Can You Hear Us, America?

Dobby Gibson: “This militarized occupation still feels like a test run for something that I’m not fully imagining.”

Since early December of last year, thousands of ICE officers have streamed into Minnesota to carry out a violent and grossly unconstitutional campaign of state intimidation upon the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Children and their families have been separated, schools have been targeted, and two US citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—have been murdered in the street. Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing letters from Minnesotans—novelists, journalists, poets, memoirists—that they might share their experiences, as both witness and warning, of American authoritarianism.

–Jonny Diamond

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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.

The shriek of a whistle, once the quaint signal of a traffic cop or coach ending soccer practice is now, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, the witnessing of another human-rights atrocity. A disabled woman being razor-bladed out of her seatbelt while trying to reach her doctor’s office, dragged screaming from her own car, engine still running. A Hmong grandfather marched into the street in his underwear in 10-degree weather after a warrantless search, front door bashed in, guns pointed at his grandchildren. A five-year-old arrested and used as “bait” to lure his parents. A young Hispanic man disappeared into a plate-less SUV and flown to a black site in Texas. A poet and a nurse executed in cold blood in the streets.

Our abducted neighbors are more often than not US citizens or asylum seekers in the legal process without a criminal record. They are taken without a judicial warrant and being denied timely access to an attorney. ICE provides no verifiable accounting for whom they’ve abducted, instead slandering their victims with a broad brush and gaslighting the public.

The government calls us “paid agitators” and “paid protesters” because it can’t allow for the idea that citizens will care for one another for neither money nor politics.

When a whistle sounds anywhere in Minneapolis or St. Paul, we come running. I saw one man arrive still in his bathrobe. The government calls us “paid agitators” and “paid protesters” because it can’t allow for the idea that citizens will care for one another for neither money nor politics. Each whistle summons more whistles, a chorus of witnesses with cell-phone cameras prepared to document crimes for a justice we can, for now, only dream of.

The ICE troops, who are nearly all middle-aged white men in ski masks, arrive in fours and fives in SUVs blowing through stoplights, casually tossing canisters of green chemical gas at witnesses. If you have brown skin, they have only one question for you: “Where are you from?” When they speed off, it’s not unusual to find clips of live ammo left behind, flash-bangs with the pins still in them dropped in the snow.

Despite being deployed to a winter climate akin to the Planet Hoth, they dress in what looks like hand-me-down Desert Storm camouflage and body armor. They are ridiculous and tragic and profoundly well-armed and terrifying. They stop for tacos, wipe their mouths, and then arrest the kitchen staff and speed them away. Many restaurants in town now leave their doors locked, if they haven’t shut down completely.

Those who support or excuse this campaign of terror and civil rights abuses, say: Why can’t you simply comply with these officers? They’re just doing their jobs. As if better compliance is the root issue with asking someone to show papers based on skin color. As if anyone can cooperate with a battering ram shattering their front door. As if a cadre of helmeted and armed troops casing a preschool (which I have witnessed with my very own eyes) can be met halfway with a shared civic purpose.

While the resistance here is firm, the fear is palpable. Whom are we supposed to call with our grievances? The FBI? The local field officer assigned to civil rights cases resigned in protest. The Justice Department? The experienced federal prosecutors in our district resigned in protest. Our business leaders? The CEOs of Minnesota’s once-proudly progressive and civic-minded Fortune 250 companies locked arms in resolute silence for weeks, until issuing a letter via the Chamber of Commerce this past Sunday so vague and toothless it doesn’t even mention ICE. The police? The ICE jackboots outnumber the cops by multiples and are harassing and racial profiling them, too. In a city that has become notorious for law enforcement lethally failing its citizens, we’ve never been more on our own.

The desperation is making space for something else to emerge. A loosely connected mutual-aid network. People working together block by block, Signal chat by Signal chat. Our smallest locally owned businesses are stepping into the leadership void. Once again, as it did in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Moon Palace Books—a bookstore!—is showing us a better way, handing out yard signs, providing care and conversation, a place for community organizing, a distribution point for food and household goods. And yes, a place to pick up a free whistle.

It’s not nearly enough. This US government’s violent ethnic cleansing campaign is relentless and expanding. The worst appears yet to come. This militarized occupation still feels like a test run for something that I’m not fully imagining. I’m unsure I have the right language for any of this.

Can you hear us? We are whistling as loudly as we can.

“In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.”
–Frank O’Hara