In our Letters from Minnesota series, writers, organizers, and activists on the ground in Minnesota bear witness to ICE and American authoritarianism. Today, read dispatches from Kao Kalia Yang on preparing for the worst with her children, Jim Moore on echoes of protests past, and Katherine Packert Burke on “why we will win.”
James Folta talks to Minneapolis bookseller Angela Schwesnedl:
“Angela Schwesnedl from Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis picked up my phone call on Saturday almost two hours to the minute after Alex Pretti was murdered in the street by ICE officers.
‘If you haven’t seen the video, don’t,’ she told me. ‘It’s an execution.’
We had made a plan the day before to talk about Friday’s huge ICE Out protest, march, and general strike against the federal occupation, but Alex Pretti was dead, and we began in somber sadness. The early reports of the murder would continue to filter out to us, to me hunched in a friend’s small office in New York while taking notes, and to her in the back of a Minneapolis store while managing diaper distribution.”
“We wear whistles now. Mine is bright yellow and plastic and weighs barely enough to dangle from its string. I carry it in my pocket. Others wear theirs like an amulet. Under any other circumstance, my whistle would be mistaken for a Christmas-tree ornament, a birthday-party favor, or a second-hand Fisher-Price toy. It looks amateur, but the noise it makes is contractor grade.
The neighbors all carry one. Some whistles are clearly brand-new—an overnight Amazon Prime purchase—others a leftover from a long-ago summer lifeguard job. In blaze-orange safety vests and down puffers, we line the streets around our schools each morning and afternoon, standing watch for ICE caravans, little plumes of frozen breath rising from beneath our hoods.”