“If you grow up in New England the war made relentlessly real to you is the Revolutionary one. Men came to this land in ridiculous red coats and farmers in plainclothes drove them to humiliation and ruin. Minnesota, unlike most midwestern states, was founded by New Englanders, who brought their colleges and town squares and the moral rectitude some call sanctimony well west of Connecticut”
“The president claims to have won the state “three times,” but no Republican has won Minnesota since before many of the Whipple protesters were born. The state is a provocation to the kind of man who thinks the middle his”
“It is the misfortune of Minnesota’s ICE contingent to have invaded the state with the second-highest levels of social trust, trailing only Utah. Many activist networks were formed in 2020; we are seeing, Petrus says, Minnesotans call upon the “muscle memory” of the George Floyd protests. In mid-January, a neighborhood organization for a part of town called Whittier put out a call for a meeting to organize a “Neighborhood ICE response”; more than 800 people showed up at the local elementary school and formed a tidy line extending well beyond the door. (“Why a line?” I ask someone later. “Because we are in Minnesota,” he says.) In the cafeteria, in their big coats, adults struggled to get their legs through benches attached to long lunch tables. Because there were too many Minnesotans to fit in a single room, officials and parents and teachers went room to room giving the same speeches about how to help neighbors in hiding. They then gridded out the rooms, dividing the neighborhood into smaller subdivisions. Close neighbors met one another (“Oh, you live on the other side of the museum”) and formed hyperlocal Signal groups. At the first sighting of an agent, someone could ping the group and draw them outside. Their favored tactic was noise. They would make it impossible for ICE to conduct raids in secret.”
“If the whistle is the sound of resistance, the sensation is the never-ending vibration of a half-dozen chats on the phone in your pocket and all the anxiety that suggests. There are Signal chats for every neighborhood, chats devoted to finding out about other chats. ICE vehicles are often unmarked; there are chats where locals type in license-plate numbers and other residents check the numbers against a database of ICE vehicles”
“Against the wail of distant whistles, the crowd passes from one character to another and comes together: “SHAME. SHAME. SHAME.””
“The impulse to drive hostile invaders from your home lives in your body in a place too deep to name. I finally bought a gas mask. You should get one too.”