From Abbie, In Minneapolis.
It is Tuesday, January 13, 2026 at 12:23 p.m. My mother in law texted asking if we wanted her to pick up our 2 year old at daycare and bring him to our house. My husband wrote back “do you mean today?” because she usually picks him up on Wednesdays. She wrote back: “Yes. ICE was teargassing and pepper spraying 34th and Park. Detaining people”. I wrote back “that’s just what life is like here now”. I used to live at on Park Avenue. Our daycare is less than 10 blocks from where Renee Good was murdered.
On Monday, a friend and I were planning to meet at a playspace. I texted her “see you soon. Don’t get murdered on the way”. She responded by saying “Right. A normal well wish in 2026”.
After that, some other friends and I made plans to go to a beloved Mexican burrito shack on Lake Street, the cultural corridor that burned in the George Floyd Uprising in 2020. As I was driving over to their house I saw neighbors on each of the four corners of every intersection on Lake Street with whistles at the ready. There were 4-6 people on Every Intersection. I pulled up to my friends’ house and brought my 2 year old inside. They have a 1 year old. My friend was coughing. He had been outside to record an abduction on his block, two blocks off of Lake Street. ICE agents deployed chemical weapons and he was coughing. We decided not to go get burritos because we didn’t feel safe bringing the babies outside to breathe the air.
I got dinner with a friend on Monday night. When we got to the restaurant, my friend talked about driving behind a white Suburban with Ohio plates earlier in the day. She wondered what would happen if she followed the truck. She’s not in a Signal chat. She has not been to a training. She followed. They went on the highway and off. They went in the wrong direction, doing loops around the city. They ended up in a parking lot in Richfield, a nearby, Latinx majority suburb of South Minneapolis. In the parking lot of a rec center, she saw 4 other large vehicles and men standing around with guns and camo gear. Her question was answered. She left. Thankfully, she got home safely.
On the way home from dinner, my officemate called. They are part of a constellation of parents organizing to support families impacted by ICE and not going to school. They were driving back from dropping of e-learning technology to a classmate of their first grader. My friend wanted to talk about the impossibilities and opportunities of being a political therapist right now. They have also been organizing about how best to secure the building where we rent our office in South Minneapolis. Dozens, if not 100, if not more, people come in and out of our funky building of artists and healers every day. Is it more hospitable to keep the door unlocked, so that people can come in without fussing with a lock box, knowing that ICE could raid us? Is it hostile for clients to come to a locked door?
Last week, a friend called to ask about attending a protest at the Whipple Building, where ICE detentions occur and the HQ of Enforcement Operations, which is, of course, located near Fort Snelling, the location of a horrific massacre of Native people to Minnesota. What are the risks, my friend wondered, of showing up? She thought I might know, since I’ve shut down that building twice in civil disobedience, once in 2018 and once in 2019. What is state land? What is federal? What are the possible consequences? What if I get kettled? How does facial recognition software work? If I drive there, will ICE agents come to my house? This friend works in state government. Could her job be imperiled by attending a protest? If she went, and became doxxed and that was politicized, would that detract from the other horrors when all eyes need to be on immigrants? What about each and all of our first and fourth amendment rights?
As I write, the Jewish mom groupchat I’m in is discussing childcare plans because multiple daycares are closed. Another mom asked which daycare. We switched from Whatsapp to Signal for more secure messaging to share about the plight of the childcare workers helping to raise our children.
Parents have extended their days to organize watches at daycare drop off and pick up. We cannot go to the grocery store, to school, to work, to dinner. We are afraid to breathe outside. We are afraid that ICE will follow us home. I am afraid that people I see for therapy will be abducted on their way to therapy. I am afraid that everyone I love will be detained for being profiled. Or for trying to stop abductions. Or for just being there. Or for just being.
Driving home from work, I’m relieved to see round headlights behind me - a Fiat or a Mini Cooper means it’s not ICE. Subarus and Priuses feel safe. What I haven’t put down is the utter terror of every moment here. And that every single person I know could write their version of this. And none of this is from the news or social media but actual real relationships. This is what it is like here. The tight feeling, the rigidity, the countervalent desires to both Do Something and to Stay Safe. The vigilance of checking license plates every time I glance out the window. The Signal chats endlessly chiming, with an amount of horror that becomes meaningless although it is all accurate. The helicopters.
The fact that we lived through COVID. We lived through the George Floyd Uprising. And wars far away. And those crises prepared us and utterly did not for the way that this feels like a war: we have people, whistles, and babies. They have guns. The streets aren’t safe, and neither is the air. .
There are two biological imperatives for all creatures. To move toward danger and to move away from fear. In Minneapolis, some have no choice. Others of us are moving toward danger. Knowingly. Even after a murder. Block by block in Minneapolis people are in deep touch with the threat and showing up anyway. Because the threat is that existential, that viscerally devastating that we will override our biology to show up for each other. It is beautiful and it is devastating. None of this should be happening. We don’t know what we are doing. We aren’t doing it right. We aren’t doing it the best. But we are doing it together.
I’m writing this on Tuesday at 1 p.m. because someone didn’t arrive for telehealth therapy. She just messaged. She didn’t come because there were 2 abductions on her block. This is what life is like here.
