we’re swarming.
This isn’t going to be coherent, and it’s not going to be linear. It’s just things I’ve seen, noticed, experienced, and felt in the last few weeks.
A local coffee shop that I go to regularly has transformed their tip jar into a free whistles jar. Every time I go in, I grab another to hand out to people I know.
Every small business I have been to has a sign on their door or in their front window that says “NO ADMITTANCE TO ICE.” Many of them lock their doors and let people in one by one, to make certain no one can infiltrate.
ICE agents are wearing plainclothes and sneaking into schools that are setting up food banks for their students’ families. They claim to have donations for the food bank. Instead, they steal lives.
A former coworker of mine was dragged out of his car by five agents, thrown to the ground, and taken to immigration detention. His teenage brother filmed it. He is a U.S. citizen. He was released a few days later, without an apology.
Every person I know has a whistle. Every person I know is getting a gas mask, a hands-free body cam. We take breaks from work and drive around, alerting each other to plainclothes officers and cars with black-out windows.
There’s a local neighborhood fight that’s been going on for years. One house on the street has one of those fifteen-foot-tall skeletons from Home Depot that they keep up year-round. The neighbors across the street hate it, call it satanic, and have been trying to get them to take it down. Even before ICE came to Minneapolis, the rest of the neighborhood had gotten skeletons of their own to stand in solidarity with The Big Guy. Now, every skeleton and every house on that street has signs — handmade, painted on cardboard or spare wood — that read something like NO ICE IN OUR STREETS.
There are three Native men from the Oglala Lakota Nation being held prisoner in the Whipple Building because ICE is demanding a deportation contract with their tribe. Because to ICE, Native people aren’t Native. These men are hostages. At every rally and every march I’ve been to, Native women have been leading the charge — dancing — their husbands and friends and brothers drumming while they sing. Mankato, Minnesota, was the site of the largest mass execution in American history, in 1862. All 38 of those men were Dakota.
I am in multiple rapid-response chats. Every single one, every single day, has people offering to purchase groceries for each other, take each other to appointments, provide money or support, pay rent, pay bills.
When Alex Pretti was murdered, I got an email from my synagogue. My rabbis and other clergy have been deeply involved in the response and have been at every protest, and organized some of their own. Last night, I got an email from my rabbi asking me to go outside at 7 p.m. with a candle, to light up our streets. I couldn’t go outside to stand last night because of a medical emergency, but I know so many who did. Whittier — where Alex Pretti died, which is now being encircled with a National Guard barricade and checkpoints — turned out on every street.
I have friends and coworkers in other cities. Every single one has seen ICE. Not just Minneapolis: St. Paul, Woodbury, Brooklyn Park — where Melissa Hortman was murdered — Maple Grove, St. Cloud, Willmar. Every single one of them has ICE roaming the streets. Every single one of them has communities rising up in response.
Minnesota is not the only place I have ever lived. I’ve lived on the East Coast, on the West Coast, in the Southwest, abroad. I have been in the Twin Cities for six years as of this August. It has its flaws, like every place. But this was the wrong place for ICE and this administration to try this. We’re a social-services state. We have thousands of programs. We’re used to supporting each other. We want to support each other.
Minnesota is a state of neighbors. When I first moved here, people told me, “Oh, it doesn’t matter who you voted for; we’re your neighbors no matter what.” Another person told me, “Community support is the most important value we have. Sometimes it’s hard, because it’s like a beehive or a wasp’s nest. Sometimes we’re encouraged to assimilate, and assimilation isn’t always good. But if you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us. Even if we disagree, we show up.”
At the time, I didn’t believe it. I have never been in a place where those boundaries don’t drive deep lines between houses and families and communities. And it’s not like they don’t; Minnesotans fight, disagree, stop speaking, lose contact.
But Minnesota nice is real. Minnesota nice might be passive-aggressive at worst, but at its best, it’s like a beehive. Minnesota is a beehive — and when the bees are under threat, the hive swarms.
We’re swarming.
-AB
