Report from Cliff Willmeng in Minneapolis
Needless to say, it’s been a long, painful week and I feel bad not to have been more available to my wife and kids and our friends and neighbours during these last days.
On Wednesday I picked up my son from school before heading into work. His high school is about three quarters of a mile from where the ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good earlier that day. His school population is made up of people from around the world, and so the entire paramilitary offensive against Minneapolis is being felt everywhere throughout his school and the community.
When he got into the car he looked like something had hit him in the chest. He is a deeply intuitive and sensitive person and was feeling the weight of the killing for he and the other students, but more so for the country and state of the world as a whole. It was a hard ride home with me listening, and helping him with perspective so that the darkness of it all just didn’t pull him in.
Later that day his friend texted him to let him know that an entire family had been taken from their home on his block, and that a military drone was flying for hours around the neighborhood. The helicopters would be out all night long across the city.
There was some confusion with my daughter at that point. She goes to Roosevelt, a different high school in Minneapolis and she was worried, thinking that she was supposed to be the one picking Charlie. Only that day she couldn’t get out of the school parking lot because ICE was raiding the grounds of the school as kids were being let out and no cars could move.
This is the video of Border Patrol agents and Border Patrol leader Greg Bovino himself, where they tackle people, abduct three, and pepper spray high school students. Once my daughter and I spoke, I told her to be safe and to come home and that my son was with me. She came home later crying, desperately talking to her friends to try to figure out what had happened and to make sense of the state of Minneapolis yet again.
My wife works at a predominantly Latino school where they line up every morning to welcome the kids and to help make sure they don’t get taken along with their families. One faculty member was so crushed by the events of Wednesday that she had to go home and my wife had to substitute for her class that day. How teachers manage and help elementary aged kids to emotionally navigate these attacks is frankly beyond me.
All along I pushed through the remainder of my shifts and touched base with people as much as I could. During all of this my ER, like hospitals around the country, is totally full of patients and packed to capacity. It would be exhausting in normal times, let alone during a period when the US President and newly formed gangs of armed men have launched an all-out offensive on your state that is amount to a paramilitary hunt for brown-skinned people and their supporters.
(Just for perspective, let’s not forget this is the same week where the US militarily abducted the President of a Latin American country and is now claiming to have taken their entire oil reserves. How the right wingers can’t seem to figure out that when a super power reduces an entire hemisphere to profound poverty by stealing everything of value to enrich its own corporate leaders, that vast waves of emigration become the natural outcome is also beyond me.)
The city has responded like no place I have ever lived in. Minneapolis Public Schools shut down for the rest of the week to avoid offering more targets for the armed gimps in ICE and are now offering remote education for families wishing to take advantage of it. This sadly isolates those families even more, but is a protective measure at very least.
The Mayor, a corporate liberal with his own ties to law enforcement, and who presided over the George Floyd response, called ICE’s version of Wednesday’s killing, “Bullshit”, and demanded that ICE, “get the fuck out of Minneapolis”.
It’s an important position for him to take, but will likely translate into local law enforcement running protection for ICE agents, as the community steps up to remove them at some stage. [Minnesota Governor] Walz has put the Minnesota National Guard on notice, for whatever that is worth. I couldn’t tell you at all what role they would ostensibly play, but I have my guesses.
The protests and city-wide reactions to ICE are profound and everywhere. I don’t know of a single governmental agency that has earned such vast opposition and contempt as the ICE has in such a rapid way. No one wants them here, and everywhere you go people are sharing stories and trashing their role.
There are multiple protests daily, and the communities are organising to protect neighbours and to get in the way of the new, warrantless, and utterly unconstitutional seizures of people. The solidarity and outrage are experienced everywhere we go and the online video of it take a thousand amazing and touching forms.
(To be sure, many of the suburbanites, true to form, are weighing in over social media to explain the freedom and justice that these raids are generating. It’s a political position with as much credibility, perspective, and longevity as the Germans cheering the arrival of the National Socialists in 1933 as far as I can tell, but who can stop ignorance when it’s on a bender?)
So today I am off work and the family will be attending one of multiple marches and actions to demand the expulsion of ICE from the Twin Cities. Like so many other times, like the COVID pandemic and the George Floyd protests, these moments are very dynamic and fast moving and unstable.
Now they are set to the backdrop of a destabilized world order and a gang of cosplay fascists at the wheel whose only official opposition is an opposing gang of cosplay corporate puppets. These would just prefer more decorum while the national working class is ransacked and the looting of basic life necessities is carried to private, offshore accounts.
As with so many of these times, the biggest and most important and powerful variable is the combined role of that same working class, which has been so predictably derailed and neutered for so many generations by our bankrupt leadership. Even keeping us sidelined and symbolic may not succeed during these newest offensives.
Maybe one day we will flex our actual power and launch our own general strike against the wishes of CEOs, politicians and labour union leaders but I just don’t know. I do know that when something contained within a vessel expands, the vessel has to break, and in the United States, this fracture has been generations in the making. Well, now its being catalyzed.
We are trying to hold our own here in Minneapolis while thousands of people are trying to survive imprisoned in the detention centers. The nation and world are never going to be the same again.
Cliff Willmeng is a health worker in Minneapolis. The above is an edited version of his post on Facebook.
