Letter From Minnesota:
We Are Going to Win

Each morning, I get a Signal message counting up how many days our city has been occupied. It bears information, reminders for new members. There are estimated to be 80,000 of us in the city.

The hardest thing to remember is that life goes on. You have to buy groceries, and decide what’s for dinner. The Saturday after Renee Good is killed, I have matinee movie tickets I bought two weeks earlier. By the time I get back, my neighborhood is so dense with protesters that I am stuck in traffic, four blocks from my home, for almost an hour. In Powderhorn Park, protesters stream endlessly across the frozen lake, Bruegelian black dots on the flat, white ice.

Life goes on—for some of us. Those who haven’t been murdered, abducted, detained. My friends have been shoved down, tear gassed, pulled over by ICE. We all know that the only thing that separates us from Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that we have not yet found ourselves on the wrong side of guns held by men coward enough to pull the trigger.

I find out from a Signal message that Renee Good has been shot. I am at work, refreshing my news apps, wondering: why the fuck isn’t everyone talking about this. A luxury, I guess, that I’m not used to living in a mile radius of national news; that I don’t know how long it takes for the headlines to hit. I am outraged, a week and half later, that a Guardian headline suggests the state-wide strike is because of Good’s death. None of this is for her; we would be fighting the same with her here—stronger, the world better, for her presence. It’s because we believe in the same things she did that we roam the neighborhood, whistles easily to hand. It’s because we must protect one another. Because if they’re lying about the deaths that are filmed, imagine what they’re saying about the deaths that aren’t.

We are right, and we are determined, and there are more of us. We are going to win.

I am so fucking angry. I don’t simply want ICE out of my home, because they’ll just go somewhere else. I don’t simply want the institution abolished, though I’ll take that as a starting point. I will settle for paraphrasing the late scholar and activist Joshua Clover: I am thankful that every living ICE agent will one day be dead—some by their own hand, some by others, too many of old age.

You’ve probably heard of Aimé Césaire’s concept of the “colonial boomerang,” but here’s a refresher: colonization, Césaire writes, works to “degrade [the colonizer], to awaken him to buried instincts… to violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.” When the rot sets in, “the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up.” Colonization makes a civilization sick; the kind of sick you don’t recover from.

This is what America stands for. What it has always stood for. We have seen it in Gaza, and in the police killing of Black people. In the destabilization of Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guatemala in the 1950s and Chile in the 70s. We have seen it under Democrats and Republicans alike. We don’t need to hem and haw over the words: the boomerang has come back to us. Fascism is here.

Friends from out of state text me every few days to ask how I’m doing. I haven’t quite known how to answer. We’re scared, of course; we’re angry. We’re working on making our city safe. Finally, I settle on: it is stupid and evil what’s happening, but we are going to win.

We are going to win.

I can’t leave my house without seeing a half-dozen legal observers—on the corner in -10 weather, or bundled into their cars. Twenty thousand spectators at a women’s hockey game chant as one: ICE out now! ICE out now! On the day Alex Pretti was killed, my block had its own candlelit vigil. As did the block to the west, and the block to the east. And the blocks beyond them. We shared food, shared our rage. No one was cowed by the threat. Everyone planning, strategizing, connecting, feeding one another. Making something that is not America—is communal where America is individualist, is peaceable where America is warring.

This is why, apart from rhetoric, the MAGA crowd insists there must be outside money, outside organization, outside agitators here. They cannot imagine doing these things simply because they are good. But we are right, and we are determined, and there are more of us. We are going to win.

I will never be proud to be an American. I am not even, precisely, proud to be a Minnesotan—an idea invented by Lutherans on land stolen from the Dakota, the Ojibwe, and other Indigenous people. One day, there will be no America. But we will remain as people, as neighbors. I am proud to be one face in this multitude—resisting armed occupation, together, with the only tools we have.

As I’m writing this, it’s been announced that ICE’s petty field general, Greg Bovino, is being retired like an aging farm dog. People are, rightly, celebrating this as a victory. But the fight isn’t over—not in Minnesota, and not in other places. I am tremendously proud of the work we have done, but listen: we’re not exceptional.

You, too, can attend a training, join a Signal group, patrol your city by foot or car or public transit. You, too, can record ICE, protect your neighbors, send out a warning whistle, or make noise outside the agents’ hotel so that those fucking cowards cannot sleep. There are more of us than there will ever be of them. Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, the Democrats in congress—none of those people are going to protect us. We are. And we are going to win.