When my wife got home from work the day Renee Good was taken from us, I was caught off guard by a sudden welling of tears.
Like most of us, I think, I’ve spent the past four days tearing up unexpectedly, as my body continues to adjust to the unrelenting rising tide of suffering against my refusal to allow my empathy to callous over and turn me into one of them.
I was caught off guard again this weekend, because the first video I saw after the one we all saw was a video I didn’t understand at the time; a guy on his front porch, with an inconsolable bystander on the sidewalk in front of his home.
But now that we’ve seen the agent’s video, I know who the inconsolable bystander is.
So I found the video again, and it’s devastating.
It’s Renee Good’s partner, sitting in the snow with their dog, in shock, and incoherent with grief.
Because she was the first to run to the vehicle and find Renee.
I was caught off guard because, you see, my kids still have their parents. And my wife and I still have each other.
We still get Friday nights on the couch with the pets and Sunday morning coffee in our sweat pants.
But Renee Good’s family doesn’t.
And do you know why? Do you know why ICE is in Minnesota?
Because they’re not looking for undocumented Hispanic people. They’re not even looking for undocumented Somalis.
Turns out, there aren’t actually a lot of undocumented people from Africa living in the Midwest.
In fact, over 95% of all Somalis in Minnesota are citizens, by birth, or by naturalization, and it’s estimated that out of the roughly 100,000 in the Somali community—which is only 2% of the population of Minnesota—only a few hundred are undocumented.
And the 50-60 involved in fraud investigations are not from the undocumented community.
Kristi Noem’s invasion, branded “Operation Metro Surge,” which she now says is going to get even worse, they say is to investigate fraud by Somalis in Minnesota.
But ICE can’t investigate or detain citizens for fraud, Somali or otherwise. Fraud by citizens is for domestic law enforcement, like the police and FBI, and if those investigations result in fraud charges, they’re prosecuted through the civilian justice system, where a conviction leads to a sentence by a judge.
And even if that citizen is naturalized, that still doesn’t involve DHS or ICE. The only way DHS is involved is if the fraud related to the citizenship process itself, and even in that case, DHS has to investigate and successfully get a judge to denaturalize the citizen first, before ICE can legally find and detain them.
None of these processes are fast, none of these investigations pose a physical threat to anyone, and most importantly, none of this begins with 2,000 ICE agents driving through cities.
So I must ask.
If they aren’t looking for Hispanic people, and they can’t investigate or detain naturalized citizens in the Somali community, what exactly are thousands of ICE agents doing driving around Minneapolis, and why is Renee Good not spending her weekend at home with her family, where she belongs?
I can answer both questions:
Not a goddamn thing.
And for no goddamn reason.
