Sharing my wife's writing here, about this moment in Minnesota (1/4):

We are not ok. Alex Pretti should be alive tonight. Renee Good should be alive tonight. Our neighbors should be alive. Families should be together.

There is no normal life here. Not in South Minneapolis. Not when the federal government is moving through our neighborhoods to create fear, chaos, and ruined lives. This isn’t “enforcement.” This is terror getting normalized, block by block.

People are afraid to leave their homes. School is canceled again and again. We are watching families switch to virtual learning because it isn’t safe for their kids to be there in person. And when there is school, we are watching kids kept inside at recess because it isn’t safe to be outside, because ICE is here. We are watching kids abducted and used for bait. We are watching how scared they are. We are watching immigrant-owned businesses close early or not open at all. We are watching small businesses that barely survived 2020, COVID, and the Uprising get hit again, and we are watching that familiar look settle in, the one that says: we might not make it through this. This is what it looks like when you chip away at family life until the whole thing starts to crack. The assault is coming from every corner.

And it’s not random. It’s politically incited violence with real consequences, landing on real people in real neighborhoods. We already know what this looks like when it escalates. Last June someone came after our elected officials and their families, dressed like law enforcement, and Melissa and Mark Hortman were killed, and Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette barely survived. In August, two kids were killed at Annunciation during a school mass, shot through the church windows. Then in early December DHS launched its ICE “surge” here. On January 6 they announced they were sending up to 2,000 federal personnel into Minneapolis like our city is a proving ground, then added another 1,000-plus of their secret police, with a looming threat of military troops.

(cont...)