Category Archives: Resistance

My 2025 WisCon Guest off Honor Speech

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Last year I was a Guest of Honor at WisCon, a science fiction convention that’s historically been held in Madison, Wisconsin but last year was held as an online con. One of the things you do as a Guest of Honor at WisCon is you give a speech. I got asked right afterward to post it on my blog, and I kind of meant to but then forgot about it. However, I was thinking yesterday about how fundraising for people’s rent, one person at a time, feels a lot like flinging starfish back into the ocean in that classic story. There’s so much need, but it definitely matters to the person who now gets to stay housed for another month. I talked about that story in this speech, and after reading back over it I decided to post it. I am tweaking it slightly but mostly just by adding a couple of notes and links.

(I also told that story, and some of the other stories in this speech, at a DFL fundraiser where I was asked to speak last spring.)

Thank you so much for the invitation to be a Guest of Honor at WisCon. I have been regularly coming to WisCon since 1998 and this means a lot to me. Thank you to all the volunteers who helped to make this WisCon a reality. And thank you to Andrea for that moving, poetic, amazing speech.

Here’s something that most people know about writing: it usually takes a while to get published.

My earliest storytelling was not in written form but mostly was narration for play, like: let’s pretend we are characters from Star Wars and since there are not enough girls in those movies let’s also pretend that Han Solo has a younger sister. When I got to middle school, everyone else lost interest in these sorts of games. So I told stories to myself for a while, and then eventually started writing stories down. A lot of my middle school writing was for an audience of me. I was not trying to communicate with a reader, I was trying to play pretend on paper. This meant I could skip over anything I found boring and just write all the big climactic scenes with no buildup . 

Sometime in high school, I started occasionally writing stories that had a beginning, middle, and end, and almost immediately after that, I started trying to get published. I dug out my manilla folder of ancient rejection letters while I was thinking about this speech, and the oldest one I found was from 1989, when I was 16 years old.

In college, I took one creative writing class, which was a short story writing class. We each wrote three stories and critiqued everyone else. It was a kind of mixed experience, like a lot of college creative writing classes. For example, there was a guy in the class who one time, instead of giving us critiques, gave everyone a slip of paper with some random noun like Hamster on it and then an explanation of how this was profound and postmodern and very deep. The downside of a Zoom speech is that I can’t tell if this is getting a laugh, but I’m going to assume that if we were all in a room together I would have gotten a laugh with a side of “oh yeah, THAT GUY, everyone who takes a creative writing class has some version of THAT GUY.”

Anyway, at the end of the class, one of the other students asked the professor whether he thought any of us had what it took to MAKE IT as a REAL WRITER. My recollection is that he sighed in a somewhat grudging way and then said, he had no way of knowing, because WHAT IT TOOK to MAKE IT was persistence. Not giving up. And he had no idea which of us would do that. 

I remember thinking, “oh, well. If THAT’S all, I can do THAT.”

A few years ago I dug out the three ring binder where I saved all the stories from this class – as I’m writing this I’m thinking, between this binder and the folder of rejection letters from 1989 you’re all going to think I have a hoarding problem, and possibly you’re right – and looked up all the students I could find to see which of us had kept at it. The woman who wrote my favorite story that semester had a novel out. The woman who I think asked “which of us has what it takes” is now a professor of Jewish Studies, so she’s not writing fiction but she’s absolutely writing and she absolutely has a job where “not giving up” is required. The guy who handed out the Hamster critique had some name like John Johnson which makes him ungoogleable so alas I have no idea what he’s up to. [Side note: someone else in this class remembers a different person asking that question! Take my recollection of the details here with a grain of salt.]

Anyway. I submitted stories in high school, and got rejections. And I submitted stories in college, though not all that many, actually, because college kept me really busy, and they all got rejected. Two years after I graduated college, I joined a writer’s group, the Wyrdsmiths, which I’m still in, and I stepped up my story submissions, so I got a lot more rejections much more frequently.

Here’s the thing about writing that people do tell you but that’s hard to internalize until you’re doing it: sometimes, and especially when you’re getting started, it feels a little like screaming into a void. 

I sold my first stories in 1999, so about ten years after I started submitting. This was actually pretty fast, as these things go. 

I started selling stories in the print magazine era, which meant that I got both money and a copy of the magazine, which was cool, but not much in the way of feedback. I knew that probably people somewhere were reading it, because the magazine had thousands of subscribers, but at best, I might hear from a friend or family member. 

I knew I had readers, in other words, but even once I started selling – it didn’t exactly feel like screaming into the void anymore but it maybe felt a little like throwing a rock into a pond in the dark. I could hear the faint splash but I kind of had to take it on trust that the ripples were there. 

I sold my first novel in 2001, and it came out as two books in 2002 and 2003. And then I wrote a trilogy, which came out in 04, 05, and 06. The trilogy didn’t sell well and as you may recall, the economy tanked right after that, and I was unable to sell books for about a decade. Those five books are sufficiently forgotten that I pretty regularly run into people who think Catfishing on CatNet was my debut novel. 

But in 2019 I went to WorldCon in Dublin, and a woman came to my reading with a battered copy of Fires of the Faithful. This book was creased, yellowed, and water-stained, and had clearly been re-read dozens and dozens of times. She wanted me to sign it for her and she told me that these books had gotten her through her teenage years.

So yeah, those ripples were out there.

I’d flung my words out and hoped they’d get to people who needed them, and sometimes they did. She was someone who got what she needed from something I wrote, and I got to hear about it, which was really cool. 

The core true thing about fiction writing, I think, is that you have to believe that your words matter. That your voice matters. That what you write matters. 

Because if you don’t believe those things, it is a lot easier to give up. 

And here’s what I want you to take away from this speech today: your words matter. Your voice matters. Not everyone here is a writer, so I’m not talking about fiction, necessarily, I’m talking about all the other things you do, that we do. The things we build, the communities we connect, the people we lift up, all of it. 

In February of 2020 I got back editorial revisions for my book Chaos on CatNet, which is set mostly in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. I live in St. Paul. What I normally do with revisions is to e-mail my editor and say “thank you, I will let you know if I have any questions,” read the editorial letter, and then set it aside for a bit. Because there’s nearly always something that makes me think “how dare!” and if I just let it sit for a bit instead of getting defensive, I start coming up with ways to fix everything, including the stuff that I was pretty sure initially didn’t need to be fixed. This is how my process works, it’s fine. 

Anyway I got the edit letter on February 10th of 2020. I read it and set it aside and normally I would have been ready to start serious work on changes a few weeks later. But a few weeks later was when I sent an e-mail to my husband saying, “hey, so, I think we’re hitting the point where it would be prudent rather than paranoid to do a little judicious stocking up?” and instead of rolling his eyes he sent me a shopping list. As some people may recall, I actually wrote a story back in 2015 about someone cooking in a pandemic, and I pulled out that story and used it to make my list. I never used the egg replacer or the dry milk but I also never ran out of toilet paper.

And then I spent all of March waking up every morning and thinking, “holy shit, I am in the timeline with a pandemic” and adjusting to all the things that were suddenly, shockingly different in this new world we were all inhabiting, and the first half of April was similar, and at some point in late April I realized that I absolutely needed to work on my book, because I had a deadline.

So I sat down and made myself work on it and I was feeling pretty good about how the revisions were going, despite everything, as April wrapped up and May started.

And then, five years ago today, Memorial Day of 2020, a Minneapolis police officer murdered a Black man named George Floyd, setting off protests around the world but especially in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.

That murder is an event that has reverberated through the last five years in ways that I am absolutely not qualified to speak to, and I’m not going to try. As someone who lives in St. Paul, who lived in Minneapolis for 17 years prior to moving across the river, my experience of the aftermath was of something that was happening in, and to, both of my cities. 

In that moment 5 years ago, my very specific personal corner was this: I was revising a book that was set in a future Minneapolis. The characters went on a bus ride down Lake Street; they visited Uncle Hugo’s science fiction bookstore. The third precinct police station was at the corner of Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue and much of its immediate area was burned or badly damaged. Uncle Hugo’s burned to the ground. I wrote to my editor and said, “…I am going to miss my deadline.”

Because in addition to all the obvious reasons that I was struggling to even sit down and focus and write, just then: I had no idea how to even begin to imagine what Minneapolis would look like in the near future setting of the book. 

Lyda Morehouse, who is my best friend – I met her through the Wyrdsmiths, the writer’s group I joined in 1997 – Lyda gave me the exact advice I needed, which was just, write the Minneapolis you want to see. 

So once I had the mental space to write again, that’s what I tried to do. I wanted Uncle Hugo’s to rebuild, so I put a new Uncle Hugo’s right on Lake Street, with solar panels on the roof and a rocketship sculpture on the front. I put a public park named after George Floyd at the intersection of Lake and Minnehaha, where the Third Precinct police station had been partly burned down. And I imagined a future of policing with unarmed community safety officers, where my protagonist, wandering around outside on a dangerously cold night, encounters city safety workers who give her vouchers to buy a better coat and try to make sure she’ll be getting indoors promptly. 

It’s been five years now, and did I get any of these things? Well, Uncle Hugo’s did re-open. It’s in a different spot than I put it in in my book, but I love the new location. The old Third Precinct building is still standing there and still wrecked. It’s going to be turned into a voter services center, probably next year. I am depressed about the situation with the Minneapolis police. I guess if I’m being optimistic I would say it remains a work in progress.

But here’s another thing I want you to take away from this speech: the future you imagine matters. Change is hard. It’s hard to demand and pursue and enact. And it helps a lot to have a vision of a destination. Somewhere we think we’re all headed. 

I’m not saying that no one should write warning stories ever, the kind where you show people the dire consequences of building the torment nexus in the hopes that people will band together and at least refuse to buy an annual license for Torment Nexus (™) when it gets rolled out by some tech company in 2027. There’s absolutely a place for warning stories. For one thing, sometimes all we feel like we can do is stand in the middle of the public square, literally or metaphorically, and scream our warnings. 

But I also think we need stories that offer a vision of something we can build at the end of the tunnel. 

In 2004 I started blogging about local elections. 

I started doing this because I’d figured out how to look up my ballot online before going to the polls, and had remembered to do this, and had set aside time to research all the random downticket races. I needed to take notes, and since I was doing the research online anyway, I opened up a Livejournal window and took my notes there. And then, since I had a few dozen LJ friends, at least two or three of whom lived in Minneapolis and might find it useful, I organized my notes, issued endorsements, and posted.

I framed my picks as endorsements, at that point, solely for my own entertainment. Because, you know, important people do endorsements, and I was literally an internet rando.

I did the same thing in 2005 and 2006. And then in 2007 I had no posts about the election, although possibly this was because there was no election in Minneapolis that year. But in 2008 my post about the election says, “by request,” because someone had asked me when I was going to post. That was when I started feeling a sense of obligation, because there were people out there who were using these posts. Like I had dozens of readers who were paying attention to my takes on local races! 

So I kept writing them.

In Minneapolis and Saint Paul, this blog, way more than the science fiction writing, is what I’m known for. At this point, thousands of people read it, often looking it up from the voting booth on election day to figure out who to vote for in the races that don’t get news coverage.

It also means I’ve spent twenty years paying fairly close attention to local politics, and let me tell you, the local version of the Overton window has shifted. 

And what changed things was that a different group of people started showing up. Young people, people of color, renters, bikers, transit users. People showed up to run, to campaign, to attend meetings and speak up. 

And this all created a cultural shift, despite the fact that the urbanists and progressives lost a ton of battles. 

Because showing up means you have to come and fight even though you lost the last time. And also even when you won the last time. You have to show up and you have to keep fighting even when it’s hard.

It is really hard right now. 

It has been so hard since last November.

But people have continued coming together, and continued showing up. And continued pushing back and trying to keep vulnerable people safe and making it really clear that we are not going to lie down and accept fascism. 

And we are not going to win every fight, but the more we push back the fewer fights we will lose.

There’s a classic kind of cliche story about a person who’s walking along a beach picking up stranded starfish and tossing them back into the ocean where someone asks what difference it makes, since they can’t get them all back in, and the person says, “it made a difference to this one.” 

But OK. Here’s a real story, which was on NPR, about people who live in the Westman islands of Iceland. Puffins nest in Iceland, and when the babies are ready to fledge, historically they would find the ocean by following the light of the moon. Except in the modern era, cities produce enough light to confuse the baby puffins, which are called pufflings, and they wind up in town, stranded in nooks and crannies and unable to take off again. So during Puffling Season in the Westman Islands, the residents go out at night with flashlights, and boxes, and they gather up all the lost pufflings and take them out to the cliffs and toss them off the cliffs and towards the ocean where they need to go. 

If it were one person out there rescuing puffins, it would still matter to each little puffin that person rescued.

But it’s not one person. It’s a whole community working together. And so they get most of the pufflings safely into the ocean where they spend a few years out at sea, fishing and swimming and bobbing around in the water, until they come back to that coastline to lay their own eggs.

Your words matter. Your voice matters.

Even when it feels like you’re shouting into the void, you are not.

You are throwing rocks into a dark pond, and you can trust that the ripples are there.

Or you are throwing starfish back into the ocean, and the ripples are there, and it mattered to that starfish. 

Or you are throwing a baby puffin towards the ocean, creating ripples and keeping a bird population sustainable, because you are doing it with your whole community.

What you do matters.

What we do, matters.

How To Help if You are Outside Minnesota

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Last edited January 22, 2026

I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this, you more or less understand the situation in Minnesota and I don’t have to explain it to you! That said, I do have a section of local news sources, below. But to answer the question most people want to ask: yes, things are really as bad here as they look in the media. ICE officers are lawless thugs who are kidnapping my neighbors, and the claim that they’re doing us a service by removing violent criminals is a bald-faced lie. You probably knew that already, but just in case, there you go.

I guess I should briefly introduce myself: my name is Naomi Kritzer. I’m a science fiction and fantasy writer. (I have a book coming out in June.) I also write an election guide for Minneapolis and St. Paul, which a lot of people here use when they’re getting ready to vote in local elections. I lived in Minneapolis from 1995 through 2012, and I have lived in St. Paul since 2012. I love my community and also wrote a post of ideas for local people who are looking for things they can do right now.

If You’d Like to Donate Money

There is a whole lot of need in Minnesota right now. Many people need to stay home most of the time to keep themselves safe. (This includes undocumented immigrants but given that ICE has been abducting fully legal documented folks with work permits, and also kicking in doors to abduct citizens in their underwear, it is not just undocumented immigrants.)

Ashley Fairbanks put together an extremely good, detailed website of organizations, fundraisers, mutual aid asks, and more, all of which you can donate to. It’s here: Stand With Minnesota.

Contact Your Senators/House Rep

You can call or email, either is fine. If you’re insecure about this and need a little help, https://5calls.org/ has scripts. Tell them you want Kristi Noem removed and ICE abolished. If you think there’s absolutely no chance they’ll listen to you if you say you want ICE abolished, say you’re shocked by what they’re doing and this lawless rogue agency needs to be reined in and the agents need to unmask and wear badges like every other law enforcement agency. If you’re talking to a Democrat, emphasize that you don’t think “better training” is an appropriate approach here (in the real world, that just means “more money”).

If you’re talking to a Republican and you are a Democrat, don’t feel any need to mention your party loyalties to the person who supposedly represents you. Instead, you could try using the phrase “jackbooted government thugs” (thanks, Wayne LaPierre!) You could say that demanding people produce their papers on demand is communism. You could say that a masked secret police that breaks down doors to abduct citizens out of their own homes is profoundly un-American.

But say it. Say it now, say it tomorrow, say it next week. ICE is a rogue agency that needs to be abolished. ETA: Maybe also ask them to put someone with a little more ability to meet the moment in leadership, because Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are really not meeting the moment.

Write a Letter to the Editor

Letters to the (newspaper) editor feel profoundly old school but they matter in a couple of ways. First, they are kind of the physical documentation of the Overton Window. This means they’re extra influential on the Senators and House Reps you’re calling, because they tend to showcase the most median, normcore set of opinions. A newspaper editorial page in Nebraska that’s full of letters saying “ICE is a rogue agency; it needs to be dismantled” will help to make “abolish ICE!” feel like a safer and more reasonable stance for politicians to take.

The ACLU has a how-to guide for people writing letters to the editor. (On any topic, not specifically ICE.)

Hassle ICE-Supporting Businesses

You may have seen a document circulating (here it is on Instagram, here it is on Facebook) suggesting that people call or e-mail the CEOs of Target, Home Depot, Enterprise Car Rental, Hilton, and Delta Air Lines, to ask them to stop cooperating with ICE. Enterprise has been supplying most of the cars to the ICE agents invading Minneapolis; Hilton kicked a hotel out of their franchise for refusing to rent to ICE; Target has been allowing ICE to stage in their parking lots and has done a crap-ass job of protecting their employees (who they should know are all either citizens, or documented, they checked their I-9s).

Stand With Minnesota has a page with a lot more substantive information on who to contact and how. They also have a link to a toolkit on contacting the corporations and a spreadsheet of the specific hotels that are housing ICE agents.

You can also cancel credit cards and loyalty accounts and so on, if you have a Target card or a Hilton Honors account.

If you do this sort of action, please be scrupulously polite to the staff you deal with; there’s no way you’re going to wind up talking to Brian Cornell (or the actual current CEO, Michael Fiddelke), you’re going to be talking to very low-level employees.

To Learn More About What’s Going On in Minnesota, Read Minnesotan News Sources

Some good places to find out what’s going on, all without paywalls:

MPR News. Reporter Jon Collins’s work has been especially good.
Sahan Journal. Immigrant-focused news.
MinnPost. A general news site, hired a lot of the people the Star Trib laid off a while back.
Minnesota Reformer: Investigative reporting.

I’m not trying to assign you homework here, just — if you read a NYT or WaPo article about us, please also look to see what our local (excellent!) reporters on the ground are saying.

A couple of particularly excellent articles I’ve seen lately:

The Mamas of Cedar-Riverside
Mounds View Couple Detained On Way to Hospital
Intimidation Becomes a Calling Card

Stand With Minnesota also has a page of testimonials from Minnesotans about what life is like right now.

Push Back on Disinformation

I am not asking you to spend your time fighting with Internet trolls! But when you have conversations with family and friends, people who might listen to you, push back when there’s stuff they’ve heard that’s just wrong.

Among the things circulating in the national media that are really untrue:

And of course there’s the claim that Renee Good was trying to run over the ICE agent who murdered her. There’s literally video where you can see that her wheels were turned away from him. Basically everything ICE is saying is a lie. They lie when there are witnesses. They lie when there is video. They tell us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears because that’s what fascists do.

Send Words of Encouragement

If you’d like to send words of encouragement, Ashley added a page for that on the Stand With Minnesota site. She’s going to create a page for people here to read.

If you have friends and loved ones in Minnesota, you can also send encouragement directly. (Maybe not your uncle in Nisswa but to be clear, this is not just happening in Minneapolis and Saint Paul but the whole metro area and many of the smaller towns and cities.)

Get Ready For This Bullshit to Come to You

Eventually, they are going to pull the bulk of their people out of Minnesota and send them somewhere else. Where? Who knows. If you live in a blue city, maybe they’ll come to you.

Minnesota is incredibly organized. Our system of mobile patrols, dispatchers, and rapid responders has made it significantly harder for ICE to abduct people. You can read a discussion of how that system works here. The best-practices document explaining the nitty gritty here. You can read a journalist’s description of mobile patrol here and another one here.

If you think your city could do something similar, and even if you don’t think they could pull this off, you should start getting ready. I have a bunch of specific suggestions.

  • Training

In Minnesota, starting early in 2025, there were “legal observer” trainings available from a local group, Monarca. (These are also called upstander training, constitutional observer training, and ICEWatch training.) My understanding is that these were pioneered by a group in North Carolina called SiembraNC.

If you have similar trainings available in your area, definitely try to attend one. If not, you can find out some of what’s covered in the training by reading this manual. Maybe call your local immigrant rights organizations to see if they are considering offering training like this, sign up if they’ve got anything, and express interest if they don’t currently have it.

  • Get On Signal

Connect with a couple of friends on Signal and get used to using it. (It’s not hard, but there are some things that are a little confusing at first. There’s a beginner’s guide here.)

  • Get a Whistle and Find Out Who to Call If You See ICE

The idea behind whistles is that if someone spots ICE nearby, they can blow a whistle or a car horn to warn people nearby. Vulnerable people who hear the warning can get into their homes and lock the doors. Less-vulnerable people can come to also blow whistles and record what ICE is doing. You can find information on 3D printing whistles, zines on how to use whistles, and much more, here. Note that the zines at that site are Minneapolis-specific; the number you should call in your area for an ICE sighting is going to be different.

(There’s an area in Maryland that is not using whistles. I think everyone else is, though.)

  • Start Building Networks

By which I mean, if you have kids at school, talk to the other parents. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Talk to your gaming group. If you think a group is a political mix, one way to quickly make contact with a bunch of like-minded folks within a larger group like your neighborhood Facebook group or your PTA is to get a bunch of nice anti-ICE buttons or stickers or whistle kits and then ask if anyone would like one, and see who says yes.

  • Read some of the information at Defendthe612.

Minneapolis has a terrific website that both hosts a lot of information and is used as a clearinghouse for volunteers. (612 is the Minneapolis area code.) They have a guide on How to Start a Rapid Response Network. They have information on How to Start a School Patrol. There’s a lot there that’s worth looking at.

  • Think about how your workplace, organization, or community could respond.

In addition to the ICEWatch network, Minneapolis and St. Paul have a whole lot of food shelves that now deliver food. There’s a laundry service for people who can’t safely leave their houses, there’s pet-related mutual aid… start thinking now about how your workplace or business or community group could help people in your community. (And, hey: maybe some of what comes to mind is stuff your community needs now, regardless.)

Also! Look into becoming a Fourth Amendment Worksite.

  • Get rid of your Ring camera.

If you have a Ring camera, de-install it. Ring partners with Flock, which gives information to law enforcement (without a warrant), including ICE. I know it’s convenient and I know there are a million reasons people like having them, but it literally makes it easier for ICE to surveil your community and abduct your neighbors.

  • If you are personally vulnerable, make your own preparations.

Honestly, this is not something I have a ton of advice about, but I do want to suggest that if you’re a US citizen that some asshole from ICE would assume wasn’t a citizen, and you don’t have a passport, get a passport. In fact, get both a passport and a passport card, and carry the card in your wallet and keep the passport book somewhere safe. You can still tell ICE to pound sand if they demand to see your papers, but you’re less likely to wind up in detention if you have your papers.

If you’re not a citizen, and especially if you’re undocumented, or if you have something like temporary protected status that could get revoked, I’d suggest that you reach out to trusted friends to talk about what help you might need if your city gets descended on by as many ICE agents as the Twin Cities has. Rides, errands, laundry help, dog walking. It’s horrifying that this is where we’re at. Keep yourself safe. You are precious, you are loved, you are a valued member of your community, and you belong here.

Talk About Immigration, and Make it Clear You Think It’s GOOD

I guess this is the final thing I want to encourage people in other parts of the country to do.

We are really goddamn lucky as a country that people want to move here. Immigrants are a gift, a completely undeserved gift. We should want them to come. I will note that a whole lot of Trump’s aggression toward Minnesota is specifically toward Somalis, and Somalis are fucking awesome. They are smart, argumentative, hardworking, funny, incredibly diverse in their opinions. (I remember a mid-morning MPR call-in show in 2001 or 2002 that was related to something happening in the Somali community and the host was a little surprised when she was flooded with calls from Somalis, all vigorously disagreeing with each other. I don’t know if she realized that every Somali taxi driver, which was like 95% of the taxi drivers, listened to MPR all day to improve their English.) Somalis arrived here and immediately started getting involved in politics (there were Somalis out there dropping lit for R.T. Rybak in 2001, even though mostly they weren’t citizens yet). They treasure education, they want their kids to go to college, they’re aggressively motivated in general. This is an immigrant community that everyone should want and I am SO GLAD they came here to the Twin Cities, despite the fact that we have some of the worst winters in the country and they immigrated from a country where the coldest days are like 68F.

There’s a chant I’ve participated in at demonstrations that goes, “say it loud and say it clear / immigrants are welcome here.” That is a nice slogan but also: do that. Be clear in your conversations that you welcome immigrants, value immigrants, care about immigrants, consider your immigrant neighbors to be an irreplaceable part of your community. Don’t apologize for supporting immigrants. Don’t accept the premise that immigration is a problem. Immigration is good. IMMIGRATION IS GOOD.

Things are really hard in the Twin Cities right now. But seeing how many people here are working hard every day to protect our neighbors makes me believe that there’s a better world on the other side of this, and we’re going to get there.

How to Help: Twin Cities Residents

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Last edited January 30, 2026

This is a post for people in Minnesota. I’m going to do a separate post for the non-Minnesotans when I’m done with this one. (If you’re in a hurry you can go to Stand With Minnesota and find somewhere to donate some money.) Note: the ICE occupation is happening all over the state, and there are ICEwatch groups all over the state, but I don’t have a ton of information about resources outside the metro.

Hi! Hello! What a year the first half of January has been! If you’re already doing stuff, I’m not telling you to do different stuff, but I also know there are people who are having a hard time figuring out where to jump in, and there are people who are doing stuff who want to do more stuff. This is hopefully going to be a living document for people who are looking for ways to defend our neighbors.

My personal motto in this (and many other things) is a Jewish saying from the Pirkei Avot that goes, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to give up on it.” We are not in this alone. We are each picking up a tiny piece of the work and doing it, and like the people who jumped on and weighed down that carnival ride that almost tipped, we build power by working together.

There are a lot of ways to help right now, and I’m going to try to split them into useful categories and give you links to more information.

MUTUAL AID

Right now, a lot of groups out there are supporting the people who need to stay at home to keep themselves safe. (This includes undocumented immigrants but given that ICE has been abducting fully legal documented folks with work permits, and also kicking in doors to abduct citizens in their underwear, it is not just undocumented immigrants.)

Food:

If you have items to donate, there is also a spreadsheet of mutual aid asks and dropoff locations here. (Includes lots of places looking for whistles if you’re making whistles.)

Translation/Interpreting:

If you speak a second language, Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid has need of translators to help with intake interviews. Their volunteer page is here: https://mylegalaid.org/take-action/volunteer/volunteer-opportunities/ but does not list this need (you can e-mail them at probono@mylegalaid.org and let them know what languages you speak.) (I’m going to hazard a guess that basically any language spoken by immigrants to Minnesota is helpful.)

Laundry:

You can help with laundry services: pick up and drop off of clothes, wash/fold, or both. The form to volunteer is here.

Pets:

Some people have been forced to leave pets behind when detained, though, and local animal person Dallas is coordinating fostering for cats. (DM her on Facebook if you can help.)

The North Minneapolis Pet Resource Center (a program under the umbrella of My Pit Bull is Family) is providing pet-related mutual aid such as transportation for pets and vet care for people who can’t leave their homes, assistance for families who’ve had a person taken, and care for pets that have been left behind. They are also a hub for human food and other necessities as well as pet food. If this is something you’d like to help with, reach out to mutualaid@mypitbullisfamily.org or text (763) 273-0710.

Someone has now set up a group specifically to support vulnerable people with pets, and to help pets that were left behind when their humans were detained or deported, as well as to support people : ICE Hurts Animals Too. They are seeking fosters, drivers, veterinary volunteers, and donations of money, pet food, and other supplies. More info here.

Unmet Needs

Among the things I have not yet heard about: I don’t know if there’s a dog-walking mutual aid group, if there are any medical folks willing to make house calls, if anyone is organizing in-home volunteer tutors for the kids doing at-home learning for now, and if anyone is organizing snow shoveling or, given the number of people abducted at gas stations, gas-tank filling services. I will add those if I hear of any.

If you are at an organization that needs volunteers and you’d like to be added to this document, please send me an e-mail. (If your need is short-term or urgent, though, probably better to post to Bluesky and ask for a signal-boost.)

Personal Assistance

One way to address things like this: if you know a family where some or all of the people are unable to leave their house, ask what they need. You can volunteer directly to help your neighbors, and people you know through other communities (church, school, fandom, whatever.)

COMMUNITY DEFENSE

Community Defense is the stuff a lot of news articles are referring to as “protesting.” It is the work of watching for ICE, warning people if you see ICE, taking video if you see ICE abducting someone, and trying to get the name and any other personal information of abductees and passing names and video along to Monarca (612-441-2881).

At the most basic level: carry a whistle and know what to do if you see ICE. (If you see ICE, make some noise! Blow your whistle, honk your car horn!) You can get a whistle for free at many area stores, and keep your eyes out as you go about your daily business.

If you’d like to get more deeply involved in community defense, here’s how.

  1. Get trained. The training you want is called legal observer training, constitutional observer training, Upstander training, or ICEWatch training. It is offered by Monarca, by the DFL, and by many other groups. You will learn important information like what to report if you see ICE (“SALUTE: Size [of the group], Action [what they’re doing], Location [where they are and where they’re headed], Uniforms [what they’re wearing], Time [when you saw them], and Equipment/weapons [what they’re carrying].”) Also, how to tell a real warrant (signed by a judge!) from the “warrants” ICE usually has. Also, what to do if you get arrested even though observing ICE is legal. (Say, “I am invoking my fifth amendment right to remain silent. I will not answer any questions without a lawyer present.” and then STOP TALKING.) You can find out some of what’s covered in the training by reading this manual.
  2. Get on Signal. The organizing for this is all happening on Signal. If you don’t have Signal, download it and sign up. If you’re on Signal but use your legal name, change it. (“But you just said it’s legal to be a constitutional observer!” Yes! But ICE is harassing people who are doing this; make it harder for them to harass you. Also, it’s the norm in these communities and people will helpfully remind you not to use your legal name, over and over. Just use your made-up name.)
  3. Find your local Signal group. In Minneapolis, there used to be intake through Defend the 612. They now recommend the following: “Directly ask your long-time local neighbors how to get connected to your local Rapid Response groups and to do block-level ICE Watch in your neighborhood and on your streets.” Outside of Minneapolis, especially if you’re in a suburb, here’s my recommendation: talk to your neighbors, especially anyone who has anti-ICE signage; go volunteer places that are doing support work (like, churches and food shelves that are doing deliveries) (they’re not going to send you to make deliveries to vulnerable people unless they know you, but they’ll get to know you if you show up and pack food); talk to people in networks where you already know the people; go to a neighborhood protest and talk to the people there. Talk to your friends directly (maybe start by saying, “hey, if you want to chat on signal, my signal name is….”) and ask if they can help you get involved.

Once you’re in: there is generally a daily Signal voice call for people who are actively engaged in community defense, including mobile patrol, stationary observation, dispatch, and notetaking.

  • You can read a best-practices document explaining the nitty gritty here.
  • You can read a narrative discussion of how it works here.
  • You can read a journalist’s description of mobile patrol here and another one here.

If mobile patrol sounds too scary but you want to be involved in community defense, notetaking / license plate checking is always needed. This is also a great option for people who are homebound. If you always wanted to be Ned from the MCU, the “guy in the chair,” dispatch could be the perfect job for you.

One final note about this: if you will be doing something like picking up laundry from the homes of vulnerable neighbors, do not also do mobile patrol, because ICE is absolutely recording license plate numbers and sometimes following people home. You don’t want to accidentally lead them to a person they would like to abduct. Pick a lane. (Also avoid that job if you share a household with a vulnerable person.)

ETA: I completely forgot to note that a lot of schools are organizing community defense within their PTA. I don’t know a ton about this because my kids are grown, but if you have kids at a school, check on what’s happening there.

PROTEST

There has been an ongoing presence at the Whipple Building (the local Federal Building, near Fort Snelling.)

There are also many, many smaller protests. There’s a Reddit forum for this and another list on 50501.

SUPPLIES

Lots of people with 3D printers are using them to make whistles! Here’s more info on doing that. Lots of people with regular 2D printers have been printing up zines to go with the whistles: you can find printables at that same site.

If you’re part of a community defense or mutual aid group that has some identifiable need that can fulfilled with an Amazon wish list, you can DM mostlybree.kitrocha.com on Bluesky or contact emidly.08 on Signal; they can signal-boost your wish list.

FUNDRAISING

Anyone can fundraise and there are a gazillion ways to do it. But the basics, if you’ve never done it before: pick a group or cause (Stand With Minnesota has loads) and ask people to donate to it. Ideally, you’re asking people who are currently outside Minnesota, or at least outside the metro area. If you have money of your own, you can offer to match donations. You can offer something of nominal value to anyone who donates over a certain amount (if you do some craft you enjoy and have a box full of crocheted pot holders, this can be a terrific use for them). If you have a higher capacity your can organize an event. Ideally, have people donate directly to the group you’re supporting, rather than sending money to you to pass along.

There is a Crochet & Donation drive being hosted by the Textile Center on February 1st.

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

If you are a lawyer licensed in Minnesota and want to help out, there is work specifically for you and there is a lot of need for it. Start here.

BUSINESS OWNERS

Here is information on becoming a Fourth Amendment Workplace. Signage is available from the City of Minneapolis. Alternate printables here. (There are a lot of versions around.)

COUNTERING DISINFORMATION

I am absolutely positively not telling you to spend your time on the Internet yelling at trolls. HOWEVER. If you have family and friends out-of-state who might listen to you, there are a couple of things I think it’s worth trying to communicate:

  • The danger is coming from ICE, not from immigrants. The first murder committed in Minneapolis this year was committed by ICE.
  • ICE is not looking for fraud; none of these yahoos would be able to recognize fraud if they tripped over a set of faked books. If this were about fraud, Kristi Noem would have sent accountants.
  • ICE is not looking for criminals. The overwhelming majority of people abducted have been ordinary, hardworking people. There are legal immigrants with work permits who have been abducted and sent to Texas, that the government is now trying to deport. They have snatched US citizens, beaten them, and stolen phones and wedding rings. The undocumented folks they’re snatching are a whole lot of people who have lived here working hard for years. They’ve repeatedly claimed they’re taking hardened criminals, and then the examples they give are stuff like, “this person had a misdemeanor shoplifting arrest in 2006.”
  • Those jackbooted government thugs that Wayne LaPierre claimed to be worried about: they’re here! They’re in Minnesota, right now!

CONTACT ELECTEDS

  • Keep badgering our Senators.
    Amy Klobuchar: email phone
    Tina Smith: email phone (scroll down)
  • Are you represented by a Republican (either in the US House or the MN House/Senate)? Sahan Journal did a roundup of what they’ve all said so you can be as specific as possible when you call up to yell at them. If you’re a Minnesotan in a red legislative district who’d consider challenging your Republican state legislator in November, check out Run For Something for resources.
  • If you’re represented by Betty McCollum her contact info is here. Ilhan Omar has actually been meeting the moment but probably does like hearing from people who appreciate that fact, and her contact info is here.

OTHER STUFF TO DO

Things that just did not fit in any of the other categories.

  • If you have a Ring camera, de-install it. Ring partners with Flock, which gives information to law enforcement (without a warrant), including ICE. I know it’s convenient and I know there are a million reasons people like having them, but it literally makes it easier for ICE to surveil vulnerable community members.
  • If you live in an apartment building, keep the outer door secure. Don’t prop it, don’t open it for people you don’t know, and obviously do not open it for ICE. There are printable signs here. The Defend the 612 website has useful multilingual signs you can print out and post to remind residents why it’s important to keep the doors secure.
  • As you drive through the Cities, bear in mind that there are a lot of angry, impatient, disoriented (because they’re not from here), out-of-control (because they’re not used to driving on snow and ice) ICE agents also driving through the Cities. This means you should drive slowly and carefully and take extra time. Every time you stop for a pedestrian, you’re keeping your community safe, and also if there’s an ICE agent behind you that misses a light, you’re putting just a little bit of sand in their gears.
  • Support immigrant-owned businesses, business that closed for the general strike on the 23rd, and businesses that are posting signs to exclude ICE!

REST AS RESISTANCE

If you’re in the Twin Cities right now, remember that part of your job is to take care of yourself. You need to sleep. You need to eat. You need to take your meds. You need to stay healthy. (Wash your hands, wear a mask, stay home and recover if you feel sick.)

I’m going to suggest a couple of specific things. You probably don’t actually need to be told any of these things; I’m basing them off the dumb stuff I’ve been doing.

  • For the love of all that’s holy, if you’re on Bluesky or Twitter, turn autoplay off on videos. I don’t know why it took me as long as it did to do this, but my sleep significantly improved once I did, because guess what, even if you’re scrolling past the bad ones, just seeing ICE agents aggressively walking towards someone on a street that looks familiar is going to give you an adrenaline spike. You don’t need that happening to you when you pull out your phone on the toilet.
  • Drink extra water and be aware that you may need extra food. Adrenaline will just burn you out. It’s like the original candle that burns at both ends.
  • Action is an antidote to despair. I feel so much better — seriously, so much better — on the days when I do anything. It doesn’t have to be huge. (It does help if it takes me out of the house, because seeing how many people in my community are out there working to protect our neighbors gives me a whole lot of hope.)

I have seen a lot of people linking to my story The Year Without Sunshine, which is a story about networking and mutual aid. I have been thinking a lot about my own story, actually, because it’s a story where the protagonist is not the viewpoint character, Alexis, but the community itself. It is the community that makes the choices that drive the story, the community that experiences the character change, and the community that survives together until the sun comes back.

We’re doing this. We are doing this. And we are going to survive together until the ice melts.