This is part of a series of on-the-ground reports from Minneapolis.
On Thursday, I ended my day on daycare patrol as the windchill crept close to 25 degrees below zero. The patrols began after ICE appeared at my son’s daycare two weeks ago; that same day, a daycare worker for the same provider was taken by agents at a nearby location while trying to get in to work. During my recent patrol, ICE agents were spotted in the neighborhood, as they nearly always are, but everybody made it out of the building safely.
As I write this, a helicopter is circling over my neighborhood, as happens most days now. My phone is pinging near constantly with alerts from Signal groups that exist to defend and support our community. A friend texted to ask how concerned we should be that the president will invoke the Insurrection Act and send the military into our city; my husband just learned that workers at a nearby small business were taken by the government; a friend’s school went on lockdown today because ICE was nearby.
Our neighborhood has never been more united, but you wouldn’t know it from how few people are out on the streets. Nobody opens their door anymore, knowing that the next knock might be a federal agent demanding to know where the Brown people live in your neighborhood. People are making a point to support immigrant-owned restaurants, but you have to check if they’re open before you go, because so many aren’t. Folks are out delivering food and essentials to neighbors who are unable to leave their homes for fear, but they have to be careful to use a different car than they drive when they’re observing ICE, because the government is tracking license plates.
Earlier this week, students in our city lost two days of learning because schools closed—the teachers needed time to shift to the virtual learning model which began on Thursday. This time, it’s not because of an unknown and deadly illness; it’s because the government is attacking our students. People are being shipped out of the state so fast that their families don’t have time to get to their holding cell with the paperwork proving they’re legally authorized to be here before they’re gone.
The horrors have not ceased since Renee Good’s death, instead they have increased. Protestors are being attacked and shot. On Tuesday, a five-year-old was detained by ICE and used to bait his family into leaving their home. The preschooler and his father have now been sent to Texas, and it is unclear if or when they’ll return. On Thursday, multiple civil rights leaders, including Saint Paul Public School board member Chauntyll Allen, were arrested for exercising their First Amendment right to protest, in a DOJ action that the NAACP has said was a likely violation of First Amendment rights. And on Saturday, Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents, shot multiple times at close range. Every day, there is a new horror to process, a new way in which the federal government inflicts irreparable harm on our community.
I serve as a Saint Paul City Councilmember, and our community is under a violent attack at the hands of the federal government. And so we are fighting back in all the ways we know how.
On January 12th, Saint Paul announced a joint lawsuit with the city of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota against the Department of Homeland Security, seeking to end this unconstitutional operation. Our City Council is working to strengthen our separation ordinance and develop other legal tools to make certain that our city resources—including our police department—cannot and will not support the work of immigration enforcement. We are calling on the governor to declare a state of emergency and enact a state-wide eviction moratorium to ensure that nobody loses their home because the federal government is making it impossible for them to earn a living. Every elected official in our city is working to connect our residents with whatever support they need right now. We are also demanding that Congress act—that our representatives and senators use every tool at their disposal to end this occupation—because neither cities nor states alone have enough tools to protect our people from the federal government.
None of this feels like enough. Individually, none of it is. But what we know from other countries that have successfully defeated authoritarianism is that democratic resurgence is possible. Over the last 30 years, 52 percent of “autocratization episodes” were followed by democratic resurgence. In 90 percent of those cases, countries were ultimately as or more democratic than they were previously.
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In Saint Paul and across Minnesota, we’re showing that we have what it will take to win. We are cultivating solidarity and pushing back through every channel that we have—and building more capacity to fight for our community every day. We are demonstrating our commitment to nonviolence, even in the face of incredible levels of violence being used against us. We might get tired, but we are not succumbing to despair. Our civil resistance movement is strong, and it is growing.
Most importantly, we know what we’re fighting for, because we’ve already lived it. Saint Paul has always been at its strongest when we’ve embraced our immigrant neighbors. Minnesota has always been at its best when we’ve built structures that allow everybody in our state to flourish, whether they’ve been here for months or for generations. This is a place where we take seriously Paul Wellstone’s immortal words that “we all do better when we all do better.” The cruel, painful world that Donald Trump is trying to force on us is not one that we will ever, ever settle for. The path ahead is not clear, but we will continue to put one foot in front of the other until the day we win.
