Letter From Minnesota: Count Them Among the Loved 

For C and A

The first time I saw masked ICE agents up close, Greg Bovino stood with them in a Target parking lot, his posture the statue of a soon-to-be-toppled-general. Agents scrambled around their tinted SUVs, pointed guns at the observers, while a little boy, about four, clutched his mom’s hand on their way into the store. So many guns near the head of a small boy stopping for oranges in Saint Paul on a cloudy, winter Sunday. Masked men screaming, “Get the fuck back,” as if our whistles were weapons and this a war.

This was early-occupation, which was a million years ago. The distance I feel in my body does not match the squares on the calendar. What is this new time? A student of mine, a brilliant writer, says time is plastic in prison. Was it because time in captivity stretches and strains and will never quite dissolve, but it can snap in a second, too? She’s been incarcerated for over fifteen years, she would know.

The federal occupation is the closest I’ve come to understanding plastic time. Time stretching the days between doorknocks on my street, stretching between the government’s murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Plastic while I watched a neighbor flee her house with her daughter, both of them in pajamas, the daughter—maybe seven—wrapped in a fleece blanket. It was too much for the petite mom to carry but she did it anyway, without a coat, windchill below zero.

Children are in hiding. Grandparents in hiding. Countless beautiful humans in hiding. The rules are gone. Help did not come. We are all we’ve got.

Time was plastic while I observed two young girls, alone and facing three ICE agents at their front door (then four, then six, seven). So cold I thought I saw trees covered in crystals. The girls, about eight and nine, oversized t-shirts, stood frozen while observers yelled, “You don’t have to talk to them! You don’t have to let them in!” Observers’ car alarms blared out of sync. The oldest girl, overwhelmed and scared when our whistles shrilled, covered her ears and yelled, “Stop it! Stop it!”

Sound waves turn to molasses. Whistles ring in my ears long after the whistling stops. Yesterday a bird’s chirp startled me, sounding for the swiftest second, like the beginning of a warning.

In early days, our out-of-state friends would see our reports on social media and, meaning well, would say, “If this is true, someone needs to be held accountable.”

It is true. No one will be held to account. We are on our own.

To speak to those friends—to anyone—outside of plastic time is difficult. My impulse is to follow Elizabeth Alexander and say it plain.

The government sent 3,000 agents to our city. The agents are required to meet a quota. They snatch bodies and they tally them. More bodies, more tokens. Sometimes when the agents shoot they count the bullet holes. (“I fired five rounds and she had seven holes. Put that in your book boys.”)

Restaurants are closing. Cooks stay home. Mosques are targeted. Preschools, too. Children are in hiding. Grandparents in hiding. Countless beautiful humans in hiding. The rules are gone. Help did not come. We are all we’ve got.

As the bodies and bullet holes add up people outside of plastic time begin to hear the stories and feel time shift, too. Why is this happening? Why isn’t anyone stopping it? This was supposed to be for, “The worst of the worst,” not the school kids, not the teachers, not the moms. Not us.

Here’s a tally: There are 100,000 undocumented individuals in Minnesota, 280 of which are in state prisons with active ICE detainers. In the face of a quota but lacking conviction(s), agents pluck people from one cage to put them in another, then claim they swept them off our streets. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025. Eight have died in 2026 and it’s only February. Just “a little extra-judicial killing,” as my friend Zeke says.

“Convicted of a crime,” is the government’s cover. “The worst of the worst,” is the master key to the one-sided war that’s blown the Twin Cities into a dimension outside of real time.

One of these among the 280 is a man I know well: a painter, a poet, a runner, a dad, a tutor—the quietest man and the best listener too; a man respected in our community by teachers and students alike. His poems are startling and his images are rare. I want you to know he feels like family to me. I want you to know he’s not a good reason to wage war on the citizens of this state. He wants to stand on the dirt of his home country before he dies. If he dies in prison, he wants to be buried in the earth he ran across as a child. He is a good man. I worry for him. We all do.

One day again, surely, children will walk to school absent the sounds of helicopters and horns. Stores will open. Cooks will cook by heart and by the hundreds: sambosas, injera, tacos, and phở.

It’s anyone’s guess whether ICE would send him back to his home country or to a strange land—out of convenience or cruelty. He is not young. Agents shoot observers on the streets, pull middle-aged women from Subarus, slam Minnesotans to the ground, deploy tear gas inside a high school. I can imagine what they’ll do to Brown and Black people with felonies. To my students, to my friend.

One thing is certain, dead or alive, they would add those bodies to their tally, and they will not do so gently.

No human being is expendable. The (queer, Black) abolitionists have been telling us this forever and never has it been more clear: None of us can thrive when one of us is hunted. Adding the parenthetical “not even convicted,” to hurt, killed or kidnapped emboldens the government’s lie. Immigrants with a record were never the reason for the blood and blasts. But if you persist in counting my friend as the exception, please also count him among the loved. Loved like the nurse. Loved like the poet. Loved like all the neighbors we’re circling around.

I wonder about the impact of the trauma the government is inflicting. How the cycle of harm—separating, beating, berating and caging families—will show up in the future. How far can plastic time stretch? When does it finally snap?

*

The sisters who faced ICE agents all alone stood for what must have felt like hours, fear stretching, unceasing—crying and confused, observers’ sounds surely shrill inside their head. The scariest moment was when the agent reached for their hands. “Cuffs,” I thought. “Fuck. They cuff kids?” But it was mittens. An agent slipped mittens on their hands, then moved them outside. I assumed they were about to be hauled to Whipple, flown to Texas, these young girls with tears and terror on their faces. But as the whistles grew louder and the honking persisted, a family member pulled up and, to the surprise of all of us, the agents released them. No doubt the girls will be traumatized for the rest of their lives, but for now, they are in a bed in someone’s home.

Miracles happen in the new dimension, too.

Sometimes whistles do deter. Sometimes snow turns gray and, god help us, a fresh snow falls. We will tire and trade places, but Minnesotans won’t quit. It’s the only choice we have. We’ll keep going until time is restored—3,000 agents, now 2,000, then 500, then 50, then none. We will lose more people, more stores, more sleep.

One day again, surely, children will walk to school absent the sounds of helicopters and horns. Stores will open. Cooks will cook by heart and by the hundreds: sambosas, injera, tacos, and phở. Sheltering souls will unlock and open doors—one, five, a thousand—open again to chickadees and wind. My friend, his life, his story: we will continue to care. And if we’re overpowered, we’ll know we tried. Every one of us, for all of us.