lived through a Minnesota winter. In Cornwall, where I live now, when people say “it’s freezing,” they mean water freezes. In Minnesota, they mean their eyelashes are frosting over, and no, I’m not exaggerating about that. If you wrap a scarf around your nose and mouth, which is tempting and I’ve done it, your lovely warm breath will first turn to frost on the scarf, pressing a layer of ice against your face, and then rise up toward your eyes. In no time at all, each time you blink you can feel your upper eyelashes grasping your lower ones and then gently letting go. They do let go–you won’t end up with your eyes frozen shut–but it’s a very strange feeling.

A yarn shop is selling a pattern for a red hat modeled on one Norwegians are said to have worn as a symbol of opposition to the Nazis. Proceeds go to immigrant aid organizations. 

I mentioned that people had brought some flashes of humor to their resistance. They’re not dressing in inflatable costumes the way people did in Portland. Different situation, different responses. But I have seen clips of two demonstrators zipping downhill on a sled decorated as a giant can of de-icer. A second group dressed as bowling pins with the heads of Trump and his cronies and waited at the base of the hill until someone rolled a giant bowling ball downhill and they obligingly fell over. A third group went down on a sled decorated as a swan. What that had to do with anything is beyond me, but it was lovely. 

I’ve leaned heavily on old friends for the information I’ve used, and we lean heavily to the left. But what’s happening is wider than my old circle of friends. A former neighbor who’s not particularly political and not of the left writes, “Words can’t describe what a sad mess it is here. Never thought I would see Minnesota like this.” 

Since the shootings

As I write this (a day or so in advance of posting it), a widespread and angry response to the second, meticulously documented, shooting has forced the federal rhetoric to be toned down a bit and a few layers of support have peeled away from Trump’s anti-immigrant push, but ICE is still on the streets in Minnesota. Federal prosecutors are bringing charges against people for “everything from spitting to throwing an egg or brick at federal agents. The defendants are also accused of other efforts to impede law enforcement, including blocking, striking or bumping agents’ vehicles, shoving agents and resisting arrest.” (Sorry, the article’s behind a paywall, but hey, it’s there.)

This morning, again on Facebook, a suburban organization warned of “ICE agents . . . impersonating concerned community members in an attempt to gather information about vulnerable individuals and to target the helpers too. . . . As long as ICE is in our community, we have to set aside ‘Minnesota Nice’ and be comfortable telling people we cannot share information with people we do not personally know.” Someone else posted about finding a car abandoned on his street, windows smashed, keys and identification inside, evidence of another abduction. “When I tell you it’s worse than it seems,” he wrote, “I’m not exaggerating. People are disappearing all over the place and we may never know their stories. I’ve started to lose count of how many I have personally witnessed.”

Through neighbors, the writer was at least able to notify the missing driver’s family.

The Nation magazine has nominated Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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* I used the word authoritarian. It’s a more moderate word than fascist and I’d like to sound marginally well balanced, but you could argue reasonably, I think, for either word. Whichever one we go for, it’s deeply troubling.