How much can a city take?

I live in Minneapolis. I grew up not far from here, in a suburb of Saint-Paul; after sojourns on both coasts, my wife and I settled here to raise our daughters in a frigid state that had always welcomed us warmly. As the ongoing occupation by more than 3,000 ICE agents enters its third week — with no clear end in sight — I have received a steady stream of messages from increasingly concerned friends across the country. They all start the same way: Um… is it really as bad as it looks from the outside?

My answer to this question is simple: no, it’s worse. Since the pandemic, my daily life has never been disrupted in such a frightening and surreal way. There was then at least a semblance of unity of the country. Aside from the morons who rallied against masks and vaccines, most Americans could at least agree that the world would be a better place if Covid-19 didn’t exist.

There is no such comfort with ICE, which is literally a hostile, heavily armed, masked police force violently occupying Minneapolis. No one – certainly not the ICE agents themselves – really bothers with the excuse that they’re there to make the city safer. This is Donald Trump’s revenge campaign, and they are the foot soldiers.

Unfortunately, their obvious incompetence and buffoonery don’t make them any less dangerous. Renee Good’s murder was bad enough, but DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s blatant lies about the incident — and the FBI’s refusal to share evidence that would allow the state of Minnesota to investigate the death of one of its own citizens — made it clear to both parties that ICE would face no consequences for anything it did, at least not while Trump is in the White House.

Since then, ICE agents have acted accordingly. We know they are often undertrained, wear masks to avoid identification, and have the unconditional support of an administration that almost openly pushes violence on the streets of Minneapolis. As I write this, Trump is still considering invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying 1,500 paratroopers to the city. How worried am I about what ICE will do to those who oppose its tactics? Enough to make me wonder if I should post this story anonymously.

And so the second question people text me – Do you agree? – it is more difficult to answer. I guess that’s because the answer is no. Call me naive, but despite ample evidence of the grisliness and cynicism of the Trump administration and its operatives, I was not prepared for them to unleash this level of chaos and violence on my city.

The presence of ICE is not an abstraction to the people who live here. It is a constant threat that requires constant vigilance. Our public schools were closed because the state government could not guarantee the safety of students. Many stores and restaurants, including 80 percent of immigrant-owned businesses, are not open, protecting staff and customers from the threat of an ICE raid. Many nonwhite Minnesotans — whether citizens or not — are essentially sheltering in place, avoiding grocery shopping and doctor’s appointments to stay at home, where ICE (theoretically) needs a court warrant to harass them.

There is a right-wing cliché, frequently used by Trump, that anyone who resists ICE must be a paid protester. Of course, the reality is quite different. Many of us have families, most of us have jobs, and we all have bills to pay. None of this has changed, but the task of protecting our community still requires many, many unpaid hours. As a white American citizen, I am one of the “lucky” ones: ICE may still detain me, like many other legal protesters, but I am much less likely to be actively targeted. I’ve also been lucky in another sense: so far, I haven’t encountered any really serious situations with my young children by my side. But I expect this luck to run out soon.

For the past two weeks, I have become a volunteer driver, transporting non-white people between their homes and their jobs. My passengers pulled up the hoods of their winter coats before getting out of the car to hide their faces, entering homes still wearing cheerful Christmas lights and wreaths. I’m not leaving until they’re behind locked doors.

Without an alternative, parents organized themselves via platforms like Signal and WhatsApp. Working in tandem with people in my community, I took turns working as a security guard, waiting outside schools, daycares, and community centers to send out a quick alert if ICE was arriving. I protested and raised money, while boycotting stores like Minnesota-based Target, without the courage to launch even a half-hearted, outlandish defense of Minnesotans.

Nothing I do is enough. But all this, I reassure myself, is better than Nothing. The most heartening thing about this deeply troubling moment is seeing how consistently and forcefully Minnesotans of all demographics have responded. It galvanized and radicalized in a way that I’m not sure anyone outside of the city can really understand. High school students in the Twin Cities metro area staged walkouts. Parents who might normally be busy with PTA duties patrol their neighborhoods, following ICE agents while honking car horns and blowing whistles to alert the community of their presence. My father-in-law, a devout Catholic in his 60s, made a cardboard sign reading “Love Thy Neighbor” and joined the thousands who rallied against ICE on a freezing afternoon in Powderhorn Park.

This year has been particularly difficult for Minneapolis. The assassination of Democratic Rep. Melissa Hortman, and Donald Trump’s typically callous response, remains an open wound. Many yards still contain pink lawn signs, created as a sign of community support after the deadly shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in August. The murder of George Floyd, never far from the city’s collective memory, has returned to the surface, as one unnecessary murder in the streets recalls another. How much can a city support?

I guess we’ll all know. Over the past two weeks, I wake up more angry than exhausted and go to bed more exhausted than angry. I’m eating more takeout from restaurants than I should, but it’s a good time to support local businesses, even if many of them remain closed. I bought a pack of whistles and messaged a few neighbors to see if anyone needed them. Nobody told me about it; they had all bought packages of whistles too.

The community is united in outrage, action and, remarkably, even good humor. Various local businesses, including Detroit-style pizza center Wrecktangle and sex shop Smitten Kitten, have become hubs for community resources and activism. We share ICE observations on Signal and trawl r/Minneapolis. When conservative influencer Jake Lang — pardoned by Trump after spending four years in prison for assaulting Capitol police officers with a baseball bat — announced an anti-Muslim march in Cedar-Riverside, group chats in the Twin Cities lit up with the same Tom Hardy GIF. We’ve been through enough to know when ICE and its allies are trying to bait us.

We talk, optimistically, about the money ICE spends every day and how difficult it will be to sustain this large-scale assault in the weeks and months to come. We hope that Trump’s distaste for anything complicated means he’ll be frustrated by the standoff between ICE and the people of Minneapolis or that his toddler obsession with new and shiny things will mean he’ll get bored and order his minions to do something else.

We also know that we will win. Time is on our side. ICE may have bloated salaries and the support of a tyrannical federal government, but we’re the ones who live here, and as the city’s greatest musician, Prince, once said, the cold keeps the bad people out. And when ICE agents finally take off their masks, leave their crappy hotel chains, and return to wherever they were before they came to terrorize us, we will still be here.

This is the final message I send to anyone who contacts me: wherever you are, get organized now. Find out who your like-minded neighbors are. Set up your Signal chats. Get some whistles (I can spare a few if you need them). This administration has made it clear that Minneapolis is just the beginning and when they come to your city, you’ll want to be ready.