“The chorus bears all of it for us”: A Dispatch from Minneapolis

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Today my partner and I wake at 5:30am and join today’s rapid responder Signal thread. We dress in as many warm layers as we can: boxer briefs, long underwear, hiking pants, corduroy, snow pants; three to four layers on top, as many head and ear and face coverings as I can accumulate without obscuring my face into looking like an ICE agent myself. We hope our old car starts this cold morning, and it does, and we park a block away from a Somali mosque, where we’ll walk to and stay positioned outside, whistles and phones ready, as community members filter in for their morning prayer. As thanks, they bring us more tea than we can drink, more sambusas than we can accept. Later in the day we do the same at a dual language immersion elementary school, patrolling the perimeter with a dozen others. I see many ICE vehicles but am lucky to avoid confrontation, though I come home to videos of my friends and neighbors tear-gassed just blocks from where I was posted that same time or later that day.     

I move to write a descriptive sentence, full of places and people, and worry about who I’ll implicate, who will become a target, what I’ll betray. Our neighborhood mutual aid network advises–since ICE is tracking, intimidating, tear-gassing, and arresting observers–that rapid responders should not also bring food to those who need it or offer rides or organize mutual aid, so as not to endanger vulnerable people or get neighborhood organizers labeled as “terrorists.” I wonder if my partner and I’s modest patrols put us in this category. The patrols keep the feeling of helplessness and panic at bay, though it comes back when my digital passport photos from CVS arrive in my inbox incorrectly for a second time due to a system failure the staff cannot identify. I wonder if this, and being a supposed radical, here and now, will make me getting a new passport impossible, and the irony of my sudden panic is not lost on me, that I am a citizen even as my black and brown neighbors get beaten and arrested with their own passports in hand, and that the difference is that I am white, yet Renee Good and Alex Pretti too were white citizens, summarily executed. I move to write a descriptive sentence but catch myself in an old anxiety, that identifying anyone endangers them to state power. When I name people with an initial, it is not for style.

I live in South Minneapolis, not far from where Renee Good was murdered by ICE on January 7th, 2026 and where Alex Pretti was murdered January 24th. On the morning of the 7th, I was working from home, struggling to focus on my remote education nonprofit job, when a friend from out of state texts saying they heard about the ICE shooting and hope that I’m safe. I check the neighborhood rapid responder Signal chat and see confirmation that a legal observer has been shot, that the situation is rapidly escalating and that more responders are needed. The chat, usually regimented to ICE observation and license plate checks, expands into disagreement: some say we need all the bodies we can get, others that it is too volatile and dangerous. I am able to go, but I don’t know what to do. I search for any news before finding a livestream from the independent news organization, Mercado Media. A group of protestors has formed a wall protecting an alley to block ICE amid a scuffle of bodies with Good’s car in the background. People are screaming with grief, rage, grief, rage. ICE showers the area with pepper spray and the wall holds firm, each person protected by facemasks and eye-coverings. One ICE agent sneaks up behind the wall to the furthest left person in the chain, as if to poke them on the shoulder, then aims his pepper spray an inch from their face behind their ski goggles and sprays, undoing the link as the protestor recoils. My conscience tries to propel my body there but I know it’s just slightly too far to walk quickly, and the now apparent blockade makes driving impossible, and that I have a partner I’d need to tell and persuade that the situation is safe enough for me to be there when it clearly is not. I have never been arrested, I have never been pepper sprayed, and I don’t yet know that Renee Good is dead.  An admin mediates in Signal, acknowledging that there is conflicting guidance on what to do, but at the very least that no one should go to this alone, and that everyone should newly assess their risk tolerance. This is concrete enough for me to finally stay, but I keep watching as I refresh every news source on another monitor and on my phone. I text my colleague who works at the library two blocks away. I remember my friend Z is on car tracking duty and hope he’s alright, hope he’s home. Soon ICE will raid a nearby high school during dismissal time, tackle and detain school teachers and leaders and tear gas students, before many children hide in a nearby library. I email another library colleague saying that I hope she too is ok. 

Within hours local and national and international news outlets are covering the same story. I go between Sahan Journal and Minnesota Public Radio and the Associated Press to see who has covered the next horrifying detail first, before even refreshing Al Jazeera to see that they too have Minneapolis at the top of their feed. Each update is a local, national, world news story, as how the Trump administration moves to oppress the people and suppress all levels of justice in Minnesota is a larger story of the US’s culminating turn into fascism, inseparable from that same week’s regime change in Venezuela and imperial threatening of Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, and Iran. Time moves quickly and much has escalated further or receded in the news cycle, but Minnesota continues to be the center of Trump’s authoritarianism and the people’s resistance to it. 

I meet a neighbor on one watch, and he tells me of what he remembers as a Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times,” which I remember as a Jewish one, one my family knows too well. Growing up I had a morbid wish to have lived through the ‘60s and ‘70s, to experience firsthand the tumult of the civil rights’ era’s height and join the solidarity movement of Jewish leftists of the time, but I knew better than to wish an earlier “interesting times” of pogroms and genocide my own family did (and didn’t) survive. In these “interesting times” I finally feel the curse’s logic, even if I understood it before, in what has now been a decade-plus of what I now see as a steady path towards this moment, an increasing expectation of military-style occupations of cities and suppression of protest movements in response to this country’s’ brutality against black and brown communities, here and abroad, even during Democratic presidencies and in Democrat-run cities, whether it be Ferguson, Standing Rock, Los Angeles, or Minneapolis; East Jerusalem, Gaza, or Caracas.  

Daily life proceeds and history becomes slippery. I visit M. for his birthday party and get higher than I expect from a single THC drink, and feel anxiously removed from time. This feeling matches and intensifies my suspicion that this moment is experiencing history’s worst repetitions. I walk through his old apartment hallway and the carpet cigarette smoke transports me to my own 2020 smoky apartment hallway on Lake Street, where I still experienced separation anxiety from K before she moved in, where our cat would try and escape into and down the stairs, and where my neighbors would call me to the window to witness the National Guard throwing tear-gas at dozens of black teenagers protesting on the Lake-Marshall bridge. The state’s indiscriminate abductions of black and brown people remind me of the Nazi holocaust; their abuse of legal observers and protesters of the Jim Crow era; the unwarranted raiding of people’s homes and prolonged detentions in Palestine. Minneapolis’s dubbing of an “ICE occupation” reverberates for me, crystallizes again—but greater than I’ve been equipped to see before—the catastrophe of Israel’s subjugation of Palestine, that today’s ICE occupation of Minnesota is an obvious fraction of the decades of everyday atrocities Palestinians have faced at the hands of the IDF. I am near a panic attack, like I will be again in three mornings, like I was five afternoons prior.      

Writing this dispatch is a challenge. I worry that by writing down what I see, I reduce surveillance, deportation, abuse, and murder down to psychological, abstract things, not the material atrocities to others that they are, that happen constantly and more than I can know. In my own research I’ve been sitting with writers like Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Syd Zolf who problematize the idea of the singular witness and move towards a collective knowing, dwelling in the entangled mess of history. Home sick earlier this week, it was from the neighborhood Signal chat that I learned about the sibling teenagers whose car was rear-ended by ICE before being abducted, the same chat that revealed more students were taken during school drop-off at two different elementary schools in one morning: I feel powerless. It is the larger network that bears witness in chorus and rounds, in whistles and honks and encrypted messages and patrols and training and sit-ins and food drives and carpools. As Hartman writes in the context of black women’s radicalism, “The chorus bears all of it for us.” Minnesota’s chorus enacts neighborly love and porousness between one another. I am so proud to live here. I love the Twin Cities despite all of its flaws. We know how to resist boldly and with love. I hate this country for fighting it, for trying to break that spirit, for finding it threatening.     

The Twin Cities’ resolve tempts me towards optimism before I realize this feeling is too morbid for the word, that what I really feel is emboldenment. I talk to N on the phone, who I’ve somewhat set up with Z, and tell her that Z got tear-gassed yesterday by Bovino’s green gas, so that today may not be the day to compare calendars for their rescheduled first date. She says it feels silly trying to date right now but also that she thinks flirting needs to be part of the resistance. After the call I flip to Nikki Giovanni’s early poem “Seduction”, where Giovanni’s speaker kisses and undresses her lover as he talks about Black Power and revolution. I take a picture and send it to her, which she heart-reacts. My neighbor is hosting a mutual aid valentine-making party, where each card is included in a meal kit. Life continues even as we grieve and get enraged and mobilize anew each day.

I wrote nearly all of this before CBP murdered Alex Pretti, and I’ve now reached a level of rage I’ve never experienced before. I’m working through the anger and fear, grief’s constant lump in my throat, but not loneliness. I write here to reflect the chorus I sing with, to help bear the collective weight of protecting and nurturing our neighbors in the face of fascism, to transform for a life beyond it.