This is an email my brother Jonathan sent out this week to friends and family. He’s involved in helping to organize monitoring and resistance to ICE and Homeland Security agents in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he lives and works in the public schools. I had talked to him on the phone a few days before he sent out this email, and even though I think of myself as someone who’s up on the news, and was of course paying attention in the aftermath of the killing of Renee Good, I was genuinely surprised by his description of the degree to which regular life in the cities has been deformed by the presence and behavior of federal troops. It’s disgusting and disturbing.-Dan
Hi everyone,
Forgive the impersonal mass email. I’m not one to raise alarms, but at a time like this I feel obligated to document the horrors happening in our backyard. I worry that if it’s not covered widely enough, or if you don’t see it up close, it can be hard to fathom what the federal government is doing to terrorize our neighbors and invade our community.
To get a sense of the scale, the number of ICE and Homeland Security agents here in the Twin Cities right now is nearly double the number of police officers. They are swarming our neighborhoods in unmarked cars; pulling people over at random; arresting and detaining people with no warrants or cause or justification other than being brown or black; intimidating people with assault weapons in their cars, at the local Target, and at nearly every immigrant-owned business; bashing out people’s windows after traffic stops and dragging them out of their cars; knocking on doors indiscriminately and asking people for documents or to turn on their neighbors. And it doesn’t matter if one is law-abiding, nor whether one has documents to be in the country, though of course it shouldn’t matter for those contributing to our community in so many wonderful ways. And of course they killed a woman last week, and I assume you all have seen the video. That thug will of course face no justice.
Make no mistake: This is not about safety. The Twin Cities are as safe as they’ve been in years. In Minneapolis, there have been two shootings so far this year, and one of them was ICE killing Renee Good. And yet now we are living in what is clearly becoming a terribly oppressive, authoritarian state in which the goons in Washington will come to stoke fear and create chaos and employ masked men to commit the most abhorrent racist abuses of power I’ve seen in my lifetime. All with impunity.
Indeed it wasn’t real to me until I was seeing it up close and personal. Students of mine crying in my room because they’re scared to come to school. Students not showing up in the first place. Students getting pulled over for no reason and being told their car needed to be searched. Coming to work at a school every day where parents need to surround the premises in case they need to document a student or staff member being assaulted by a paramilitary force and whisked away to a detention center that our elected officials are not allowed to visit.
I don’t have an ask of anyone and I don’t mean to be preachy in any way. I just feel the need to bear witness and to document the horror show happening in our country. I was late to the game in calling Trump and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem the worst kind of names and labeling their government all the things we ascribe to authoritarian and anti-democratic forces. I wanted to believe this country, for all its massive flaws, could and would withstand a madman out only for power, revenge, money, and subjugation. But the evidence is now too clear what these people aim to do — because they are doing it.
I fear it will only get worse. I hold out hope only because of how much goodness there is here in Minnesota with regular people going above and beyond to care for strangers and friends and colleagues and loved ones. I do believe in the goodness of all people, though it’s sad beyond words to see minds poisoned to think they’re doing good by treating other people as sub-human and unworthy of dignity, respect, and the rule of law. It is not a new tragedy or the worst in history, but it is a tragedy nonetheless.
Sending love,
Jonathan
Sending love back to Jonathan.
The remarkable thing is that the administration is desperately trying to provoke public violence, and despite their best, most cruel and oppressive efforts, the Twin Cities haven't given them even ten seconds of video footage to frame protests as "riots," or to frame ICE agents as "under assault," unless you count having their feelings hurt when they go into a Target.
St. Paul himself would be proud of what the cities are doing. Keep resisting.
Well said. I’m starting my seventh decade on the earth and I never thought I’d live long enough to see people being stopped at random on the street and asked for their “papers.”
I just want to say that people shouldn’t lose faith entirely. This has been driven by an outlaw government. It is still roughly a 50-50 split between democrat and Republican in the electorate. Trump and his ilk will go eventually. The country is still the country it was before him and despite all the lingering problems there’s still tremendous potential and opportunity for improvement.
I’m not usually in the business of optimism, but in this case it’s at least worth considering.