One mile south of my street, there is a street where neighbors do laundry for an entire apartment building whose tenants cannot safely do their laundry. I’m told most of the clothes they gather are children’s clothes.
As with other times of struggle, as with other times when basic needs are made difficult or impossible to meet for some, good parents do without so their children won’t have to.
And good people look for ways to help.
I am aware of a neighbor who will come to your house, take your trash and recycling to the curb, then, after they’re emptied, return and bring them right up to your door or put them back in your garage.
In times like these I write so I won’t forget. So I’ll keep hold of details that might otherwise slip away. I want to keep hold of exactly what it was like back in 2026.
Years from now, maybe this is one way I will consider the ways some people got laundry done and their trash hauled out and responded to the many other horrors, small and large, attendant to the federal occupation of Minnesota:
2026 was the year the Trump administration made household chores untenable, unsafe.
I’m saying, 2026 feels quite like 2020. The same sad and sinister menace occupying 1600 Penn. A lethal illness threatening everyone’s health and wellness. Our city streets occupied by armed agents of the state again, kitted out in combat gear; those agents are harming us again. They’re going door-to-door again threatening and hurting people in their homes—stripping our sanctity, crumpling up the Constitution.
It isn’t safe for many folks to leave their house. Leaving your house may affect your health; it could get you killed.
We’re protesting unnecessary extrajudicial executions by agents of the state again. We’re mourning the loss of beautiful neighbors. Brave people capture videos so all the world can witness. We’re back in the streets rising up, trying to set it right while above us helicopters chop up frigid winter air.
They’re opposing us with tear gas again, with pepper spray, with baton rounds and bean bag bullets aimed at fearless faces, with violence and threats of violence. Unmarked vehicles are back, racing around town, causing all kinds of collisions.
Last night, in the bakery aisle of my favorite grocery store, two friends, D and P, told me they recently had guns pointed at them. Sudden subtle tears from D. I felt ashamed for some reason—ashamed.
It isn’t safe for many folks to leave their house. Leaving your house may affect your health; it could get you killed. Several city schools have moved online. Workers who can do so are back to working from home. Some folks can’t get groceries. They have to have them delivered. Neighbors who can move about with less risk get groceries for neighbors who can’t move about freely right now.
Restaurants are struggling again, losing customers, down to skeletal staff. Fast food joints have pivoted to drive-thru only, take-away only. DoorDash ain’t dashing to many doors; they don’t have drivers. Other businesses keep their doors locked, strictly controlling who can gain entry. They’ve put up signs that read “No ICE.”
A call goes out to help a restaurant that’s hurting for business. I’ll not say which one. We go. We get our food to go. There’s a sign on the door asking customers to be patient. “Due to the current situation in the Twin Cities” it says, “many of our staff are choosing to stay home.”
The shop where I get my hair braided once a month (I’ll not say which shop) lets me know people are afraid to come in. Business is way down. After a recent appointment, I’m told “we might have to take a break.”
People are showing up though. Last night, or the night before that (I’ll not say which night) a familiar room (I’ll not say which room) was packed for a literary arts event/fundraiser for anti-ICE causes/raid readiness training. The poems and practical suggestions soothed my spirit.
I initially wrote this on the day we held a general strike: no work, no school, no shopping.
Back then, two days ago now, ages ago now, I wrote, “more than 1,000 businesses have closed in solidarity. Tens of thousands of Minnesotans are protesting peacefully downtown and at the airport. We mean it. Today’s high temperature will be -8 Fahrenheit (eight degrees below zero or -22 Celsius). We mean it.”
Alex Jeffrey Pretti was still alive when I wrote that.
He’s dead now, like Renee Nicole Good.
The government shot him, just like they shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Just like they shot Keith Porter, Jr.
*
History is rhyming, not repeating; 2026 isn’t exactly like 2020. The violence is more specifically designed to advance authoritarianism. It’s conspicuously race-based. It’s more xenophobic; our Somali siblings are really going through it. The government’s violence and hate is intentional. It’s a feature not a bug, and all of it is out in the open.
Within the broader terror campaign, the administration is focused on the most vulnerable. They’re harming the elderly; they’re going after children. They grab up kids in front of other kids at the end of the school day on purpose: theft plus trauma, violence amplified.
Normalcy is impossible here without erasure. Normalcy is violence.
So, for too many kids, school is risky. For too many people residing here lawfully, going to an immigration meeting or an administrative hearing is risky. Around here, for too many immigrants, here lawfully or not, going to church has actually been risky for months. Not because their pastor earns a living through race-based cruelty and violence that absolutely needs to be called out. No. For many of our neighbors, they can’t go to church because the state has made church unsafe. The administration changed its policy on what are called “sensitive spaces.” The government has been actively denying some people their freedom of religion for months.
Armed federal agents act with immunity and impunity. They’re paid for violence, urged toward violence, and rewarded for violence. Any illusions about protection and service are gone. “Public safety” is a pretext for a terror campaign.
Nowadays, in addition to helicopters, they also surveil us with drones.
*
2026 is different for me too. I’m on Signal now. I wear a whistle around my neck wherever I go. I keep my head on a swivel. I share my location with loved ones. I walk around with my passport. I limit my outings and social obligations. I think about keeping a couple of days worth of essential medication in a baggie in my pocket—just in case. I don’t, but I think about it.
Not that any of these things will save me. What’s one more dead Black person? What’s one more dead poet?
You see it. I’m sure you see it, but, yeah, my mind is a little messy at the moment. Normal things seem abnormal. Abnormal things are starting to seem like they might become a new normal. The benign sometimes shows up malevolent. Familiar words seem unfamiliar.
I start my car. It flashes up a warning once so common I disregarded it:
Ice possible. Drive with care.
If I’m not contributing to the resistance, I feel I should be. Wherever I’m not showing up, I feel I should be. I feel I should fight all the time, deny myself joy, deny myself rest.
*
Not too far from my house there’s a restaurant you can walk right into for supper, even if you’re an ICE agent. If you dine there, it might seem like the world is as it was before Operation Metro Surge began. People look happy. They seem undisturbed in the booths and giddy at the bar.
Settings like that are not in short supply, and they remind me that many people seem unaware of everything that’s happening right here in Minnesota right now. They seem undisturbed by what’s happening. It reminds me that more than a few people are happy ICE is here doing what they’re doing. They like how they’re doing it too.
I think of those people as disturbed in a different way. I think of them as undisturbed because they are disturbed.
So, in one way or another, everyone is disturbed here.
Nothing is normal, not even things that seem normal. Everything that appears normal is an illusion, a bigger lie than The Big Lie. Normalcy is impossible here without erasure. Normalcy is violence. It’s support for violence that makes the government’s cruelty and violence possible. It is the amplification of governmental violence.
I write to remember. Not the general, the specific. I write it down so I can go back and remember things like how I used to sanitize cereal boxes, how we kept mail in the garage for seven days before bringing it in. How we hung N95s on hooks we installed by the backdoor.
As in 2020, large familiar questions remain: How will we survive this? How can I help?
The source of the threat ain’t changed though, not really, ultimately it’s still man’s inhumanity to man. But some of the daily horrors are different.
The N95s are in a drawer for when we need them; these days we hang our whistles on those hooks by the door.
The days are the same; the days are different. We fill them as we did; we fill them in new ways.
“Saturdays are not too busy,” we find ourselves thinking lately, “maybe we could take in a load of wash.”
