Letter From Minnesota: Life Inside an Economic Blockade

Greetings from inside the economic blockade zone of occupied Minneapolis.

What do you know about cities inside economic blockades? I know about the Prussian siege of Paris, when the trapped Parisians had to roast their zoo elephants. I know about the Dutch Hunger Winter, when the Nazis were, as ever, acting like Nazis and starving babies and everyone.

Now I know what an economic blockade looks like today.

It looks like: MPR News reports that economic activity is down across the city, which seems right to me.

Everywhere on the main city drags of restaurants, barber shops, coffee shops, and little boutiques, storefronts are eerily dark, the cars and street life are just gone from vast swaths our city—it feels like Christmas morning, the crunch of ice echoing through the quiet emptiness of a ghost-town.

The people are behind locked doors, contemplating a teeter-totter of obliteration; potentially violent strangers on one side, certain economic ruin on the other—guess what you have to pick?

Standing outside a locked and empty St Paul restaurant at twilight, I tapped on the glass. Scared faces of women came close to the other side. “Do you have a reservation,” shouted the shortest one with the long pretty hair.  Not a soul in her restaurant, and she was terrified of her customers.

Standing outside a completely different locked restaurant, the host’s fear came across as hostility. What do you want? she shouted through the locked door, prompting one of her coworkers to rush to us, and the angry woman to flee to the kitchen.

All over my neighborhood we keep finding empty cars, the glass shattered into diamonds on the snow, the people missing. Tiny private automotive kristallnachts, everywhere and ongoing.

In the Twin Cities right now, we all have to remember that some people show stress as fight, some as flight, some as doomscroll or shut down or—I’m reading Bleak House. That’s kind of weird, but I’ve been meaning to get to it for decades, and it has nothing to do with any of this, except I’m at the part where a murder gets pinned on a foreigner and… One of this particular restaurant’s coworkers had been dragged across the ice by ICE, kicked and pummeled and ultimately carried away, only to be released twelve hours later with no charges, as ICE here routinely does, secret police-style. No warrant, no charges, just capricious face-breaking violence.

Did you hear the one about the St. Paul roofer who was brought to the big public hospital with eight skull fractures and a broken face, and ICE told the nurses he did it himself, running into a brick wall? He got his shit rocked, an ICE agent told a nurse, before his bosses came up with a less plausible version. Many are getting their shit rocked, it’s the trend. I was tear gassed, without warning, near the ramen shop. I’m still coughing.

All over my neighborhood we keep finding empty cars, the glass shattered into diamonds on the snow, the people missing. Tiny private automotive kristallnachts, everywhere and ongoing.

I talked to a restaurant owner today who told me he’s six weeks from going under. I’ve been hearing stories of people working 100-hour weeks, clocking in as themselves and then ending the shift and immediately clocking in as their co-worker, because the co-worker has to eat and pay rent and the business might close otherwise.

I know a chef who spends an hour on either side of his work driving all his (legal! not that that matters!) employees to and from work because otherwise:

They might get rammed by a truck of ICE agents, and their car windows shattered and car abandoned and, eventually, towed. (This happens so much the city has a policy to waive tow and storage fees for those cars.) Then they get beat up, and detained for days in inhumane conditions at the Whipple Building, where their wallets and phones are stolen. Then their families have to put a retainer on an attorney, and they get put on a plane to Texas, where the detention continues. Finally, they’re shoved out the door in Texas, no coat, no ID, no money, no phone, and have to try to make their way home. Who is going to get in a car and go to work when that may await?

We all know teenagers who skipped school because of: a mean fellow teenager. Now: find me a teenager who is going to go to school when three truckloads of armed men are going to beat the hell out of you, steal your phone, and use you as bait to do the same to your parents. And the governor, the mayor, and the cops can’t help. My daughter is a senior in high school, she says only ten percent of her school is showing up.

Because ICE is everywhere. Everywhere everywhere. On my block three times that I know of, just this week.

On Monday morning, eight forty, I walked outside, coffee in one hand, mind on getting the kid to the bus stop—ICE is three doors down, a caravan of SUVs blocking traffic, agents up on the stoop of a neighbor’s house. I pull the whistle from my pocket, the phone from my pocket. I start to blow my whistle, and blow, and blow—two feet planted firmly on the ice of the rutted pavement beneath my feet, and—nothing. Quiet street, I’m whistling and whistling and whistling and—ICE drives away, and I see a little four-door sedan with two young women in medical masks, trailing behind them, bravely.

The newspapers where people earn three and seven and twenty times what I do published the news of the day on Monday: Bovino was leaving, the occupation was easing, we were at a pivot!

I’ll believe it when I see it, I thought.

On Tuesday morning, brutal cold, I heard the sound of ICE whistles from my warm bed, the sky still black. By the time I got up and peered out from behind the blackout curtains, everyone was gone. Then I heard the ICE whistles while I was brushing my teeth, by the time I got to the front windows, gone.

Pivot! Said the writers of the wealthy coastal papers, and they brought sophisticated analyses with experts weighing in on what caused the pivot.

There is no pivot. I’ll believe it when I see it, I thought.

Thursday morning, coffee in hand, twelve below, I headed out my front door to take the kid to the bus stop, and it was like that scene in Men In Black where Will Smith is training to use his gun and the targets pop-up, and he has to make sense of what’s going on and be the good guy, when everything is happening as fast as can be.

The ICE agent was staking out the bus stop on the corner, the little kids’ school bus stop, the same one my own kids used to wait at.

People, standing, everywhere. Civilian-looking people, but out of place. One on a stoop and two on a corner and four motionless on a sidewalk and—down the block, the reflective vests of the volunteers in pairs walking the school patrol, to keep the kids from the K-5 safe from ICE. Also, three cars, idling in front of my house. I tried to make sense of the crowd, and walked towards my own car. Two women in a small, idling sedan, and the driver rolled down her window. “That’s ICE,” she said. “No whistles.”

It took me a minute. “Who’s ICE?”

She gestured again

A guy that looked like Wilmer Valderrama, but left in a meat smoker till he got dried out and hard, sitting in an idling silver Wagoneer.

I started my car. It needed to warm up! I’m a mom trying to take my kid to the bus stop because it’s twenty below with wind-chill! And she’s got to get to AP statistics!

For real, people are still having to keep up with AP statistics in all of this.

A guy was behind my car, an African immigrant I know from the neighborhood, warming up his car, scrolling his phone.

Then I notice: A woman I’ve known for twenty years, in a furry hat, weeping on a snowbank. What is going on? I went to her.

“I finally broke. I haven’t cried in all of this, I finally broke,” she said.

She’s a birder; she saw a hawk in the tree of the beautiful old elm across the street from my house, the elm that miraculously survived Dutch Elm disease, the one that turns the brightest saffron-yellow in the fall and provides the preferred perch for sharp-shinned hawks and red-tailed hawks who come to hunt the mice thriving in our apartment building dumpsters. She saw a bird above and wanted to share her delight but when she looked around she saw armed federal goons, not people who cared about the transient miracle of birds.

I hugged her, I invited her inside. I was now on the snowbank too.

She didn’t want to come inside; she was working. She filled me in. The ICE agent was staking out the bus stop on the corner, the little kids’ school bus stop, the same one my own kids used to wait at, stomping their feet in the cold, looking with me through my phone at the constellations in the stars above. “That’s Orion’s belt. Do you see the three little—Who’s Orion? Well, that’s a good question—”

The ICE agent was also staking out the sidewalk in front of my house, to grab anyone walking to the school for kindergarten-through-fifth-grade on the corner.

He found the perfect tactical spot for warfighters to stalk little kids daring to try to read, write and do ‘rithmetic: right in front of my house.

If he frightens a child, he can scoop them up. That’s the rules, says Brett Kavanaugh, who makes them. If an ICE agent thinks you’re scared, that’s probable cause for a so-called “Kavanaugh stop.” So is being brown, or black, or having an accent. Take that, Christine Blasey Ford! First you came forward to say Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted you, then you had to flee your house, and now—thousands have to flee, too? Tens of thousands?

We should get medals, all of us who were right, we can walk through the snow, picking up the diamonds of glass, we can glue them to brooches, we can—

I tapped on the driver’s side window of my African neighbor, idling and scrolling in his car. “That’s ICE,” I said. “What’s ICE?” he answered. I pointed. “Oh God!” he exclaimed. Because suddenly he found himself in the trap. Show you’re afraid, and they can really give you something to cry about.

And then the dear daughter came out of the house, her shoelaces flapping, and I introduced her to my weeping friend, and then a low-flying helicopter came through, and I said: “Helicopters! Always with the helicopters.”

“They’re driving me insane,” said my friend.

“I can feel them in my teeth. It’s endless,” I replied. Because I live near Alex Pretti’s execution site and near Renee Good’s execution site and if you come to town I’ll take you on our own new walking trail of tears, built with our tax money and surveilled above by helicopters we are also paying for. Do you ever think about Henry the VIII, and everyone rushing around London, trying to get their kids to school as the heads rolled? I never used to.

And then I kind of lost it too, driving off, ICE in my rear view mirror. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” I gasped. So I took dear daughter all the way to school and then I had to take a walk in the icy woods to calm myself down, and—

The problem is that the major news platforms treat Trump like they’re watching a circus on television, and it’s their job to sum it up for a completely stone blind audience. “Now he’s going over that way! Now he’s going that way and there are people in sequins to meet him! Now he says there’s a drawdown! Now he says: Pivot! Now he’s going over that way again!”

But what he says isn’t the story. The real story is: The goons he threw into my world like so many murder-roombas, going and going and sucking up people and grinding us up and getting us stuck in the wheels but going, going—now you’re gone.

ICE is outside my house whenever the school buses run.

The city is starting to feel a lot like it did during Covid. The big box stores in the suburbs are open; the small businesses in the walkable streets are locked up.

ICE was in Powderhorn Park near where Renee Good was killed this morning, where the Renee Good rally was. ICE was specifically ordered not to go into the city parks, but if you tell them no they go and poop where you said not to, like angry dogs. I mean, they were throwing tear gas where we used to do family pottery and the kids would smoosh clay into lumpy, adorable cups; the tear gas blew out onto the lake, and hovered like fog. Does it make park birds cough, too?

MAHA was supposed to make America healthy, but clouds of tear gas are coming through the cracks of the door and into my house, and I told my therapist it was easier to avoid the artificial color in M&Ms during the Biden administration than it is to avoid this tear gas—what’s so healthy about this? My therapist says I should buy an air purifier. They’re all made in China, but what can you do, just pay the tariffs, you might get a good price at Target if you’re not boycotting.

I talked to a restaurant owner today who said: No one wants to come out, everyone’s using all their money for other people’s groceries and all their time for delivering them. We’re six weeks from going under he said. Better than a lot of people.

What happens next, with wedding season, and patio season, and all the economic choices we all make from a choice to go outside? What happens to the funding for buses and light rail when people are afraid to ride them, and no one buys bus tickets? Will we conclude: Ridership is down? What happens to the funding for our schools when the kids are hiding, or fled? Will we conclude: The kids aren’t here? What happens to our car insurance, or our car repairs? Is there even any car window glass left around here?

And I guess my final question for this minute: The sun is going to rise in eight hours: What are the odds that ICE is going to be excreting SUV exhaust into my precious pollinator garden, yet again? When Megyn Kelly asked: “Do you know why I wasn’t shot by Border Patrol this weekend? Because I kept my ass inside and out of their operations. It’s very simple.” Did she, does anyone who listens to her have any idea that you could walk into ICE operations twice in a week by opening your front door—and nothing about this is simple at all.