Marble Falls I can’t keep from sharing a long “letter” of sorts from the deportation and ICE resistance in Minnesota that ran as an opinion piece in The New York Times by Will McGrath, described there as “an essayist” from Minneapolis. I’ll simply describe him as a resister who shares an insider’s report and joy at being able to play a small role in the collective enterprise of protest and struggle against injustice. He’s a witness to what’s happening in Minneapolis, but he’s also making a subtle appeal for all of us to play a role in this great national project of saving America.
Here are excerpts from McGrath’s essay:
In the Resistance, We Drive Minivans
In the resistance we drive minivans, we take ’em low and slow down Nicollet Avenue, our trunks stuffed with hockey skates and scuffed Frisbees and cardboard Costco flats. We drive Odysseys and Siennas, we drive Voyagers and Pacificas,…. One of our kids wrote “wash me” on the van’s exterior, etched it into the gray scurf of frozen Minneapolis slush.
In the resistance …we double-check the address, two new kids in the car pool today, three more families requesting rides in the Signal chat. We scan our phones to see which intersections to avoid: armed ICE action in Powderhorn; saw a protester get pushed down. This is in the weeks following the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents. Following the killing of Renee Good by a federal agent.
In the resistance we drive the high school car pool, that holy responsibility, the ferrying of innocents among the wolves. We drive kids we’ve never met before from families afraid to leave their houses….
We’ve been doing this since December, eight weeks-going-on-nine-going-on who knows. Kids stopped going to school when thousands of ICE officers arrived in Minnesota. They didn’t want to take the buses anymore, their parents too nervous to release their children onto the block, lest they get swept up by masked agents in flak jackets. A network of neighborhood moms and dads bloomed organically, divvying rides, vetting newcomers. There were no open calls, just friends talking with other friends, seeing who might want to help.
What they don’t often tell you is how beautiful the resistance can be. In the evening, on the day that Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse, was shot to death by federal agents in front of Glam Doll Donuts, my wife and I drove through Minneapolis. There were candlelight vigils on nearly every corner we passed, some corners with four or five people cupping tiny flames, some corners with 50 neighbors milling about, communing, singing, stoking a firepit hauled to the sidewalk, lighting up the little Weber grill, just hanging out in the frozen dark.
What they don’t often tell you is how fun the resistance can be: the marches joyous and laced with adrenalized anger, people cheering the brass band that thumps its way down the block, chanting and pumping fists, belting out a ubiquitous profane call and response about ICE.
The biggest march was planned for a day of general strike, Jan. 23, when the weather was projected to be -9 degrees, wind chills reaching the negative 20s. People began to fret, worrying about low turnout, but when my wife and I arrived in downtown Minneapolis with our children we encountered one of the largest assemblies of humans I’d seen in person. Some news outlets reported 50,000 people.
As we tramped through the arctic streets, a bearded dude pulled a wagon bearing a generator and a vat of bubbling soup, dishing up bowls for anyone who cared to slurp. My 13-year-old daughter carried a sign that said, “You can’t shoot us all,” but most of the signs were funny and usually vulgar, along with numerous variations on crushed and salted ice.
…in these unsettled times, one must nurture joy wherever one can. As the poet Toi Derricotte writes, “Joy is an act of resistance.”
Everyone is doing his part here, each to his ability. This is easier to accomplish, it seems, when joy and love are the engines. Outside the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, where detainees, some of them American citizens and legal residents, are being held without beds or real blankets, the grannies of the Twin Cities are serving hot chocolate to college kids in active confrontation with ICE. I know of an off-grid network of doctors offering care to immigrants, a sub rosa collective of restaurateurs organizing miniature food banks in their basements. A friend of mine is a pastor who went with around 100 local clergy members to the airport in protest. Another friend is an immigration lawyer who spends his days endlessly filing habeas petitions, has gotten 30 people released from detention over the last few weeks. He recently offered a training session on how to file habeas petitions and 300 lawyers showed up, eager to do the work pro bono.
Every day and night, in the neighborhoods most affected by ICE raids, volunteers stand on street corners and patrol the blocks, phones and whistles ready. The middle-aged ladies of the metro area still take their jaunty 5 p.m. walks, but wearing neon observer vests now. My wife told me about a plumber out in the burbs offering his services free to immigrants affected by the federal occupation — and truly, when the suburban plumbers are against you, you can be sure you’re on the wrong side of history.
Our loose parent network keeps growing, more than 80 of us now. The demand is greater each week, as people in hiding talk with other people in hiding. The first week we had five families riding the car pool; by the seventh, more than 60 families had requested rides, just in our small corner of Minneapolis. We’ve started driving kids’ parents to their jobs, started putting up rent for people who can’t leave their apartments. This is happening in neighborhoods and suburbs across the Twin Cities. We are legion, the local moms and dads, we cruise the city in our minivans. You can’t shoot us all.
Here’s what you need to remember: There is no reward that comes later. No righteous justice will be dispensed, not soon and not ever. Renee Good and Alex Pretti don’t come back to life. The lives of their loved ones are not made whole again. Thousands of people will remain disappeared, relatives scattered, families broken. This story does not have a happy ending, and I can assure you the villains do not get punished in the end. If that is your motivation, try again, start over.
But you also need to understand — and this is equally important — that we’ve already won. The reward is right now, this minute, this moment. The reward is watching your city — whether it’s Chicago or Los Angeles or Charlotte or the cities still to come — organize in hyperlocal networks of compassion, in acephalous fashion, not because someone told you to, but because tens of thousands of people across a metro region simultaneously and instinctively felt the urge to help their neighbors get by.
So in the resistance you drive the car pool. It’s fun, and it’s mostly not scary. Your invisible shield of whiteness has developed a small fissure. You understand that being a white mom dropping a kid at elementary school may no longer save you from being killed in the middle of the street, that being a bearded white bro may not stop government employees from firing their Glocks into your back outside the Cheapo Records.
This afternoon I’m driving a brother and sister. We’ve been listening to the radio, which reports that almost all of the 3,000 ICE agents involved in the surge are leaving our state. No one believes it, not really, this declaration from the agency that asked us again and again to disbelieve our eyes, to accept that nurses were domestic terrorists, that children were violent criminals. In the meantime, the official story behind a third shooting by federal agents in Minneapolis has been outed as a lie, the offending agents now suspended for providing “untruthful statements” under oath. So you’ll have to forgive our collective skepticism. The drawdown has been rumored for a while now, but the car pool is still booked, with new families requesting assistance each week. Our network won’t be shutting down any time soon.