They are ripping apart my home (Jan 20, 2026)

Note, added Jan. 22, 2026: A quick preface. Of course I am upset that five-year-olds are getting detained by ICE, and it would be misleading to not speak to that injustice. But even beyond that, my main point is that immigration enforcement is not really the goal of Operation Metro Surge; it is instead a wholesale attack on Minnesota, for political reasons, and it feels prescient, as though it is only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger effort, one which will soon expand far beyond my home state. Minnesota is suffering socially, emotionally, and, crucially, economically, as school attendance craters, businesses close, and US citizens are afraid to leave their homes. This is not an accident. The authoritarian bent illustrated over the past month is deeply worrying and does not bode well, even for our near future. I think most people outside of Minnesota do not yet realize how concerning this is.

It feels increasingly uncontroversial to say that my hometown is currently occupied. It’s been invaded by the federal government. What would have recently been a conspiracy-tinged claim is now just a plain statement of reality. I started writing this just over a week ago, and since then, it has only become more obvious. I’m not sure why President Trump has become obsessed with our state over the past month or two — maybe he still hasn’t gotten over our long history of Democratic governance or that we have the longest running streak of voting blue in presidential elections. Or maybe Governor Walz’s description of Mr. Trump as “weird” got under his skin so much that he decided to, as one does in such cases, launch a paramilitary operation.

In December, I arrived home to reports about ICE agents showing up in the Twin Cities and taking people from their homes and on their lunch breaks. Then after Christmas we were gifted a media firestorm about a video in which some kid on YouTube was apparently infuriated that childcares wouldn’t let him in to take videos of the children. A lot of people were, so I read, very angry about this. Of course, one might think, the daycares should have let the guy with the cameras in. Obviously, they’re supposed to protect the kids, except if the weird guy at the door is videotaping, in which case they should definitely let him in right away and give him full access to the place. He professed to be “exposing” a huge fraud scandal, even though thorough investigations in the hands of zealous lawyers had been ongoing for months, even years, into the issue. Due process was already well underway. But no matter. The video racked up millions of views as fraud in Minnesota became the new hottest political issue. This was odd, and felt vaguely manufactured. It was really about nothing new — a problem, sure, but one which was being addressed. Indeed, it turned out that members of the state GOP had facilitated the video’s production.

Then the federal government showed up and started disappearing people off the streets and from Target and maybe also school. Someone important must have decided that there were too many immigrants here — obviously they’re responsible for all our problems! — and what better place from which to take some people than Minnesota, right? Get them back for always being so stubborn. Maybe they’ll finally catch on.

I drove up to Ely, a small town maybe fifteen miles from the Canadian border, with my family in the minivan right after New Year’s. We stopped in Cloquet for soup. My brother and I cross-country skied a few dozen miles. Stepping out of the sauna with our wool socks, we walked beneath the frozen night sky onto the lake and climbed down the ladder, through a hole in the ice, and into the water, taking a breath before plunging beneath. On the last day, wind and frost turned every tree along the shoreline a lucid white. I shoveled off a bit by the dock and skated in circles, spines of silver around everywhere you could look. We drove through Duluth on the way back and Max got a secondhand flannel while my dad got two loaves of bread from the co-op — cranberry-wild rice and cheese curd.

The next day they executed someone in broad daylight. They couldn’t even brush it aside this time because, inconveniently, this person had pale white skin, and also was a mom. We all saw the same video. With people yelling at her from all sides, she moves to drive her Honda Pilot out of the way, turning her steering wheel away from the ICE agent. As she starts to drive, the agent — who walks in front of her car despite law enforcement training to avoid doing this precisely because it leads to dangerous situations — shoots at her. He fires three bullets at her as the car drives further and further away from him. One enters her skull. The car jerks off the road and she is dead. She wrote poetry and played guitar and was once a kid in Colorado Springs. Now she has been shot to death in the seat of a Honda Pilot and her wife is left on the sidewalk and their six-year-old’s stuff is still in the glove compartment.

In no time at all, Kristi Noem comes on TV to call her a domestic terrorist and exonerate the guy who murdered her. The FBI magically takes full control of the investigation, seizing the evidence and shoving the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension aside unceremoniously. Everyone knows why they do this, of course, but they do it anyway.

I am having a harder and harder time pushing aside the thought that this is not the prelude to something much darker. In the future, one might look back at how things turned out and think of how incredibly obvious this all was, the same way we look to the past and think, “well clearly they weren’t smart; it was in plain sight the whole time.” Barely a week after they killed Renee Good, our president threatens us with a “DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION” (emphasis his). The federal government has unmistakably singled out Minnesota. They’ve sent in what amounts to the military — conveniently the variety of pseudo-police who can be justified in taking you, warrant or not, if they simply think you look suspicious — to do their bidding. They murdered someone and are making stuff up to cover it, and everyone knows it. I wonder whether they’ve bet correctly: that we will all just go along with it after all. It’s easier that way, I guess.

While the country sits around, biding its time, the federal government is slowly, and meticulously, tearing apart the social fabric of my home.

One of the most caring, remarkable politicians in the state — probably one of its most remarkable people — was murdered in her home this summer, as was her husband. There was a hit list of other Democratic lawmakers. The President’s response could not have been more flippant and careless; instead of calling our governor he thought the assassination made for a really great opportunity to reiterate that Walz was “whacked out” and “a mess.” Quickly came the school shooting at Annunciation, the images of six-year-olds clinging to their parents on the most normal city street you’ve ever seen, both sobbing, because the adults can’t make sense of it either; and this so soon after the assassinations that there was barely time to breathe. There were thoughts and prayers offered, of course, but obviously it wouldn’t make sense to pass strict gun control legislation, since it’s not like that’s worked elsewhere or anything. Another tick got added to the mass shootings tally. They probably have forgotten about it by now anyway. You know, the shooter briefly went to my high school. We probably walked by each other in the hallway. I found the name in a PDF of an old school directory. Then I found a poem saved on my laptop, in one of the old literary magazines, the same ones I edited a couple years later. Turns out a couple years later this person would shoot up a church with a bunch of grade schoolers.

After all this, Mr. Trump’s administration trained its crosshairs upon us. Perhaps the open wounds made for an easy target. They know perfectly well that since its very inception as a state, Minnesota has always been a home for refugees. Welcoming immigrants with open arms is woven into this place: long ago came the Norwegians, then the Germans, later the Hmong, the Ethiopians, the Ukrainians. In 2018, Minnesota had the most refugees per capita of any state. Since its inception, it has always been a haven — a place where the world might actually get better. Knowing this, first they have come for the Somalis. Get the Mexicans along the way, too. But they are not the target. Next, they come for the rest of us.

The point is not to enforce immigration laws. I mean, maybe their lips curl into a smile when they watch another family get torn apart. I don’t know. But the point is to disassemble Minnesota. As destructively as possible, ideally. Rip apart the whole place, into little tiny pieces that’ll make for a good fire to burn fast and keep their red hands warm.

The speed with which this is occurring is chilling. Our state is actively being trampled by ICE. A couple days ago, six of our federal attorneys — including Joe Thompson, the firebrand who passionately pursued the very fraud cases that the Trump administration is using to justify ICE’s presence — resigned en masse. I saw another video of a US citizen get dragged outside, then shoved into an unmarked van, from the doorway of the Target, the doorway I’d walked through when I bought a Tony’s chocolate bar while waiting for my friend’s flight to land. Such sights have begun to feel normal. But they cut just as deep every time.

In moments of clarity, the place I grew with and love is still with us, and its people offer a glimmer of hope. On my drive back to school, I came upon a handful of protesters on a bridge above I-94 in the bitter cold. Never would I have expected to see anyone on that bridge, surrounded by fields on the outskirts of the metro, but even the quiet people of this secluded place just beyond the suburbs won’t stay silent. It’s a couple days later, and I watch photos appear on my computer screen of a thousand-person protest outside a hotel at the Universiry of Minnesota. It has a Starbucks I used to get coffee from when I spent the summer there researching cryoprotective agents for organ storage. I hear high schoolers on the radio protesting because their classmates can’t come to school now, since they or their parents might get kidnapped and marched onto an unmarked plane. One guy has been meticulously keeping track of each one of those planes by hand from the top of a parking ramp, armed with a telephoto lens, counting each person sent up the stairs one by one. A man who got sent to prison for four years for attacking police officers with a baseball bat during the Jan. 6th self-coup (before being conveniently pardoned by Trump, the “self” who incited said coup) comes in from out of town and says he’ll burn the Quran — but he gets chased back to his hotel, since no one wants to hear what he had to say. He’s taken to safety by people who have no idea who he is: they just see a man in pain and in need and don’t hesitate when he asks for help. Every day, throngs of people who care follow ICE agents to record their inconvenient tendency to violate human rights like it’s their day job. (Wait, I forgot, gotta hit those quotas!)

In short, Minnesotans won’t sit around and watch their home get trampled without a fight.

But when I close my eyes, I cannot help but see an image which chills me now. The day after they shot Renee, I stood outside the Whipple Building, astonished at how there seemed to be just as many ICE agents, clad in tactical gear and with guns in hand, as protestors. Now the complex has been fortified with concrete barriers and chain-link fences, which sit where I walked just days ago. And the barrage of escalations seems endless. The other night they tear gassed a car with a six-month-old in it and knocked him unconscious. Someone else got shot by ICE. I refreshed the StarTribune website to learn that apparently 1,500 paratroopers from Alaska have been put on alert.

This is merely the beginning. I cannot predict what comes next, yet I know with absolute certainty that it is terrifying. And it is entirely the making of our own government.

ICE agents, the ones who took the bounty to do the government’s bidding, are no longer even worthy of being labeled cold-hearted. That’s giving them far too much credit. They don’t deserve their own acronym. Ice and snow are treasures. The cold is a way of life here. These people — well, they’re just idiots with guns and unaddressed anger issues.

Go get a real job.