A Kidnapping in Minnesota
At 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday November 25th, my husband Peter gets an alert that ICE is attempting a house raid nearby. We jump in the car. Several blocks from the address, we encounter Saint Paul police, flashers on, barring all roads. Saint Paul officially has a separation ordinance that prohibits police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. But here they are, the awkward SPPD slogan “Trusted Service with Respect” crawling across black SUVs at every intersection, very much complying with this raid on a home in this working class neighborhood full of immigrant families.
We stop alongside a police vehicle and I call out, “Thought you were not cooperating with ICE!”
The officer stares straight ahead as if bored. Slowly, he turns his head a few degrees toward me. “What?”
“’Thought the police weren’t cooperating with ICE!”
He swivels his head forward again. “Take it up with the chief.”
“Come on, brother!” Peter yells, as we pull away. I leave my window down and start to blow long blares through my whistle as Peter tries to drive as near as we can to the address. Long blares mean emergency in progress right now. Short-burst whistles signal ICE in area.
The back alley of the house on Rose Street is where we enter the crowd. What are we? Witnesses, yes. Protestors? Certainly, but there are no signs, no chanting, no slogans. We are, at the back of the house, about forty strong, with people arriving continuously; we learn there are many more at the front of the house. “Agents,” as they’re now calling themselves, stand in their vests and masks and low brims, backs against the house garage, eyes on the crowd. Their vests read “HSi,” Homeland Security investigations, an amalgam of ICE, HS and FBI. With assistance from SPPD.
Their masks allow them to seem calm and in charge. We can’t see fear on their foreheads or mouths, can’t see quivering jaws or drawn cheeks. These hired mostly-men and mostly white, we can’t see whose son they are, whose brother, father. Can’t recognize the unemployed neighbor, the janitor let go from the auto parts store, the contract IT guy out of work. We see them in these costumes meant to intimidate, meant to protect them from any solidarity with us, we who show up hatless, gloveless, in sweatshirts and jackets to witness this stand-off, this eventual orchestrated kidnapping in broad gray daylight.
Assembled protestors span every age group, twenties to eighties, and every ethnicity. People we know fill us in. There is a family in the house. Legal advocates are helping them decide what to do. It’s not clear that there is a warrant. Protestors were pepper-sprayed at the front of the house. A friend of ours, a military veteran arrested at the D-Day protest in D.C. in June, has been thrown in a squad car.
We hear short-blast whistles, and a young friend takes off like a gazelle, around to the front of the house. Protestors closest to the garage link arms to form a constitutional barrier. A city councilwoman whom we will learn later was roughed up by agents, announces to the crowd that we should move to the front of the house. That the family, with lawyers helping to explain and negotiate, has decided that one family member will go with the agents, and the rest will be left alone. A sacrifice. The councilwoman says that this is what the family wants, no one likes it, but this is what is happening.
One young woman in an orange hat, pacing back and forth, challenges the councilwoman: this is wrong, illegal, immoral, what are the guarantees? She speaks for everyone, but the crowd follows the councilwoman’s directions and we move toward the front of the house. Orange Hat screams what’s on her heart. She is not strategic, we need her to shut up. We also, each and every one of us, need her to keep screaming.
It is tense at the front of the house, Everyone’s phone is in the air. Agents and people in regular clothes— legal intermediaries, officials—move between the front porch, the inside of the house and the van waiting on the street. The van waiting on the street. Twenty minutes go by. A drone buzzes ominously, newly, above our heads. Then a file of agents comes out of the house and eventually a silent man in a red sweatshirt, head bowed, is escorted down his front steps, across his yard, and into the van. Into the van. Gone.
Will ICE leave now? Is the family actually safe? Promises mean nothing, laws barely hold. After several minutes we protestors back agents off the street, filming and chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
It takes another hour to get the agents out of the neighborhood. Three journalists have been injured. SPPD knocked over and injured a woman with a cane. Our friend detained in the squad car watched everything through the car window. She was released, and is now fighting a misdemeanor charge. A persistent set of journalists tells the story as well as it can be told.
Orange Hat is still screaming in my head.
This is America now.
BETH CLEARY‘s essays are published in Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, The Maine Review, After the Art, Invisible City, and other publications. A retired theater professor, Beth lives on the ancestral homeland of the Dakota people in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she co-founded the East Side Freedom Library.
