In my home state of Minnesota, neighbours are standing strong against ICE

In an opinion piece for the Observer, Siri writes about Minnesota’s current occupation.

I am writing from Brooklyn after a big snow that reminds me of the snows of my childhood in Northfield, Minnesota, a small college town of about 20,000 people south of Minneapolis. It’s cold in New York City, well below freezing, but not as cold as in my home state, where residents have organised to protest Minnesota’s occupation by Immigration Customs and Enforcement troops, known by the wintry acronym ICE.

On 27 January, my Minnesota sister Liv wrote: “ICE was in Northfield on Saturday night and detained a kitchen worker at the Reunion. All the staff walked out in solidarity. The same day Carleton [College] went into lockdown as ICE was roaming about campus. Yesterday, when leaving my office, I heard loud chanting. I got in my car and followed the noise. ICE was at the Fairfield Inn, and a large crowd had gathered outside peacefully protesting. People in cars were honking in support. Temps and wind chills have been below zero all week, but Northfielders have been out supporting neighbours.”

The organisation to protect immigrants in town is called Northfield Supporting Neighbors.

“Neighbour” has become a rallying cry in Minnesota: “We Love Our Somali Neighbors” and “We Love Our Immigrant Neighbors” are emblazoned on protest signs. Rev Dr Jessica Patchett, of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, wrote in a public statement: “As a church grounded in the call to love our neighbor, we cannot remain silent when an entire [Somali] community is targeted in a way that dehumanises its people. The church must be a voice of compassion and truth, standing firmly for the dignity and worth of every person.”

Neighbour is a word defined by proximity – those near you; other human beings who in one way or another are not far away. My father believed in neighbourliness. Born in a log house in a rural Norwegian-speaking immigrant community in 1922, he remembered collective barn raisings and harvests, neighbours caring for the sick and making meals for the grieving. As children, my sisters and I were tasked with delivering vegetables from our garden to neighbours up and down Old Dutch Road where we lived on the outskirts of town.

“Minnesota nice” is intended to summarise a local attitude: polite, self-deprecating and ever accommodating. There is self-irony in “nice”, an awareness that the veneer may hide moral ugliness. There are deep political divisions in the state and plenty of Maga voters, for whom the word neighbour does not include any person of colour, recent immigrant or protester. The man who disrupted a town hall meeting and attacked Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar with a vinegar-filled syringe was not “a nice guy”. For years Trump has insulted Omar, born in Somalia, in racist and misogynist terms. She is “garbage” from a “shithole country”, who “does nothing but bitch”. All Somalis are “garbage”. “I don’t want them in our country.”

Scapegoating is a form of exorcism, and this licence-to-hate feels good
A friend recounted that an ICE agent stopped a white woman in Minneapolis and asked for her papers. She told him she did not have to show her documents. Examining her, he said: “Your cheekbones are too high for you to be white.” He let her go. Every brown and black person is suspect now.

And yet “race” is a moving target. In the US, newly arrived Irish and Italian immigrants were once not considered “white”. They became white over time. In White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (1996), Ian Haney López documented US legal cases in which individuals sued the courts to establish white status. The wobbly legal decisions expose a truth: race is a fiction, a fiction made real by history.