Being Ellen

Advocacy with Heart

It’s been two months since ICE arrived en masse in the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota. Two months of lawless tactics and abductions. Two months of instigating fear and terror across the state.

And two months of resistance that’s become a model for the entire nation.

People hear a great deal about Minneapolis, but out where I live in red-to-purple Carver County—forty miles west of Minneapolis—ICE is operating in full force. They racially profile people, including high school students, and demand their citizenship papers. Immigrants are being abducted, as are people who simply act as observers.

The fact that observers stay out of the way and just report on the movements of ICE agents doesn’t matter; those agents are boxing in observers’ cars and breaking windows to haul out drivers. After the observer is pummeled, they’re taken to a detention facility in Minneapolis.

In response, ordinary Carver County residents, many of whom are retirees who’ve never before protested or spoken out, are showing up in droves to resist ICE.

They’ve successfully pressed the county sheriff and his conservative bosses, the county commissioners, to not allow ICE to house detainees in the local jail.

They have also conducted sit-ins at local Target stores to push Target to ban ICE (which uses store restrooms and assembles in store parking lots before embarking on raids or roving patrols) from its properties.

Like clockwork, resistors show up every Saturday at various locations across the county protesting ICE and politicians who’ve turned a blind eye to the systematic dismantling of our democracy. Following the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the number of protestors holding makeshift signs in below zero or single-digit temperatures grew exponentially—last week, in Chaska (a city of 25,000), nearly 1200 people lined a busy roadway for an hour in the freezing cold.

I was among last Saturday’s protesters. Thousands of vehicles passed by us, with many honking horns in support. It truly was a remarkable sight, and it made me feel like I was at least doing something.

Like me, many of my fellow Carver County resisters were alive when Dr. King and other civil rights leaders nonviolently worked to tear down Jim Crow. They witnessed the anti-war protests of the 60’s and early 70’s and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights in the 1980’s.

Unfortunately, none of those movements concerned fighting for the very democracy which allowed the movements to flourish. Today, the stakes are much higher—this time next year, as Trump is now signaling, we may have lost the right to vote out a tyrannical government. It’s not hyperbole to say that the very essence of our democracy is at stake, and like it or not, Minnesota has become the front line in that battle.

Conservative media is full of commentary that the Minnesotans who resist ICE are “paid protestors” summoned by George Soros or some other liberal boogeyman. Those presently in power can’t fathom that ordinary people would voluntarily give of their time—and risk their own freedom or lives—just to protect innocent people who seek a better life in America. They can’t imagine having an iota of empathy for those who are “other.”

In the end, that blindness by Trump and his sycophants like Kristi Noem may be their undoing. The truth is that most people have a kind, empathetic heart for those who are at risk. A heart which yells, “Go back!” when you pass on helping someone in obvious need.

Right now, several million Minnesotans are responding to their hearts. Loving kindness and compassion for one another will defeat ICE and what’s happening in America now. I’m so proud to be a Minnesotan, living in a place where we are showing the rest of the country the way.