I work in Minneapolis. My work is as a school teacher. All that my life has been for the past week, is crisis management and high alert. Like when a video game is a bit much for an old computer and the fans are on full blast and you’re waiting for it to overheat. I feel like I’m going crazy and I need some grounding in a community of other people who have similar values around human life and justice.
ICE in other cities seemed far away, but now reality hit Minneapolis
When Trump sent ICE to other cities, I’ll be honest I let it feel far away; I focused on my sphere and what I could control. It’s been my mechanism through it all to be able to keep doing my job and living a life.
Now everything about my life has been tipped upside down and shaken up. I want to share some things that are going on because people keep saying I should keep talking about it:
Half my students aren’t leaving their homes, and I’m coordinating food delivery. We’re setting up online classes as best we can, while still teaching our kids that are showing up every day because school is the safest place for them.
People are disappearing, children are being teargassed
I’ve been to more meetings in the past week than probably the whole year prior, trying to hash out how we’re keeping kids safe when dozens of schools around me have had ICE agents circling schools at drop off and pick up, kidnapping parents, even teargassing high school students who were just in the way of their chase, and taking staff members who tried to help.
Bus drivers, neighbors, business owners, people are disappearing and places are empty. Cars left on the street with windows smashed because the person inside was brown.
Everyone I know has seen someone taken, beaten while they were down and handcuffed, detained for putting their bodies or cars nearby or for filming.
Families are trying to move back to their home countries but can’t get the proper passports or are getting detained at airports.
A knife driven through the city, based on how people look
Our city is having a knife driven right through it lopping off our people. Families can’t go to the doctor or the grocery store or the gas station because countless people have been taken. And not taken as in arrested and processed and given a lawyer, taken as in when they don’t come home they must be in a detention center somewhere, you call and no one can find them. They’re moved all around and can’t talk to anyone outside and they get no due process to even try to prove their citizenship or rights to be here.
They are doing this to native Americans. They are not checking, they’re just taking people based on how they look. There’s no training, no oversight. Everything is excessive use of force, there are kids being detained. They are waving weapons around recklessly, injuring so many people.
Even at peaceful protests brutality hits
Every protest has been peaceful, I actually received nonviolent deescalation training from one of the marshals who leads the major protests at the building they work out of. Yet going to one means you will get tear-gassed, shot at, thrown down, kicked and detained.
They are tracking people who express anti-ICE sentiment, who organize non-violently or observe, they are looking at personal messages, taking phones and following license plates wherever you go. They are using this to threaten and intimidate people.
I’m not sure what my purpose or goal is in sharing this. But it’s not just a news story anymore, it’s my entire life. I’ve been pretty lucky so far in my life, and this feels like the first extended time when I understand what Abraham Maslov was talking about, that you can’t do any of the other stuff if you don’t feel safe.
I’m scared all the time, and I’m white. I’m so sad for everyone here I love, who are the main targets. I just want people to keep hearing it from first-hand accounts, because I know when it’s a game of telephone on social media it gets jumbled.
I don’t know what happens next, but I think we all need to be ready. I used to be one that hated thinking about what could happen because I had at least some faith in our systems, but they’re not working anymore. There’s no due process, no protections from excessive force, no consequences for endangering or ending people’s lives.
I don’t know how we come back from this, and I think what we need to do instead is to lean into our communities and be ready. As ready as we can be.
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