The Grinch paid an early visit in an attempt to steal Christmas in Chicago, but Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Chief Greg Bovino did not stay long after a surprise return from warmer haunts down south. In my previous blog post, “Moral Blowback in Chicago,” I made mocking reference to the fact that he and many of his agents headed south after the first winter storm in the Chicago area, but I was under no illusion that they might not come back.
What I did not expect, the result in part of President Donald Trump’s deranged response to a scandal involving fraudulent use of public funds from the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program in Minnesota, in which dozens of Somali Americans were charged, was that he would unleash about 2,000 federal agents into the state. Most swarmed the Twin Cities, using the same or more brutal tactics than in Chicago, resulting quickly in the shooting death of Renée Good, a mother of three. Despite the almost instantaneous administration claims that she was a domestic terrorist, the numerous videos appear to show a woman who spoke to agents politely, tried to swerve away from them, and then was shot in the head. Even worse, the cell phone video taken by Jonathan Ross, the agent assumed to have fired the lethal shots, recorded an unidentified male voice saying, “F—ing bitch,” just a second or two afterwards. ICE refused to allow a nearby physician to check on her condition, insisting they had their own medics, who in fact took several minutes to arrive. Meanwhile, the smear campaign against Good and her spouse was already underway.
None of this is normal or reasonable, and predictably, it has triggered a tidal wave of citizen resistance not only in the Twin Cities and Minnesota, but across the nation. Moreover, the State of Minnesota has filed a lawsuit, and Illinois and Chicago just yesterday filed their own lawsuit alleging a federal campaign fear and an illegal invasion of the Chicago area by ICE and the Border Patrol. CBP Chief Bovino, true to form, pledged that “we’re gonna be here for years.”
I mention all this not to rehearse another story like the last one I wrote, which has already been accepted for publication in an upcoming urban studies textbook, but to relate my own challenges in presenting all this in the first place. It is noticeable to anyone paying attention that I have posted rather infrequently in recent months. One reason, not sufficient in itself, is that I have plenty on my plate: a planned book, the completion of a documentary film (Planning to Turn the Tide), and the final stages of the installation of rooftop solar panels on our church, the result of a grant I wrote for them two years ago. I will write more about all of that in due course. Also, about the time I sought to post “Moral Blowback,” I discovered that this website had been hacked. We posted the article initially on a church website to make it public, but then I spent considerable time undoing the damage and installing protective software to prevent a recurrence. Many thanks go to the Bluehost staff and my web designer, Luke Renn, for helping me solve that problem.
But all of that was taking place while my wife and I were also hosting six grandchildren, the result of parental circumstances that made us the best home for ensuring they get stability and an adequate education. Until you try it in your late seventies, as we are doing, it is hard to anticipate fully what that entails. The whole story may be good for a memoir someday, if I find the time and energy to write it, but for now it is sufficient to say that both of us felt a bit overloaded at times. I certainly realized how deeply it affected my ability to maintain a blog and work on the projects I mentioned. Had I still been teaching my course at the University of Iowa, I might have hit a brick wall of exhaustion.
I promised in the “Moral Blowback” post to include a bibliography of Chicago news coverage of the ICE invasion and local resistance during the height of the Chicago occupation. You can find it here, but it covers only the period roughly from early October to Veterans Day. I encourage those interested to explore it and use it, but I had no free time to expand it once I wrote the article. Since then, two more months have elapsed, more has happened, and the situation has not improved, although one can certainly take heart in the fact that the Resistance—whistles, cell phone cameras, and all—has spread like wildfire. May thousands of protests bloom. It is the only way we can halt this authoritarian, deeply racist, and xenophobic power grab. The real Americans can be found in the streets peacefully helping their beleaguered neighbors. Please join them if you can.
Jim Schwab