I'm Not Asking You To Take My Word For It

I'd rather build a bridge than win an argument.

If you support ICE and can’t understand why anyone would protest, that makes sense. If they were only removing rapists and murderers, I’d be confused too.

But that’s not what’s happening.

I’d rather build a bridge than win an argument, so this is not a post designed to make you angry or defensive or dug in deeper than you already are, this is a document, this is me, one mother in northern Minnesota, writing down what I know to be true so that someday, when someone asks what it was like, there will be a record.

I live in Duluth, Minnesota where the lakes freeze thick enough to drive on and the winters stretch long and quiet, and for most of my life the chaos of “the cities” has felt far away, like something that happens to other people in other places, but it doesn’t feel far away anymore.

This week, after church, I stood outside in subzero temperatures with my family on a corner near our favorite pizza shop, and my kids ducked inside to warm up and eat a slice while I stayed out there with parents and friends and people I hadn’t seen since high school, all of us standing together because we believed that what was happening in our state required our presence.

It wasn’t the massive march in Minneapolis with tens of thousands of people, it was a small gathering in a small city hours north, and that’s exactly the point, because this has reached all the way up here, to corners by pizza shops and familiar faces and neighbors who don’t agree on everything but agree on this.

Down in Minneapolis, 700 businesses closed. 100 faith leaders were arrested peacefully at the airport. In New York and Los Angeles and Salt Lake City and Seattle, people marched too. And up here in Duluth, on a frozen corner where traffic flows, we kept expanding from corner to corner, cars driving by honking their support, and we proudly did what we could.

I need to tell you about the gift we have that previous generations didn’t, the thing that changes everything about how we can know what’s true, because we have videos now, multiple angles, slow motion, footage uploaded in real time before anyone can tell us what we saw or didn’t see…

We don’t have to blindly trust the headlines anymore, we can watch it ourselves, slow it down, zoom in, compare angles, and decide what our own eyes are telling us.

I know there are official accounts for everything that’s happened in my state these past few weeks, I know there are talking points and counter-narratives for every video that surfaces, and I’m not asking you to take my word over theirs, I’m asking you to watch the footage yourself and decide what you believe: your own eyes or what the headlines tell you you’re seeing.

I’ve watched the same footage you can watch. I’ve slowed it down, looked at the angles, listened to the people who were standing right there.

I’ve seen children used to lure their parents out of hiding. Teenagers tackled in the snow screaming that they’re citizens. Elderly grandparents pulled from their homes in freezing temperatures. A man exercising his First and Second Amendment rights who never came home.

I’m not going to tell you what to think about any of it. I think you’re smart enough to look at something and know what you’re seeing. I think you already know that sometimes the official story doesn’t match what’s right in front of you.

What I see, in video after video taken by ordinary people on ordinary streets, is not what I was promised.

We were told they were removing the worst of the worst, dangerous criminals, people who posed a threat to our safety, and I wanted to believe that, because who doesn’t want their children to be safe, but then I watched the videos and read the data and something didn’t add up.

So I went looking, not for activist talking points, but for the government’s own numbers analyzed by sources that couldn’t be dismissed, and FOX 9, a local Fox affiliate, analyzed the Department of Homeland Security’s data and found that out of more than 2,000 people arrested in Minnesota only 5.2% have violent criminal convictions, and the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that nationwide 73% of people being detained have no criminal convictions at all.

Nearly three out of four people being detained have never been convicted of any crime. This is the government’s own data, analyzed by a Fox affiliate and a libertarian think tank, and the math does not match the message.

I’ve read accounts of a 69-year-old United States citizen born in New Mexico who was surrounded by federal agents while parking her car, and when her husband asked why they told him it was because of her ethnicity.

I’ve learned that off-duty police officers have been stopped with guns drawn until they could prove they were law enforcement, and that Minnesota’s own police chiefs have gone on the record stating that their officers are being racially profiled.

I’ve seen school enrollment drop from 90% to 60% overnight because families are too afraid to let their children leave the house, and teachers making home visits to deliver food because parents are too terrified to go to the grocery store.

This is not what safety looks like. This is what fear looks like when it moves into a community and refuses to leave.

If you love the Bible, I need you to sit with Leviticus 19:34, which tells us to love the foreigner as ourselves, and Matthew 25, which says whatever we do for the least of these we do for Him, not the least of these with the right papers, not the least of these who came the right way, just the least of these, and I need you to ask yourself if what you’re seeing looks like love.

If you love the Constitution, I need you to sit with the Fourth Amendment, which protects us from unreasonable searches, and the Fifth, which guarantees due process, and I need you to ask yourself what it means when American citizens are detained for how they look and a man legally carrying a permitted firearm while peacefully filming is killed by federal agents.

These are not partisan positions. These are the values we say we hold. This is where we find out if we meant it.=

My kids went to school this week and I made dinner and I did laundry and I answered emails, and the whole time I carried something heavy in my chest, the strange guilt of routine continuing while other people’s lives shatter just a few hours south.

But I have never been prouder to call this place home, because when something felt wrong Minnesotans showed up, they asked questions, they protected their neighbors, they marched in temperatures that hurt to breathe because they believed that every human being has dignity.

This is who we have always been beneath the nice, a people of grit and heart and stubborn relentless love, and what you’re seeing in the streets is not chaos, it’s a community saying we see you, we’re not leaving.

Someday people will read this, maybe years from now, trying to understand what it was like to live through this moment, maybe even my own kids who stood on that corner with us, trying to make sense of why their neighbors needed them there.

And I want them to know that people saw it and documented it and didn’t believe everything they were told because they had finally learned they could verify it themselves, that people stood in negative eleven degrees because it mattered that much, from the tens of thousands in Minneapolis to the small gatherings on corners in Duluth.

I want them to know that some of us refused to look away.

I don’t know how this ends, I don’t know if the bridges I’m trying to build will hold any weight, I don’t know if the people I love who see this differently will ever see it the way I do, but I know that staying silent is not an option for me.

There is nothing wrong with learning new information and changing your mind, it’s what we teach our children to do, and you can love your country and still hold it accountable when it fails to live up to what it promised, that’s not betrayal, that’s the deepest kind of patriotism I know.

Advocacy looks like a lot of different things, it looks like standing in the cold and making a phone call and having that hard conversation at the dinner table and teaching your kids to ask questions about what they see, and not everyone can march, not everyone can risk arrest, not everyone has the privilege of being visible, and that doesn’t make their contribution less valuable, it makes the movement bigger.

Show up however you can. Right now, one of the most powerful ways to show up is to call.

The Senate is voting next week on whether to continue funding ICE through September. They have the power to demand transparency, accountability, and respect for constitutional rights before another dollar is spent. This isn’t about politics. This is about ethics. This is about humanity. This is about what kind of country we want to live in and what we’re willing to accept in our name.

If you’re in Minnesota, call Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith. Yes, they already agree with you, but they need to understand the intensity of what their constituents are feeling right now. They need to hear from you, over and over, so they know we are not backing down.

If you’re outside of Minnesota, call your Senators too. Even if you think they won’t listen, call anyway. They need to hear from real people, not just headlines. They need to know we are paying attention and we are not going away.

Here’s a script if you need one: “Hi, my name is [NAME] and I’m a constituent from [CITY, STATE]. I’m calling to urge the Senator to vote against continued funding for ICE until there is full transparency, accountability, and respect for constitutional rights. What’s happening in Minnesota is not what we were told, and the government’s own data shows the math doesn’t match the message. I’m paying attention and I’m not going away. Thank you.”

📞 Senator Amy Klobuchar: (202) 224-3244
📞 Senator Tina Smith: (202) 224-5641
📞 U.S. Capitol Switchboard (to reach any Senator): (202) 224-3121

Get everyone you know on the phones and flood the offices and share this piece and send it to five people who need to see it and put some skin in the game online even if it feels uncomfortable, because your discomfort is nothing compared to what families are facing right now.

The tides are turning and it’s working and they’re watching. Keep going.

If you want to help in other ways:

If you want to help: standwithminnesota.com has resources and ways to support families directly, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota is providing legal help, and the Monarca Rapid Response Line is 612-441-2881.

We can enforce laws and still be humane. You can believe in borders and still believe it shouldn’t look like this. I don’t think we’re as far apart as the algorithms want us to believe.

This is my testimony. This is what I saw. 💛

Sources: FOX 9 and CATO Institute, both using the government’s own data.