Letter From Minnesota: Our Community Grows Stronger by the Week

You might be surprised to learn how many kinds of gas masks there are. Some are effective if you get pepper-sprayed, others are better for mace or tear gas. Some cover the mouth and nose; others also have a shield for the eyes. Most of the masks you see at the hardware store, of course, are sold for benign reasons—to protect against paint fumes, for instance. But we all know another use now that ICE is in town.

I spent several hours researching gas masks yesterday and ordered two to be shipped to my nieces in Portland, Oregon, who had been tear-gassed a few days before. They had been marching past the ICE headquarters there along with thousands of other people, a weekly protest organized by Quakers and made up of families and children. When they were blasted by the poison from ICE agents on the roof, my nieces—two strong women in their thirties—were carrying flowers.

Picturing them blinded by tear gas, hacking and stumbling in that deadly fog, makes me want to wail.

I didn’t buy a gas mask for myself, but I have thought about it. When I was out on the protest corner last Friday—where I will be again this Friday, and next Friday, and the Friday after that—there was an ICE presence, although they just kind of stalked around the parking lot and then left.

I live and protest in St. Paul, across the river from Minneapolis and about ten miles from where Renee Good was murdered, ten miles from where Alex Pretti died. Our protests are peaceful and joyous; the sense of community is buoying. Two weeks ago, someone brought a boom box and played “Yankee Doodle” and we sang along. We shouted, “Ice!” and “Out!” back and forth across the street. It was exuberant, but even as I waved my sign (“Protect Your Neighbors!”) I thought how odd it was that we could feel so happy protesting things that are so awful.

Renee Good was shot in her car in front of the home of some friends of mine. Alex Pretti was killed in front of a doughnut shop—shot ten times in the back by federal agents who had first pepper-sprayed him, then knocked him to the ground, pinned him in the snow, and beat him in the head with a gas can. His murder was met with fury and anguish. But it was also met with peace. That evening, Minneapolis did not riot. Instead, the word went out that at 7pm we should light candles.

If the feds thought that we would turn against one another, that one group of people would betray another group to appease them, they were wrong.

My husband put two short candles into metal holders and then came back into the house. “There are a bunch of neighbors on the sidewalk,” he said. I walked out and saw a group standing on the corner—seven or eight people, and a dog—holding glowing candles in the dark. One of the women crossed the snowy road to hug me, and I choked up.

Up and down our street and through our neighborhood, all over the Twin Cities and across Minnesota, people stood outside in the frigid dark with candles. In the Como neighborhood where I live, neighbors marched down to the lake and stood outside and sang.

ICE has been a constant presence in our lives since before Christmas. They arrived in full war regalia: helmets and camo and body armor, SUVs packed with pepper balls and flash bangs and mace and tear-gas grenades and rubber bullets and loaded pistols and god-knows-what-else. The pepper-spray canisters dangled from their hands as casually as you might swing a purse.

Minnesotans have responded to the invasion with unity and peace. Lighted candles and song. Whistles, to warn their neighbors that ICE is on the troll. Camera phones, to record where they go and who they kill. This sense of community, this fervent need to protect one another, has been fierce. Neighbors who never spoke before now text each other frequently, checking in, asking about ICE’s whereabouts, about protest sites, about where to donate food and money, about which restaurant needs help, about candlelight vigils. Groups gather to sing their way through downtown Minneapolis. Drummers set up their kits along bridges and street corners and make a joyful racket. And everyone carries a whistle.

I have to say it again—it is an odd thing to find good in such evil, but the community we have found, or forged, or renewed, is affirming.

Minnesota is a peaceful northern state, and the Twin Cities is an area of parks and lakes and bike paths, home to artists and writers and musicians and scholars. Yes, we have crime, and we have racism, and we definitely have police problems, and I don’t mean to minimize any of that. But it pales next to the wanton violence and cruelty we have experienced since ICE came to town.

The feds’ ostensible reason for the invasion makes no sense. They say they are here to grab “the worst of the worst,” the undocumented immigrants who have murdered and raped. But those people do not exist, not here. We have fewer undocumented immigrants than most states, and almost none of them are violent.

So instead, federal agents lie in wait and snatch whoever they can. They choose by skin color and accent. They stake out Mexican roofers who are hard at work. They go door to door asking where the Asians live. They seem to love smashing car windows and slicing off seat belts and dragging women from their cars, throwing them to the ground, and disappearing them. They terrorize the trained observers who follow them around with phones.

I have tried to write this letter five times and each time it turns into a wail.

Our defense against these federal agents have been whistles and phones. Sometimes snowballs. On one memorable occasion when a Nazi came to town and threatened to burn a Q’uran and then march through the Somali neighborhood, water balloons and silly string.

If the feds thought that we would turn against one another, that one group of people would betray another group to appease them, they were wrong. The sense of community grows stronger by the week. Well-organized nonprofits sprang up to collect food and rent money for immigrants who are afraid to leave their homes. A woman, a veteran, realized that the feds were releasing detainees at night, in the cold, with no coats, their phones and IDs confiscated, and she began collecting coats and burner phones to help them.

Churches, labor unions, schools, bookstores, toy shops, restaurants, small grocery stores—everyone is pitching in. Ad-hoc groups have sprung up all over. My neighbor across the lake sent out a message asking for donations; she collected hundreds of dollars within a day or two and then drove across town to one of the hurting mercados and bought food for immigrant families sheltering in place.

The animal shelter a couple of miles away put out the call for dog food, cat food, kitty litter, and puppy pads—puppy pads because, get this, some immigrants are too afraid to walk their dogs and so the dogs must relieve themselves inside the house. I told the cashier at the pet store that the overflowing cart I was buying was for donation, and I wondered if she could give me a discount. She did not smile and I kind of feared the worst, and then she said, “The best I can do is 25 percent.” That was a pretty good best! All of us, I think, are doing our best.

The morning after I ordered the gas masks I woke up feeling, as I always do now, low-level ill: aching muscles, sore throat, headache, weepy. I recognize the symptoms from the days of George Floyd and other recent traumas: it’s not Covid, it’s stress.

We have been told that the feds are “drawing down” here, that they are working to be kinder and gentler about the way they go about kidnapping and disappearing people. Do not believe it.

ICE was in Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis yesterday, flash-banging citizens and hauling away an observer. They were out in the small towns, staking out schools and boxing-in drivers who were following them. They were up in my hometown of Duluth and out in western Minnesota in Willmar where there is a big turkey processing plant. They pulled guns on a car of observers, zip-tied them and bundled them away.

January here was terrible. Now it is February, and nothing has changed. I don’t know when anything will change. I write this and it becomes a wail.