Friends and Relatives,
We continue to check in with organizers on the ground in the Twin Cities, where masked federal agents have invaded and continue to terrorize everyday people in the name of “just enforcing the law.” We hear that ICE is specifically targeting any and all people of color—racial profiling which has been deemed legal under a recent Supreme Court ruling.
Cars are being found running with the glass shattered and the occupants missing. Unmarked cars are following people down their own streets, and entire families, including children, are being abducted. ICE is specifically targeting anyone who tries to film them and bear witness to their rampage.
This wave of oppression is crashing first upon those who were already the most vulnerable—those who, because of legacies of structural violence and economic dispossession, are exposed to both the cold and to the violence of the state.
Last week, four men who are citizens of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota were abducted by ICE from a homeless encampment in Minneapolis. Three of the men are still being held at Fort Snelling, a site once used as a concentration camp for Indigenous people in the 1860s.
ICE is also targeting communities of refugees, who have fled violence and been approved to receive refugee status in this country. Many refugees are from countries which the United States has had a direct role in destabilizing. The administration and DHS are fueling narratives that immigrant and refugee communities are hot-beds of fraud, crime, and violence—justifications used to defend their own actions.
It is becoming clear–the frenzy of violence unleashed in this instance is not new. It is the lashing out of an empire built on extraction, greed, and infinite growth, benefitting only the few. The administration is using the tools initially provided by the Doctrine of Discovery five hundred years ago embedded in American law to define and enforce who has a right to live on this land and who does not. These ongoing structures of oppression keep vulnerable people increasingly more vulnerable.
Yet, amid the violence, our people on the ground are also witnessing care, solidarity, bravery, and love. Direct action and mutual aid networks that initially formed in the wake of the murder of George Floyd are engaging to provide for material needs—rent, groceries, and rides. In a reality where going to work and getting groceries is a risk, this means keeping people safe.
YOU can support impacted families on the ground with rent support and food delivery. Donate here: dismantlediscovery.org/donate (mark your donation with “Minneapolis” when you fill out the payment information).
Now is the time to step into solidarity for our neighbors in the Twin Cities, and for our neighbors at home. If we seek hope, we must find it in each other. These are the seeds that we tend in a world that we, friends, must build together.
