Under Occupation

There are too many dispatches to include from here in the occupied Twin Cities. This is not “unrest”: It’s an entire state peacefully resisting military occupation and documenting the violent abduction of our neighbors.

I hope everyone has heard about the shirtless Saint Paul Hmong man taken from his house by ICE on Sunday, wearing just shorts and Crocs, in 10°F weather – without a warrant. Here's an MPR story on this travesty, and Marisa Kabas's earlier story. DHS is still making up things to excuse their execrable actions in this case. 

If you haven't, take some time to read Masha Gessen's New York Times commentary, and Lydia Polgreen's reporting from her visit here, which includes her observations from North Minneapolis last week when a baby was gassed as her parents tried to escape the scene. (Both should be gift links.)

Saint Paul schools are closed today and tomorrow so teachers can prepare to offer fully hybrid school starting Thursday, because so many students have been absent and it's not safe for them to come in. A Saint Paul teacher I follow on BlueSky said they are shuffling all the teachers so that some teach fully online classes and some teach in-person, rather than having each classroom be hybrid. Which makes functional sense, I suppose, but means students will all have no teacher continuity, and will also effectively segregate the classes, with white students in-person and the vast majority of students of color at home. Though I guess they're already spatially separated. 

A Facebook friend reported that a person she knows works with legal refugees in Minneapolis — people who have done everything required of them to achieve citizenship. To date, about 60 of her clients have been rounded up by ICE and separated from their families. They have been shipped, without any sort of hearing, to Texas where they know no one. They are held until their identities and paperwork have been evaluated, and then freed. That may take a week, or longer, in filthy conditions and with no changes of clothing. Then they're released in Texas. With no money. And they're the lucky ones.  

Those are just a few of the things I can put together out of everything that's happening, without reporting individual abductions that are happening everywhere.

I also want to share a story I've heard that is not known. People may have heard about ICE going into our hospitals to handcuff people to beds and terrorize people seeking care. This story is a bit different. 

It comes from a neighbor I know personally, and happened a week ago Saturday, January 10. She was present as a legal observer at Regions Hospital, which is the Level 1 Trauma Center in Saint Paul, on the north edge of downtown.

A Spanish-speaking man and his wife had been stopped by ICE. Neither one speaks any or much English. He had, as my friend put it, had "some medical concerns" during the stop, enough that the ICE agents took him to Regions instead of to the Whipple Building. (So they must have been serious enough to not ignore.)

At the hospital's Emergency Room, my friend the observer was with the wife, an interpreter, an attorney, a witness to the ICE abduction and the man's wife, who was sobbing "uncontrollably the entire time I was there.... Her voice was shaking when she could get some words out. I understood that she wondered if her husband were still alive, and if she would ever see him again."
 
The wife was not allowed to be with her husband in the examining room because he was in ICE detention, and was denied updates on his condition. Hospital staff said a social worker would come to help her but no one ever came. (I assume he was provided with an interpreter, which is hospital policy, but that's only an assumption.)

The five of us, sitting in an area off to the side, were quiet, not creating a commotion as we kept trying to find some assistance for the overwhelmed wife. I don't think other people in the waiting area were aware of this crisis or that anything unusual was going on.
 
Then ... perhaps four to six hospital security guards approached us as a group. Without conversation or questions or offers of assistance or support, they said we would have to leave. We asked if the wife and the interpreter could stay while the rest of us left and that was denied. 
 
Around the corner was an area of tables and chairs that no one was using. We asked if we moved over there, would that be acceptable for us to stay. That was denied. We continued to try to find a solution. The guards stepped away to a desk and all came back with a woman wearing a uniform who said she was a St. Paul police officer. I don’t believe she ever gave us her name. She wore a badge but I was unable to discern the number or a name on it. 
 
Hoping to capture that information, I took a couple of photos. The officer immediately told me there were no photos allowed in the hospital and I would have to delete them right away or she would take my phone. When I asked, she confirmed that yes, there were no photos allowed anywhere in the hospital. I didn't think that was correct, but there was no arguing with her so I deleted the photos because I couldn't go without my phone. 
 
The officer said we would have to leave right then or we would all be arrested. That also didn't seem correct to me but since having the wife arrested would not help the situation, all of us, including the wife, left into the night.
 
It seemed that the hospital and St. Paul Police had chosen complicity with ICE over patient health and family togetherness. 
 
The experience was shocking, sad and angering. I believed that the police officer had lied to us about permission to take photos and the right of any of us, especially the wife, to be at the hospital. Here was a woman obviously panicked and in grief. 
 
No one in charge at the hospital, that I saw, displayed any empathy or support to this person in distress. I did not see that any of them offered a single gesture of kindness, but instead sent us out into the cold and dark. I was very disappointed that neither the hospital nor the St. Paul police did not do better for this woman, the wife of one of their patients.

That's just one story of the inhumanity we are living with, and compared to being detained and shipped to Texas, where they might kill you directly (or indirectly since they have stopped paying their third-party medical providers!) or let you go with no money and no way home... it's not as bad. 

But it's not a way to run a free country either. It's apartheid.