It’s not a Resistance, It’s a Paradigm Shift: Minnesota’s Fight for its Soul

Regina is punk rock to the core. We used to work together at a restaurant in South Minneapolis. She was a prep cook, I was a waitress. She'd often join me when I'd step out for a break, and I'd listen to her social commentary saturated with wit and a deliciously jet black sense of humor. That woman has a gleaming silver tongue. She describes herself on social media as "Cyborg. Weirdo. Meat-Wizard." I think that's accurate.

On the day they killed Alex Pretti, Regina was just a few blocks away in her apartment. She's a wheelchair user now and could only watch out her window as people passed below on their way to stand up for the dead.

It was too cold for her chair battery to last even a block. Her compromised lungs could not handle the inevitable teargas that is deployed with such abandon that aerial photos of neighborhoods look like massive structure fires rage below. She felt furious, frustrated, helpless. Through her closed window, she heard the citizens of Minneapolis converging blocks away at the site of atrocity. It sounded like a stadium show.

Bao is an essential part of the ecosystem that is Minneapolis and a titan in the literary community. He worked at the Loft Literary center for 23 years, rising through the ranks to serve as Director of Events and Programs for a decade. He provided space and opportunity for all artists to thrive with a particular focus on those of color.

He is an award winning poet, children's book author and donut junkie with a bottomless love of fried chicken. We both came up through the Slam Poetry scene, and I feel an affinity towards him in how we each, as young poets championed our identities with anger and humor and have mellowed in our approach with time. Maybe that's an inevitable symptom of aging, but I feel a connection. It could also be the donuts.

Bao is an immigrant whose family fled Vietnam when he was less than 1 year old. He has been a US citizen since grade school, but now has to carry 3 forms of ID when he leaves the house in case he is targeted by those that many call the Gestapo, though some say slave catchers is more accurate.

He worries about his elderly parents who have broken no laws and been legal residents for 50 years, but that doesn't seem to be dealbreaker for men who drag pregnant women through the snow and shoot people in the street. Meanwhile Bao's father calls to beg him not to leave his house for the same reason.

I call a friend to make plans to see a show next week in Powderhorn, the neighborhood where Renee Good was murdered. Although we both want to go, we keep it tentative in case of Martial Law or civil war. I text another friend to confirm upcoming plans for dinner. "Are we still on to be potentially murdered on Tuesday?" It's glib, I know, but also entirely possible.

I read the newspaper and see people winning Grammys and planning the Super Bowl, and I wonder how anyone can continue life as usual in this country while an entire state is occupied by its own federal government. I tell my mother not to answer the door without looking out the window to make sure it's not ICE. They have been going door to door asking people to point out immigrant neighbors. This all sounds very heinous and dystopian, but here we are. This is the reality. This is Minnesota.

I was born in Minneapolis and have spent the majority of my life there. My friends, my community, my heart are all in Minneapolis, but I am now in a small college town about a half hour from the city limits. We have ICE here too. They're staying at a hotel two blocks from my house. I have neighbors who I believe have been disappeared. I haven't seen them for over a month. People here are taken every day. While the concentration of this occupation is definitely on Minneapolis, know that it is a statewide effort.

Liam Ramos, that adorable 5-year-old with the bunny hat was abducted in Columbia Heights. ChongLy Thao, the US citizen whose door was broken down before he was forced out into the snow in his underwear lived in St. Paul. The teenage citizen who was slammed on the ground, dragged from his job at Target, then dumped bloody and black-eyed in a parking lot 8 blocks away was in Richfield. And the Mexican restaurant where ICE agents had lunch, then returned at closing time to arrest the entire staff was in Willmar.

These stories are endless and everywhere in Minnesota, every town no matter how small is occupied. This is not to hijack street cred from Minneapolis. They've endured the murders, but we are all in this together.

I plan my trips to the city in a new way now. I make sure to dress warmer than my typical half-assed lifelong impermeable Minnesotan way in case I am outside for long periods. I pack a charging battery for my phone so I won't run it down recording assaults and abductions. I remind myself to be hyper aware on the road and on foot, because ICE drives recklessly. They run people off the road deliberately and cannot navigate winter streets. I consider my routes through the city. You can be yanked from your car for simply driving down a street where they're operating.

I worry about my cats. Who will take care of them if I'm arrested? I'm a white woman. I don't imagine I'll end up in CECOT, but it could be days before I'm released. I have these thoughts when I'm not even heading to a protest. I might be picking up cat food at my favorite pet store or meeting a friend for coffee or getting a haircut. But they are everywhere, and you have to be ready. Who knows when they might come tearing out of nowhere, ram a car into a telephone pole and drag it's driver out through the window while she screams for her kids. And if you get too close trying to record the demolished wreck and the large pool of blood next to the car, you might get shoved to the ground and possibly shot to death. Really anything can happen right now in Minnesota.

When Trump sent his first incursion into LA last year, I was surprised, not because he was invading US citizens. That guy would happily bomb a city to dust just to look at the pretty fireworks. I was surprised because it wasn't here. I was sure we'd be the top of his list.

People assume they're here because our Governor called him weird and was on the opposing ticket in the last election, or because Minnesota never voted for him. Perhaps they want to distract us while they tap into our massive abundant supply of fresh water to power the AI data centers with which they plan to pave the earth, so they can sit alone in the rubble of a demolished planet breathing through respirators and counting their bitcoin. All could be true. But I suspect it is has something to do with George Floyd.

There Trump was in 2020, telling us to ignore the pandemic and get back to work, his approval ratings plummeting, corpses piling up in shipping containers while he said, Pfft. What corpses? Along comes this city he'd probably never even heard of sparking the largest civil rights movement in human history. It was embarrassing. He couldn't even get the military to storm in and mow us all down with machine guns, though lord knows he tried. Now he's rid himself of anyone with a conscience or interest in the law, so he gets a do over.

We know how that guy likes to hold grudges.

We were ready, when they finally did arrive. Before the first whistle blew, we had systems in place to protect our neighbors; mutual aid networks, legal support, volunteers to witness and record, trained observers, ordinary citizens poised to deliver groceries and shovel walks for those afraid to leave their homes, rides for children to get to school and people to work. This isn't our first rodeo.

The whole world remembers just six years ago when we put our foot down. And we've had a year to prepare for this while we watched ICE invade other major cities, to pick up pointers, to bolster our resources. I'm not the only one who expected Minneapolis to be prime target. I just wasn't expecting it to be the entire state.

Perhaps the regime waited this long to target us, because they thought that if they hit us in the winter, we'd be less likely to take to the streets and stand up to them. As If. They just attacked a population that grew up on ice skates and skis and sleds, who have winter carnivals and markets and ice sculpture competitions and fish on frozen lakes. I have seen people mock waterskiing behind cars after major blizzards. We thrive in winter.

And perhaps because of our familiarity with harsh conditions, we are a uniquely neighborly society. We shovel walks for our elderly neighbors. If someone's car is stuck in the snow, strangers appear within minutes to help free them. We are accustomed to delivering meals to the homebound and helping others find shelter, so the transition here was an easy one to make.

On January 23rd, when temperatures plunged to twenty degrees below zero with a windchill that made it feel like fifty below, Minnesota staged a general strike; no work, no school, no shopping with massive marches through the frigid weather to demand ICE leave our state. Some of the media covered it, showed images of crowds flooding the streets despite the cold. But few reported the hundreds of businesses that closed that day in solidarity, or the ones that remained open but donated all of their proceeds to support immigrant families.

A broadway theater downtown Minneapolis opened its doors that afternoon to provide marchers with a place to keep warm before the protest. The city offered its basketball stadium for a massive rally at the end of the march. Restaurants and independent businesses shut their doors on a Friday to allow their staff the opportunity to participate. It was an immense showing of resolve, endurance, durability and solidarity that made us all feel like superheroes.

We couldn't even savor the afterglow before they'd given us another martyr. It galvanized us even more.

We're a big state with plenty of rural areas. Yes, we have racists and soulless people with money who want to profit no matter who suffers and those complacent, just wanting to maintain the status quo. They exist here just like everywhere else, but they are most certainly the minority. One need only look at our historic voting record and the progressive legislators we've sent to Washington to know that.

A handy indicator is the recent rally organized by a far-right influencer in downtown Minneapolis. He advertised for weeks, inviting his huge following to join him for a march through the city. Only about five people showed up to watch him burn a Quran on the steps of City Hall while thousands came to make sure he didn't. If you step out of the comments sections and into the real world, you see that there are far more of us than them. Most of them simply don't exist.

They underestimated Minnesota; our heartiness, our deeply established organizational systems of mutual aid and support, our impermeability to extreme weather, the overwhelming volume of humanity that we possess. They also underestimated our people.

Perhaps they expected us to be scrappy, misperceiving the protests that exploded after George Floyd was murdered. Maybe they thought Minnesota would erupt in rage and violence and give them an excuse to escalate, that people of color would lash out at being targeted.

Silly Rabbit.

As a middle aged white lady, I have enjoyed an entire life, safe in the knowledge that I would really have to try to get pulled over. I would have to like, drive 100 miles an hour down the highway, shooting an AK-47 and screaming Heil Hitler, and even then I'd probably live to tell the story. Granted, that would likely land me a job offer at this point, but there are roughly 100 million people in this country who run the risk of getting murdered just because they're driving a car.

People of color have lived with the reality Minnesota now faces for their entire lives. They can't take a morning jog or hang out in grandma's backyard or go shopping or play at the playground or walk to the store for snacks or have a burrito in the park before work or eat ice cream on their couch or sleep in their own bed without running the risk of being executed. They don't even have to follow law enforcement around and blow whistles. Actually there's a high incentive to avoid the hell out of them, because: see above. Being targeted, for them is just another Tuesday.

Minnesota has enjoyed progressive waves of Hmong, Latin American, Southeast Asian, Liberian, and Somali immigrants to name a few. We have large and thriving black, Asian, LatinX and Native populations. These are people who have been forced to fight for their rights and color outside the lines throughout all of American history, to build their own schools when their children were denied an education, build their own communities when they were barred from jobs, buying homes in white neighborhoods or securing loans, to nurture and protect these communities without government help, to rebuild again and again.

Their neighborhoods are the first places picked to run the new highway through. Their backyards are where the refineries are built and the toxic waste is dumped. Their businesses have been burned, their land stolen, their people lynched. This is nothing new to them, so who better to show us all how to endure this? Who better to stand beside, to learn from, to look to for guidance? They are the authorities on this matter, and we are blessed to have them among us in this fight.

Minneapolis has extensive and strong systems in place to support immigrant communities to navigate life in a new country and build fulfilling lives. As I've mentioned, the Black Lives Matter movement sparked a global Civil Rights movement starting right here just 6 years ago. We are the birthplace of AIM, who could teach a master class on protecting community. We have Water Protectors here. Remember Standing Rock? Those people are pros at sustained resistance.

Paired with organizers for labor, GLBTQ+, women's rights and countless others, Minnesota's resistance isn't a mass of friendly white people protecting their neighbors. It is a glorious patchwork of communities with centuries of experience with being targeted by the government leading us all in a crash course on how to resist and survive.

We're told the world is watching, but I wonder what they see. If George Floyd taught Minnesota anything, it's that the media can get the story very wrong. Burning police stations and videotaped murders sell papers, but it's what's happening here every day that this country needs to know.

When I visited Alex Pretti's memorial, there were 4 news crews there, with their tripods and polished correspondents. It felt invasive, like obnoxious tourists taking up too much space, getting a sound byte with a colorful backdrop while the real story is left untold.

Every day the atrocities pile up; chemical weapons sprayed directly into people's faces, clouds of teargas and a billowing noxious green substance, doors broken down without warrants. Ice kneels on the neck of a man they've ripped from his car, beats another unconscious at a gas station, then drags his limp body away.

A Roller Derby athlete is choked by an agent who gouges at her eyes with his thumbs. A man is thrown into oncoming traffic and nearly hit by a bus. A legal resident steps out back of the restaurant where he works and is abducted. The staff of a restaurant in Elk River is kidnapped while they set up for the day. A 2-year-old girl is taken. A mother steps out to warm up her car, and is grabbed, leaving her young children alone in the house. Pepper spray is released in a high school.

They are hunting; waiting near churches and preschools, bus stops, workplaces and public parks, demanding identification from anyone black or brown, assaulting whoever dares to bear witness. Minnesotans are watching and then some.

The regime complains about domestic terrorists, which I guess means the majority of Minnesotans. They claim that we are paid agitators, and there must be some master pulling the strings, because they don't understand a commitment to something that has no financial gain. They cannot comprehend what is happening, and for all their efforts to define or break it, they're failing.

We have no central command to topple, no leaders for them to imprison to crush our spirits. They've invaded a remarkably civic minded people. Minnesota consistently has one of the biggest voter turnouts in the country. We get involved. Their incursion kicked us into high gear, and that is the story that should be on every front page.

The people of Minnesota have mobilized in thousands of ways. Citizens have taken to the streets to monitor ICE activity, tens of thousands trained to observe. There are protests everywhere all the time; holding signs on highway overpasses, in front of Republican congressional offices, in Target stores, surrounding hotels where ICE is staying, outside the detention center, in town squares across the state. Children, their classrooms half empty, stage school walkouts. Local businesses provide warm beverages, bathrooms, snacks, eye washing stations, medics, hand and foot warmers to those on the front line.

Food banks overflow. Each call for donations receives an avalanche in response. People post outside schools to protect our children. Volunteers wait at the detention center for those who have been released without coats, their phones confiscated. There are rumors that those who have been beaten badly are dumped in the woods around the fort. A whole organization has arisen to feed them, give them burner phones and warm clothing, arrange for them to get home. Every day another hole is filled, another need is met.

We have created a complicated web of aid and resistance that concocts new ways to help every day. This is a well oiled machine with millions of independant parts. A retired couple stands watch near a church to protect those who want to worship. A pizza place starts a Venmo to support immigrant families and raises hundreds of thousands. Mutual aid hubs pop up in the most unlikely places; a sex shop, a Facebook group for funny memes.

There is an entire underground laundry network to wash the clothes of those trapped in their homes. People donate what skills and resources they have. Artists speak out, organize concerts and poetry readings, build subversive public sculptures and street art, write to inform the world. Carpenters fix broken down doors. Tow companies salvage vehicles left when their owners were dragged away. Graphic designers make logos, buttons, and bumper stickers. A group of nerds uses their 3D printers to make whistles. A local baker makes bread for hungry families. Systems are developed to take care of abandoned pets. Volunteer doctors and veterinarians provide in home care. Crafters knit, artisans make goods to raise funds, people flood Congress with phone calls and letters.

Every day we all wonder what more we can do.

What started as a defense of our neighbors has become a struggle for our soul. Minnesota is showing the world what community means. And while we work every day to strengthen ours, we take time to fortify each other. We hold strategy meetings and throw parties to blow off steam. A friend invites everyone over for soup and emotional support. Tribal dancers sanctify sites of death and violence. A puppet theater stages a parade. We remind each other that not everyone can be on the front lines risking their lives. We all have roles to play, and every role is critical.

Bao writes an Op-Ed that is published in Time Magazine. Despite the risk, he leaves his home to participate in the marches and vigils that take place daily. Regina flags down a group of young protesters heading towards the fray and hands them her bullhorn. We all use our platforms to share, post, broadcast, because Minnesota is in it for the long haul, and the world needs to know.

There's something happening here. It's not a resistance, it's a paradigm shift. Neighbors are stepping away from the rhetoric to band together and build. Performative boycotts are becoming lifestyle changes. Everyone is hyper aware of every small business, every human being, every element of our community, and we're making damned sure we've got everyone's back.

There are two images that I find define Minnesota best. One is a photograph of Minnesotans taken the day that Alex Pretti was killed. They are walking down Nicollet Ave into a massive cloud of teargas to reach the place where he died. Bringing up the rear is a woman using a walker, charging into the cloud with the rest of them.

The second is a video that has been shared widely of ICE agents desperately trying to free a vehicle stuck in the snow. It is clear they have no idea what they're doing. The driver digs the car in deeper, while those trying to push flail and fall repeatedly. It's fun to watch, but the best part is two older men standing on their respective front lawns, watching the debacle with their arms folded. Any Minnesotan immediately senses the utter contempt wafting off these men. It's basically morally illegal here to not immediately jump in to help anyone stuck in the snow. The fact that neither man moves a muscle while ICE flounders is the clearest Minnesota way to say,

You are not welcome here.