Trump's Minnesota Siege Begins to Break

As federal immigration agents fanned out across Minnesota, an underground network of neighbors became a lifeline for families too terrified to step past their own front doors.

WASHINGTON — For one family living in an apartment in Minneapolis, Monday was the first time they had walked outside since December 4th.

That is eighty-three days.

In that time, Donald Trump continued signing executive orders in batches like grocery receipts, and the machinery of a federal government continued turning itself toward the project of making people like this family disappear. ICE agents fanned out across Minneapolis. People were pulled from cars. Children were left behind in backseats, screaming.

And this family stayed inside.

On Monday, some families here decided they would send their children back to school. Not all of them. Not even most of them. But some. In a city that has spent three months watching its immigrant neighborhoods go quiet the way a forest goes quiet before a fire, that counts.

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A woman who has been running food and supplies to families in hiding — she asked not to be identified, because the people she helps are terrified of exactly this kind of attention — has spent these months carrying groceries to apartment doors, texting coordinates in group chats, and reading requests that she says “really hurt your soul.”

She is not wrong.

One family she visited has a small child with severe developmental issues, born here, an American citizen by every law ever written. They have not taken her to her medical appointments. They have watched her miss them one by one, because they have seen what happens when immigrant families get into cars. Someone offered to drive the child to her doctor. The family said no. They are too afraid even to try.

Another family came to the United States years ago because their child has a serious brain condition that could not be treated in their home country. They had not left their home for three weeks when the woman found them. She brought groceries. The parents came to the door to help carry the bags and she urged them to go back inside immediately.

“The look on the mom’s face is not something I will ever forget,” she said. “She looked haunted.”

The mother asked for food. She also asked for menstrual pads. She had been going without.

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The messages coming through the informal mutual aid networks read like dispatches from a siege — because that is what this is.

A single mother with several children sent a grocery list so short it broke the hearts of everyone who saw it. People got more to her than she asked for. She had not asked for much.

Messages in Spanish have been coming through all winter, people with no legal standing to beg and every human reason to. One family wrote that they had been without work for a month and a half. Everything they had saved went to an immigration attorney after a family member was detained in January. Now they had nothing. They asked for help with rent. They apologized for asking. They said thank you to God and to anyone willing to help. They said they were sorry. They were sorry.

An elderly couple wrote that their children were helping them with food, but the children’s resources were also nearly gone, and February rent was coming.

Almost every request, the woman noted, includes people insisting they want to work. They want to pay their own way. They are sorry to ask.

“People feel invisible,” she said.

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Not all of the food that was dropped made it inside. Some packages sat uncollected at doorsteps. The families inside believed the deliveries might be ICE lures — federal agents trying to draw them into the open.

That is what three months of this does to a person.

In a group chat Monday afternoon, people were crowdsourcing diapers and supplies for a newborn. The baby’s mother had been taken.

The woman telling this story paused. “I don’t know how people already living so much on the margins are going to get back on their feet,” she said. “It feels gigantic.”

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Minnesota has not been passive. The Hopkins Education Foundation partnered with the local school district to launch the Hopkins Strong Emergency Relief Fund, serving a town home to many immigrant families. A statewide clearinghouse at standwithminnesota.com has been aggregating mutual aid contacts across the Twin Cities and suburbs. Food mutual aid in Minneapolis has grown to meet the moment, though rent and utilities — especially with temperatures plunging toward brutal cold — remain urgent and unmet.

Rochester, hours to the south, has lagged. People there have had less of a net beneath them.

The woman has been talking to families who are now beginning to consider moving again. One mother told her that her child desperately wants to go back to school, that most of his friends have already returned, that they did online school through COVID and don’t want to do it again. But the mother is scared. She is so scared.

“We want to go back to work,” the mother told her.

Another woman, who had just lost her job, said the employer had brought in replacements. People willing to risk going outside.

Then her voice dropped.

“But those don’t have children,” she said.

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Three months ago, on December 1st, the Trump administration launched what it called the largest deportation operation in American history, with Minneapolis among its early targets. In the weeks that followed, federal immigration agents set records for arrests. Migrants reported being stopped in their cars. Advocates documented cases of American citizen children left without parents. The administration called this enforcement. The people of Minneapolis watched their neighbors go dark.

On Monday, some children went back to school.

One family stepped outside an apartment door for the first time since December 4th and let the cold air hit them.

It was not safety. Nobody is calling it that. The woman who has been running supplies all winter said a neighbor asked her recently: Are they really leaving?

She told her she didn’t know. She hoped so. But she didn’t trust it.

“She said she feels the same,” the woman recalled. “Her kid really wants to go back to school.”

For now, that will have to be enough. A child wants to go to school. The mother is terrified. The city is holding its breath. And outside, in a country that did this to them, the morning is cold and getting colder, and nobody yet knows what comes next.