Catholic and Nerdy

ICE now tackling press.

I’ve been reading (and have read) a lot about trauma and anxiety, and also literature, literary theory, literary criticism, things like that. I feel like I’m comprehending something vast about human nature and my own nature that makes me want to vibrate at the speed of light.

It’s something to do with picking up a book in the literature section that was a survey of woundedness, or scars and wounds as motifs in classic literature, and picking up a book in the psych section about feeling safe and healing from fear, and realizing the books’ prefaces talked about essentially the same things in essentially the same language

Does this writer know what a searing artistic insight they have happened upon? That a horror story, a story that delves in fear, must also be a love story, not in the sense of a story about falling in love or that centers the feeling of love, but in the sense that wherever love and understanding is absent, there true horror is, and whatever loves or is loved or must be loved, whatever understands or is understood or demands to be understood, that is what lets us fight back.

We have this idolized AND sanitized version of what happened then, and so we do not recognize it when it happens now.

Resistance fighters assassinated nazis and blew up weapons and infrastructure and destroyed records and forged paperwork and raised secret funds and smuggled people in vehicles and yes, hid them in their homes.

“Well it’s sad he got sent to an ICE camp but he faked his permit :/“

Whoever helped him fake his paperwork did what fighters in ww2 did. People who cut through chain link fences do what fighters in ww2 did, people who blow whistles chasing after ice cars do what fighters in ww2 did, people who destroy arms factories and cop city cranes do what fighters in ww2 did, people unmask agents do what fighters in ww2 did.

People are doing it now! They’ve been doing it now! You keep saying “oh if this happened here__” it HAS! It IS!

One local jail contracted with ICE voluntarily. We were getting close to forcing them to actually follow the rules of ICE detainers and release people if ICE hadn’t come for them. That’s over now. If anyone gets bond on a pending criminal charge, they are arrested and deported without the chance to prove innocence or guilt.

Two of my clients were victims of severe domestic violence. Nearly all have dependent children. Some of the children are US citizens. There are no questions. No support. Give your kids to CPS — this is the only option.

You know undocumented people can get a driver’s license? They can file taxes and get a tax ID? Those, the ones who tried to obey the law, are being taken out one by one, because their names are in a database that they voluntarily joined. Because they want to be here. They want to be Americans.

The judge in a case of mine gave someone a two-day jail sentence. Gone. Case deferrals for dismissal are available for all Americans; if an undocumented person tries to take the same deal, they’re gone. A child client of mine had his father disappear to ICE. A woman had her husband disappear.

If you're looking for a good, centralized collection of fundraisers for people and organizations doing on-the-ground work in Minnesota right now, someone on Bluesky put together a great resource hub for things like food support, rent relief, mutual aid, and immigrants' rights centers that I'd really love to see spread around.

And if you're local to the Twin Cities, there's a "Take Action" section with links to ways to get active, as well as some resource guides for legal observers, etc.