Liza Cochran is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She and her mother, Lorni Cochran, of Guilford, write Brave Little Voices, a Substack site that advocates for a more just world as it celebrates Calvin Coolidge’s famous remark about Vermont: “If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.”
LINCOLN-A week after Alex Pretti was killed, I joined a dear friend in Minneapolis. She grew up in the Twin Cities and we went to visit her family and offer what felt like a meager token of support as they continued living day-to-day in a besieged city.
We also went as witnesses. To document for posterity what we saw, and to carry back home what could be scenes from our near future.
If ICE is a virus spreading city to city, then the people of Minneapolis — who were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize — are the first responders, administering to the suffering with the grace and grit we all must be ready to muster soon.
In the neighborhoods we visited in south Minneapolis — Powderhorn and Whittier, Corcoran and Central — the care of the community was evident everywhere. And so was the occupation.
Nearly every house had a message staked in the yard or taped to the window: ice out of mpls, go home, no secret police, say their names. Homemade signs marked the locations of kidnappings.
There was a pervasive sense of urgency cloaking the community, undamped by the fresh snow that fell the day we arrived and blanketed the memorials.
In the face of Trump’s undocumented paramilitary force — which roves lawlessly, running red lights in their oversized SUVs, their identities always obscured behind tinted windows and face masks — there was a grave call to protect the city block by block, neighbor by neighbor, to counter the goons not with weapons but with sheer good will.
At the site of Renée Good’s killing, someone carefully moved through the island of flowers and signs, wiping the fresh snow off of each tribute with his mitten. Someone else shoveled slush away from the curb to open up passage for circumambulating visitors. Someone else tended a fire.
And still someone else — a young man of Hispanic descent, not insignificantly — handed out fresh cups of coffee, brewed on a portable gas burner next to the memorial.
“The resistance to ICE is driven by neighbors looking out for neighbors more than by affinity groups or any specific left-wing ideological project,” Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein wrote in The New York Review of Books. Up against such clear opposition, pulling together reflected the shared conclusion that no one else was coming to protect them. All over, we saw the sign: we keep us safe.
* * *
We got the sense from my friend’s brother and sister-in-law — who live not far from George Floyd Square, which is not far from Renée Good’s memorial, which is not far from Alex Pretti’s — that it was all-hands-on-deck, all the time. Everyone is doing something in addition to their day jobs to resist the occupation.
Meeting up with a couple of my friends in the city required planning around not only their work schedules, but also their food delivery shifts to families sheltering in place and school watch shifts, in which trained observers survey nearby blocks during drop-off and pick-up, ready to alert school officials if they see a suspected ICE vehicle.
Meanwhile, my friend’s partner drives kids from two families to and from school every day so the parents can avoid exposure. Meanwhile, other neighbors are repurposing their local bus stop into a mini clothing donation center — winter coats and snow pants neatly arranged on hangers across the length of the shelter, bins of clothes below, available to any passersby in need.
* * *
Thirty thousand Minnesotans have now been trained as constitutional observers. With a 15-to-1 ratio over ICE, these everyday heroes are “actively responding to a case every six minutes across the state of Minnesota,” Edwin Torres Desantiago, who leads trainings for the Immigrant Defense Network, told Minnesota Public Radio.
“They are the ones keeping watch,” he said to Sahan Journal. “They’re the ones that are making sure our constitution is upheld, and when those rights get violated, we work with legal partners to bring a remedy through the court system.”
Some of these observers are on foot, and some are moving about the city in cars, plugged into their hyperlocal Signal chats with a dispatcher directing “commuters” to certain coordinates to check for suspected ICE and to call in car models and license plates.
“I can’t believe I have to do this,” one observer reflected to Racket. “I can’t believe I have to respond to an abduction in progress. I can’t believe I have to patrol school pick-up. I can’t believe I had to learn the difference between an Expedition and an Escape. [...] I don’t want to do this! I have to do this!”
* * *
My friend’s brother told us ICE has recently attempted to evade detection with vegan bumper stickers and rip-away temporary license plates. Once a vehicle becomes “confirmed ICE” — either by license plate or a visual on its masked, armed agents — then commuters honk their horns, and any pedestrians or observers who happen to be out on the block flock to the vehicle and start blowing their whistles.
Everyone has a whistle.
Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic that perhaps Trump’s menacing delegation expected a walkover.
“Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers — at the very least — are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom.
“If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it ‘neighborism’ — a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.”
* * *
On our second day, we drove through a neighborhood where barricades had been constructed (especially near schools, it seemed) to slow down traffic and give observers the chance to monitor, record, and report ICE vehicles. This, apparently, was a new tactic.
The barriers were crude — cobbled together with whatever was on hand: wooden pallets, living room chairs, a grocery cart, an elegantly drawn homemade sign indicating the new roundabout traffic pattern.
More than anything else we’d seen up to that point, these roadblocks caught my breath in a “holy shit” kind of way — in part because rerouting traffic was, I assumed, crossing a line into murky legal territory.
But more than that, it was a clear display of people taking matters into their own hands. In this act of piling shit in the street in front of ICE’s path, I intuitively understood, neighbors were also placing their bodies.
The gatherings at the blockades had the flavor of turf pride, a high-stakes block party: This is our block, damn it. And yet there were volunteer medics on hand and observers posted as guards with scarves wrapped around their heads and faces, evoking what could be recognized instead as participants of a revolution.
Charles Homans observed in The New York Times Magazine that ICE had, for some time, “been actors in a kind of theater of power.” But what became clear to the journalist once he witnessed it all from the ground was that “the agents had no capacity to maintain order or much apparent interest in doing so. Their presence was a vector of chaos, and controlling it was not in their job description.”
* * *
When we came across the blockades on Monday, they were so new there was not yet police presence on site or law enforcement pressure to dismantle them. There was no higher authority monitoring these encounters.
Instead, there was a feeling of lawlessness in these neighborhoods with checkpoints and safe houses — but not on the part of the residents. The law, it seemed, could be broken right in front of us, and no one would be there to hold the federal perpetrators accountable — or, for that matter, to protect us.
And this was certainly true when we found ourselves behind an ICE SUV, approaching one of the blockades.
The vehicle had just ripped through a red light. Instead of stopping or slowing down at the roundabout, it sped up toward the group of five or eight observers standing amidst their household items.
At the ad hoc traffic circle, ICE took a right at high speed, almost hitting an observer. Nearly simultaneously, another observer picked up a metal folding chair and swung it at the car, smashing it over the back window and bumper as ICE fled.
Even in the blur of these seconds, I was aware I was witnessing exactly what Homans had described as the “latent combustibility of these encounters.” The flash point would further ignite for us when, moments later, ICE spun around to return to the checkpoint, only to encounter our vehicle behind them, slowing their progress.
The ICE agents who approached our car were relatively sedate as they spoke to my friend’s brother behind the wheel, threatening arrest.
Sitting through the encounter in the back seat, ICE standing right there through my open window, not unlike Renée Good’s open window, I found myself frozen. At the bifurcating fork of the fight/flight/freeze stress response, I froze — with my hands up.
Afterward, I couldn’t be sure if it had been one agent or three, one minute or five, if running the red light had happened before the blockade or after, if the agent outside my open window had in his holster pepper spray or a gun.
While sitting there, waiting for the combustion to burn hotter or burn out, I was experiencing a tightening on my freedom of movement — a constitutional right that, as a white woman, I normally take for granted had vanished.
And then we were let go, allowed to leave, to drive away from the blockade into the bright sun of the day, toward lunch and a warm home.
Would four non-white people have been granted this movement?
* * *
The night before I left home, I talked to my younger brother, who is adopted from Peru, on the phone. Since infancy, he’s been a U.S. citizen, growing up in Vermont in our very white family in our very white town.
Now, he told me, he’s making decisions based on the likelihood of encountering ICE. Contemplating a trip to visit our older brother in Australia this coming spring, he decided not to leave the country for fear of not being let back in. Last weekend, he thought twice before driving to Denver to see a concert.
He lives in asmall Colorado town that hasn’t been targeted per se, but is full of immigrant families. Going to work at his landscaping job, he doesn’t fear he’ll be rounded up with the rest of his crew, many of whom are undocumented — though he acknowledges this possibility and carries a photo of his passport.
Instead, he’s afraid of his own flammability. If his coworkers were taken in front of him, he doesn’t trust he could remain calm. His suspicion of all law enforcement runs deep, he says.
And now he’s aware that his own volatility, however justified, carries a sharpened risk.
In the Atlantic article “Welcome to the American Winter,” Robert F. Worth describes talking to someone whose neighbor was hiding their “adopted brown kid” in the basement.
“This kind of thing no longer sounds weird in Minneapolis,” Worth noted. “Many people are hiding indoors — so many that, in a city with a substantial minority population, I hardly saw any Black or Latino faces on the street.”
This is a time when the constitutional right of freedom of movement is being stripped away on account of skin color, when what is purported to be an immigration crackdown feels more like ethnic cleansing, when people with brown skin are hiding in their homes.
And this is a time when white bodies can still move relatively safely about the world.
I chose to go to Minneapolis, and I chose to leave, and both of these movements were founded on privilege. As a visitor, I could jet in and jet out of a city-sized zone of risk, like some sort of perverse adrenaline junky.
But here in the city, the resident observers and commuters, like Alex Pretti and Renée Good, are choosing every day to put their bodies in ICE’s path.
Imagining the lengths I’d go to guard the stretch of road where my daughters attend school — the elementary on one side, the preschool on the other — I could taste the desperation to protect one’s neighborhood, I could shake with righteous indignation. How dare anyone keep these children from learning in peace, from walking home in safety?
This indignation could spill over; flash points were likely if not inevitable. But Minnesotans were taking what felt like calculated risk. Prompting the piling of this wood, the blowing of these whistles, the beeping of these horns, was a sense of responsibility to let neighbors know to hide, or businesses to lock their doors, or schools to keep the kids inside until the coast was clear.
Within the courage of these bodies to turn toward danger lived a refusal to remain frozen, to remain blind.
* * *
Every day, more Minnesotans pour peacefully into the streets for protests and strikes. They’re showing up in droves for constitutional observer trainings. By the thousands, they’re singing to ICE, inviting them to defect. People who have never protested before have been driven to action by what they deem intolerable. They consider themselves not protesters so much as humanists or protectors.
While moving about Minneapolis’s neighborhoods, and certainly while attempting to put this experience into writing, I’ve asked myself about the value of being a 40-hour witness. I’m mindful of the risk of telling someone else’s story and not getting it right, making an errant assumption, misrepresenting.
And yet I’ve also been overcome lately by that foreboding feeling that descended just before the pandemic — like what is taking shape is too big and unsparing for any of us to understand. The only certainty is that it’s coming. And while it will, in its cruelty, wreak havoc discriminately, it will no doubt touch us all.
In visiting Minneapolis, I wasn’t quite sure if I was there to pay honor or to bring some of that honor back home with me — to share what these first responders have learned about this federal virus, what they have built on the foundation of the American Indian Movement, on Black Lives Matter, on what the recovery community in Minnesota calls “Mecca” for its vast support system — aka mutual aid — for people overcoming addiction.
* * *
On our first day in the city, we’d had lunch with my friend’s 95-year old grandmother. She told us exactly what she’d do if she saw an ICE agent. She’d look him right in the eye and ask him earnestly: “What would your mother say?”
She would appeal to his humanity.
I never looked the ICE agent who stopped us in the eye. Like the rest of me, my gaze had frozen up. I was only aware of his looming presence, a foot away. No doubt he saw me there in the backseat: a white lady. He took in the outside of me, the external contours of another body, assessed my skin and age, saw me without seeing me.
I didn’t see him, either.
* * *
On our second and final night in the city, we walked to the Alex Pretti memorial to attend a gathering organized by Brass Solidarity — “part of the soundtrack of resistance” in Minneapolis since George Floyd’s murder, as described by NPR.
With a few hundred others, we encircled the site where Pretti sheltered a woman from pepper spray, where he tried to help her up, where he was shot 10 times in the back for his crime of caring.
We sang to the steady pulsing of drums and peals of trumpet: O-o-h child, things are going to get easier, o-o-h child, things’ll get brighter. Some day, yeah, we’ll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun Some day, when the world is much brighter.
We sang “Stand By Me,” overlayed with “The people united will never be defeated.”
In the swell of this music was a fleeting sense that the world we long for was actually right there before us, that we are a part of it already.
I would not describe myself as a hopeful person, but surrounded by those vibrations, I was carried by the melody into what felt like hope.
But like so much of what I experienced in Minneapolis, there was a distinct contrast between this life force and the people hiding in fear, people grieving a loved one already taken, people imprisoned in detention centers thousands of miles away from their home.
If my adopted brother were here visiting with me, would he be out on the streets with us? Perhaps not. And I don’t think I would want him to be. If the combustible material of fierce protection were to ignite here on the street, he would certainly be among the first hauled away.
* * *
Since returning home, tears have been a frequent visitor. It’s hard to decipher if they are for what I just left behind or for what could be coming.
And like the honor I paid and the honor I brought back to share, perhaps there is no real difference.
On the plane back to Burlington, I looked out my window at the familiar backbone of the Green Mountains. I saw the two peaks and long spine between them, sheltering the valleys below. My partner and girls were tucked into those folds of frozen forest and streams — I could almost pinpoint our house. Beneath us, Lake Champlain appeared, vast and frozen.
The wind had pushed the snow into hieroglyphics across the ice — a mesmerizing, indecipherable language beckoning us home, into a future we could not predict but could perhaps prepare for together.
* * *
Editor’s postscript: Since Liza Cochran wrote this account, posted on Feb. 9, the surge of immigration enforcement in Minneapolis has receded substantially — perhaps because of the community reaction that she saw firsthand. But as described in a May 5 joint report by NPR and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalistic nonprofit, “the surge left a mark that enforcement statistics can’t capture, including a hollowed-out local economy that immigrants and their neighbors say they are struggling to rebuild.”
“Together, [the stories reported from Minneapolis] map what the crackdown left behind: shuttered restaurants, households rationing groceries, mounting debt, mental health woes and, for some, a serious reckoning with whether to leave the United States to return to their home countries,” NPR Immigration Correspondent Sergio Martínez-Beltrán reported.
This Voices Dispatch was submitted to The Commons.
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