Applications are now open for this year-long journey of writing, mindfulness and community where we show up to the page with intention, curiosity and joy. Starting January 2027 with me and my co-guide, Teri Leigh 💜. Every year since this course started, people have continued when we get to the end. The group that started in 2024 will be going into their fourth year in 2027. It’s fun, transformative and creates deep connections.

Get info and apply here

Writing From the Heart and the Bones

Amanda Saint and I have been friends for going on three years, and I still get a little fluttery around her. Before we met, I spent months watching her run the kind of writing cohorts I dreamed of running. Then she asked to meet. She’d been watching me too.

This year we got to swap classrooms. Amanda teaches a monthly writing workshop for the Creator Retreat, and I’m teaching five workshops inside her Year of Mindful Writing.

How the Year of Mindful Writing began

Amanda had been writing and teaching fiction for a decade when she realized the publishing industry had drained the joy out of her. Bringing her mindfulness practice to the page brought it back, and The Mindful Writer was born.

She launched the Year of Mindful Writing one October with six spots. It sold out in a month, including to a woman in New Zealand who got up in the middle of the night for every Zoom, all year. At the end, everyone wanted to keep going. Her first group heads into their fourth year in 2027.

Why we keep it small

We both cap our programs at 20. That’s the size where everyone gets seen and friendships grow deep enough to last. My Creator Retreat alumni are still cheering each other on a year later, and they asked for a second year too. Applications for the next Creator Retreat open in January.

Feedback that nurtures

Amanda is a sensitive soul who used to hear critique of her writing as critique of herself. So she built something gentle. Her workshops help writers find the stories living in their heart and bones, and the feedback starts with what’s landing.

• What touched your heart?

• What gave you goosebumps?

• What made you want to cry, or laugh?

Once you see what’s working, the rest becomes clear. Those spots are usually just where we slipped into our head for a bit.

One of my Creator Retreat folks now organizes co-writing sessions between workshops. And one of Amanda’s participants summed up her whole year in a single word, nurtured.

Writing in color

In one of my workshops for Amanda’s group, we color coded a Maya Angelou poem, giving each sound its own color wherever it appears. What you end up with is the aura of the poem, a little like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when everything goes Technicolor.

Amanda tried it on an old flash fiction about a woman leaving a club at dawn, waiting for her Uber. She’d built the beat on purpose, with each section holding as many sentences as minutes left until the car arrived. The colors showed her she’d also filled the story with B sounds, without ever meaning to. That’s the sign you wrote from your bones.

Losing our way and coming back

We’ve both wandered off. A school careers advisor told Amanda writing wasn’t a proper job, and definitely not one for someone like her, and she stopped writing for twelve years. Later, chasing flash fiction prizes, she looked at a story she’d just sent out and asked what it was even about.

I started a novel during my last year teaching high school English, and it sat in a drawer for fifteen years. Then came a stretch of writing for likes and follows, until the Creator Retreat brought me home.

This year I accidentally started writing a book, right around Amanda’s first workshop with us. The manuscript is in the hands of more than 30 readers, and on Sunday I leave for a week-long solo retreat to revise. I’ll hear Amanda’s voice in my head the whole time.

How to join the Year of Mindful Writing

• A welcome meeting in January to meet your group

• Monthly coursework February through November in a private community space

• Two Zooms a month, one deep-dive workshop and one embodied writing session

• A simple application of about five questions, open now through mid-December

  Get info and apply here

Before we signed off

If a writing group hands you a list of tick boxes your writing has to hit, Amanda says run away. I’d say run far, far away. Find the people who ask for more of what’s in your heart.

Her parting words were these. Keep looking inside your heart, see what wants to come through you, and keep writing.

Thank you to the 26 of you who joined us live, including my dad.

What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

Share

“What are you doing, Mom?”

Bekah spins on her heel, sharpie in one hand, hovering above the half-written phone number on her other forearm. Busted.

“I’m writing our lawyer’s number on my arm,” she tells her daughter while scribbling the last three numbers. No point in lying. Sophia is too intuitive and too smart for that. Might as well tell her the truth.

“I’m doing bus patrol today,” Bekah continues, “it’s just in case. . . “

“You get picked up by ICE,” Sophia finishes for her, “Well let’s at least make it legible.” She grabs the sharpie from her mom and re-traces all the numbers before adding “I love you, Mom” with a frilly heart underneath.

At first, Bekah had tried to not talk to her kids about the ICE surge, but it was unavoidable. She and her husband had a practice of saving their tough conversations for after the kids had gone to bed, and they’d been careful to keep their voices low and only talk in their own bedroom with the door shut. But, not long into the surge in early December 2025, Sophia came home from school with questions. Other parents were talking about it with their kids, and the kids were talking at lunch.

But it was more than that. Sophia is intuitive. Bekah knew she had been behaving differently at home since the surge started, and Sophia picked up on that. That night at the dinner table everyone stopped chewing when Sophia asked out of the blue if ICE was gonna come take them. Even though their school district is predominantly white and ICE hadn’t been to Sophia’s school, as a ten-year-old, Sophia didn’t understand that ICE was just taking black and brown people at that point. To her, ICE was taking her friends’ parents, and she was afraid they’d come for them. She pointed out that Bekah was getting up earlier in the morning and spending more time on her phone than usual.

“I love that, Honey.” Bekah said, tracing her fingers over the frilly heart. “Now please tell me, how do you really feel about me doing this?”

“It’s fine, Mom. I know you gotta do it.”

“Are you frustrated that I’m not more present with you these days?”

“No, really Mom, it’s fine. What you’re doing is so important.”

Bekah swallowed the knot in her throat, capped the sharpie and put it back into the junk drawer. She couldn’t believe how wise her kid had become in such a short time. How could it be that she is only ten?

As she pulled her shirt sleeve down, Bekah realized that the way she and her husband raised their kids, the so-called coddling her own parents had accused her of doing, had helped them develop critical thinking and emotional intelligence skills well beyond what they had at that age.

An hour later, knowing Sophia was seat-belted in and singing with her dad in car-line for school drop-off. Bekah checked her newly installed dash-cam next and pulled up the Signal Rapid Response chat while she parked a block away from the bus stop where she was assigned to patrol. Three immigrant kids stood at the bus stop with a small cluster of white neighbors who had walked them there.

Bekah knows which cars belong to which neighbors, and which ones are other members of the rapid response group. An SUV with heavily tinted windows and no front license plate pulls around the corner, and she types the license plate number into her phone.

Unknown.

It was the same make and model as the one that pulled an immigrant dad out of the vehicle in front of her in car-line two weeks earlier. Her son had been having panic attacks in the passenger seat of her car ever since, so he’d started sitting in the back seat with his headphones on, a hoodie pulled over his head, and his face buried in a tablet. Normally they didn’t allow screen-time in the car, but everything about their family rules was different now.

“Do I wait for the school bus or follow the SUV?” Bekah thought to herself as she watched the SUV make another turn. She ultimately decided to stay with the school bus unless the SUV made another appearance.

It didn’t.

Two minutes later the school bus pulled up and stopped. The kids with their too-big backpacks climbed onto the bus while their white neighbors waved vigorously and promised to be there for pick-up after school. Bekah followed the bus through several more stops and to the school. Once all the kids were off the bus and it had pulled away, she put the car in park, pulled on the e-brake, and pushed play on her spotify playlist that had exactly one song. She turned up Macklemore’s F**ked Up to full blast and let herself scream at the top of her lungs for exactly one minute.

Then, as she turned the music down and tuned to a different playlist, she looked again at the frilly heart underneath her daughter’s handwriting on her forearm.

She pulled down the sun-visor, flipped open the vanity mirror and looked into her own eyes as she said, “Honey, your mom fucking loves you so fiercely!”

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

The full book is scheduled to come out in December.

Share

“What happened at the hospital today?”

It was the first thing out of his mouth every time, before the seatbelt was even clicked. His brother was already buckled in and leaning forward between the seats, waiting.

“I got a really gross one for you today,” Emma said, looking at them through the rear view mirror.

“I’m not sure you’re gonna be able to handle this one,” she teased.

“Try me!”

“Seatbelt first.”

Emma doesn’t have kids, and doesn’t really have much experience with nine-year-old boys, except when she was a third-grader herself. But, it became very apparent to her, very quickly, that they liked gross stories. Emma’s a social worker in the ER at a local hospital and sees plenty of gross things every day.

It was how they bonded over those several weeks she picked them up from school during the surge. It was also the easiest way she knew to keep them from asking her about ICE. She didn’t know what they knew, and as the stranger-neighbor-turning-friend who drove them home from school a couple times a week, she didn’t think it was her place to have those kinds of conversations with them.

“What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever seen?” Emma asked Tom, the quieter of the two who was already buckled with his bookbag at his feet.

The twin boys were named Bob and Tom. Emma must’ve made a funny look when their mom, Teresa introduced them to her. Teresa explained that she wanted her boys to feel like they fit in, and figured it’d be easier for them to have names the other kids could pronounce. She’d hoped it would stop them from getting bullied.

“I saw Mackenzie Thomas pick her nose and eat the booger once on the swings,” Bob answered before his brother could say anything.

“Ewwww!” Tom responded.

“C’mon, haven’t you ever had snot drip from your nose into your mouth? It’s not that bad.” Emma suggested.

“Yeah, and it tastes gross, like slimy over-cooked mushrooms but salty and, well, worse. Why would anyone want to eat that on purpose?” Tom asked.

“I’d do it on a double-dog-dare,” Bob announced.

“Of course you would,” Emma said. “How about you, Tom? What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“I’ll tell you after you tell us about what you don’t think we can handle.”

“I don’t know,” Emma said, dragging out her words, “I gotta gauge your gross tolerance levels before I tell you this one. Maybe we should stop at CVS and get something to serve as a barf bag first.”

“Stop teasing us and just tell us!” Bob screamed, kicking the seat in front of him.

“Okay, okay,” she said, pulling away from the curb. “So I walk into this guy’s room to check on him, right? But before I can even open the door I know something is wrong because of the smell.”

“What did it smell like?”

“You know what it smelled like.”

“SAY IT.”

“It smelled like poop. Because this guy had taken his poop — “

“NO!” the boys yell in unison

“— and smeared it all over his room. Like, all over. The walls. The bed rail. The call button.”

“Were his hands covered in poop?”

“Every-thing was covered in poop, even under his fingernails!”

Their reaction was exactly what she expected — pure, unfiltered nine-year-old boy joy that comes from a mix of disgust and delight. Their squeals erupted into a series of farting sounds they made first with their lips and then with their armpits.

Why do I love this so much? Emma thought to herself just as she turned her head to check her passenger-side blind spot.

Her happy thought was instantly crushed as she caught a glimpse of the Valentine’s Day cards peeking out of a CVS pharmacy bag sitting on the passenger seat. Two days earlier, driving on Lake Street after purchasing those cards, she’d witnessed an ICE abduction at a city bus stop. The sight of the Valentine’s Day cards triggered the vision to play on repeat in her mind.

The piercing sound of whistles and screams as several ICE agents carried away a boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen by his limbs, his head dangling limply off his neck.

Was he even still alive?

It’s okay that I didn’t stop. There were plenty of witnesses and whistles. There’s nothing more I could’ve done. I’m not a soldier, I’m a mutual aid driver. She reassures herself.

She had gone home that night and looked up the incident on Reddit, and found several videos. The kid abducted was just a teenager. He did survive, but social media reports speculated that he must’ve had a concussion, at the very least.

Emma took a couple of deep breaths to remind herself that the squeals and giggles coming from the backseat of her car were joyful.

Several minutes later, Tom spoke again, but this time with a more mature voice, “That guy sounds like he has something wrong with his brain that needs fixing.”

Emma looked at him in the rearview mirror. Tom had that older-than-his-age look in his eye. Their mom worked in mental health, so the boys had a framework most nine-year-olds didn’t. Sometimes they surprised her like that — toggling between armpit farts and genuine insight without any awareness of the whiplash.

“Yeah,” Emma said. “I think you’re right about that.”

She pulled up to their building and put the car in park. Bob grabbed his backpack off the floor and was out the door before she’d even turned around. Tom took his time, carefully zipping his bag shut before sliding across the seat.

“Same time Thursday?” he asked.

“Same time Thursday.”

He climbed out, and then turned back, holding the door open. “You still owe me your grossest one, though. That poop guy was only like a seven.”

“Only a seven?”

“Maybe a seven and a half.”

He shut the door and jogged after his brother, backpack bouncing against his shoulders.

Emma grabbed the CVS bag off the passenger seat, locked the car, and followed them inside. She had spent eleven dollars on those Valentine’s cards. It wasn’t much, but it was something she could contribute.

When Teresa opened the apartment door, the boys rushed in and straight to the kitchen where they found the snack jar replenished.

“I suspect you had something to do with that?” Teresa asked.

“They came?”

“$300 worth of groceries were delivered a couple hours after you picked up the boys this morning.”

“I didn’t do it, I just messaged the chat,” Emma deflected.

“How were they?”

“They were great,” Emma said.

“Really? They seem to be in a gross-phase, and I find it rather repulsive.”

“Oh, I am well aware. I work in an ER. I’m immune to gross. Besides, it’s really nice to have that time with them in the car. They’re just really cute.”

“If you say so.”

“I didn’t get the groceries, but I did get these.” Emma said while handing Teresa the CVS bag.

“You know they’re going to remember you, right? When they’re older. They’re going to remember the lady who drove them to school and told them gross stories.”

Emma didn’t know what to say to that, so she just smiled.

“Thank you,” Teresa said slowly, while grabbing Emma’s hand, “I mean it.”

“MOM, TOM WON’T GIVE ME THE GOLDFISH.”

Teresa closed her eyes and exhaled. “Cute?” she said. “If you say so.”

A few minutes later, Emma clicked the seatbelt into place and paused before turning on the ignition of her car. She stared out the window at the pile of dirty snow pushed up next to the dumpster. The whole ugly, beautiful mess was doing something to her insides that she couldn’t explain. Six months ago, a twenty-minute drive was just a commute. But now, between the armpit farts and the abduction, the eleven-dollar Valentine’s cards and the three-hundred-dollar grocery delivery, Emma felt herself evolving.

This is so much better than being a soldier, she thought to herself.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,

Pass it to the woman next to you.

Share

Did you know that geese in Minnesota are vicious?

We have all been chased off a walking path by a goose protecting its goslings. We also know that a whole gaggle of geese will chase us to protect their babies.

Operation Metro Surge arrived arrived where the children were: at our school bus stops, our grocery store parking lots, and the entrances to our mobile home parks.

And we got protective as geese are about their goslings.

“Oh shit!”

Linda saw them from about thirty yards out. Eight adult Canadian geese, clustered loosely on the grass between the path and the water. And between and behind them, dozens of tiny yellow-brown unsteady goslings bobbled along, bumping into each other and tripping over their own feet.

She thought she was far enough away to wait for them to get into the lake, but she was wrong.

One of the larger adults started hissing, and then lunging, and next thing she knew it was running towards her at full speed, wings out, mouth open, loud honking.

“Shit! Shit! Shit. . . Millie NO!” Linda tugged on the leash, but Millie — a seventy-pound black lab with extensive hunting dog training saw the goose and pulled with every bit of her might towards it.

The goose did not slow down.

When we see a gaggle of Canadian geese with goslings in tow, we apply the same healthy fear we have for black ice and deer on the highway. From April through July, the Canadian geese who come back to our 10,000 lakes every spring are not the docile, bread-accepting birds that people in other states think they are. A gaggle of geese like this is several families who have merged their babies together into one huge group, called a gang brood. Every adult guards every gosling — not just their own.

Linda got a hold of Millie’s collar and stumbled off the paved path onto the grass, and power-walked in the most undignified retreat of her adult life.

“We’re going! We’re GOING!” she said to the goose, as if reasoning with it would help.

It did not help.

The goose escorted them a full twenty yards past what Linda would have considered a reasonable perimeter before it stopped, shook out its wings, honked twice more for good measure, and waddled back to the group like a bouncer returning to the door.

We all know that a mother goose is more ferocious than a black bear with her cubs or a giant moose standing in our backyard, or a wolf eyeing our mini-labradoodle for lunch. We can easily spook the bear, moose, or wolf to run away. But a goose doesn’t spook, especially when it is protecting goslings. It will chase and hiss, and yes, attack.

We aren’t gonna wait around for the attack. We’re the ones that spook and take off.

Linda caught her breath on a bench near the parking lot. Millie sat down and panted, thrilled with the whole experience.

“You are no help,” Linda said to the dog.

She watched from a safe distance as the geese reassembled around the goslings and moved as one body toward and into the water — a slow, wide parade of tiny wobbling fluff surrounded on all sides by adults whose necks swiveled like periscopes.

And we get it, a mother doesn’t wait for permission to protect a baby. When a threat is imminent, every baby belongs to every mother.

When ICE showed up at our school bus stops and our grocery store parking lots and the entrances to our mobile home parks, we did what the geese do.

We didn’t sort the children into mine and not mine. We formed a gang brood. We stood between the babies and the thing that didn’t belong near them, and we made ourselves big, and we made ourselves loud, and we did not bluff.

Nobody assigned us a gosling. We just showed up at the park and started counting heads.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

A Frog, an Owl, and the Blade That Got Too Sharp

I went live this week with Matt from Beneath Performance, and he titled it “Masculinity and the Politics of Force,” which is a big meaty title for two writers who both showed up carrying the very thing we were about to talk about.

Matt opened by reading me what his AI told him the night before. He had been printing research articles from his sociologist friend, reading himself into a spiral, convinced he needed a PhD in masculinity studies by Monday morning to be allowed an opinion. He has that chatbot trained to call him on his stuffs, and it delivered. “Stop reading research articles tonight,” it said. And then this: “You’re preparing for a conversation about how men equate worth with competence, certainty, control, and appearing strong. And tonight your mind is telling you, know more, prepare more, don’t get caught not knowing something. Prove you belong in this conversation. That’s the material.”

That’s the material. Sprinkle that on your morning coffee, friends.

Performing is the word I grabbed and ran with, cuz it is exactly what I watched here in Minnesota. I am no expert on politics, though Substack keeps sending me little notes telling me I am rising in the politics category, which still cracks me up. What I am an expert on is ICE in Minnesota. And what I saw was performance. Men with their chests puffed, holding their guns like trophies, radiating I am power, I know better, I am better than you. It looked like a bunch of grown men playing Call of Duty in real life. One of them was recorded saying that out loud after Alex Pretti was killed. “It’s like Call of Duty, it’s so cool.”

I told Matt about the woman in her sixties walking into Target in January, six weeks out from hip surgery, stepping carefully because of the ice on the ground. An agent broke from the pack at the door, bowled her over, straddled her, and started swinging at her face. She turned her head, looked him dead in the eye, and said, “I could be your mother.” He stopped. Something in his brain short-circuited. He got up and walked away.

My friend Frances, the one who went to the protests dressed as a frog, watched a similar spell get cast. Inside the frog suit she became sort of invisible, so nobody performed for her and she saw what she would have otherwise missed. A line of agents stood toe to toe with a crowd of women, and one grandmotherly woman in her sixties stood sweetly in front of a stone-faced agent a full head taller than her and said, “You don’t have to do this. You can quit this job. You can come over and join us. Do you really enjoy all this fear you put in people?” He never looked at her. He never said a word. He started crying.

The old white ladies here call themselves OWLs, and they have figured out the trick. Go ahead and arrest me. Throw me in your detention center. My husband will bail me out in six hours, and you are going to look horrible on camera. That act of surrender carries more power than the force of the arrest, and I think it is why this hyper-masculine performance is falling. It cannot hold its own appearance anymore.

Matt brought me a concept called drone morality. Hierarchical control is treated as good. Following legitimate rules substitutes for individual moral judgment. Empathy becomes suspect the moment it interferes with carrying out the rules. Sit with that one for a minute in relation to a crying man in a uniform.

Where we landed together is the middle. My Hobbit quotes the Tao at me: when you over sharpen the blade, it blunts. Masculine energy is good and necessary. Competition is good when your opponent exists to draw the best out of you. Watch women’s basketball rivals become teammates the second the international game starts, and you will see the version of competition our politics forgot. Matt coached college baseball tied to a scoreboard with numbers on it. I coached high school swimming so empathetically that we lost a lot and my swimmers are still my friends thirty years later. We both watched Ted Lasso and took notes. Governor Walz coached Minnesota through COVID like a team with a common goal.

Go read Matt at Beneath Performance, where he writes his way out of the scoreboard and into honesty.

I love you fiercely. TeriLeigh💜

In writing this book, I am interested in preserving a different kind of historical record, the emotional truths of this time.

During the height of the surge, journalists poured into Minnesota from out of state to tell our story. They stayed for a few days, or maybe a few weeks. But as soon as the surge “drawdown” was announced, they moved on to the next topic in the news cycle, as is their job.

I couldn’t. And I still can’t.

My intention for this book was first and foremost to document the feelings, and that’s what we did. . . because feeling matters.

“HOLY SHIT!”

Alice shouts out loud from the couch in her home office as she watches the 15-second reel of ICE marching a half naked Hmong elder out of his home in zero degree snowing weather.

Are you okay?

Alice’s husband texts her from his office in the basement two floors down, having heard her exclamation through the heating vents. She texts him a link to the reel.

The man is ChongLy “Scott” Thao, a 56 year-old Hmong grandfather, a U.S. Citizen, being detained by ICE. He’s wearing boxer shorts, white Crocs, and a red and white fleece blanket thrown over his shoulders. In temps hovering around zero degrees with windchill.

“Why can’t you let him put on clothes!” one of the neighbors yells at the ICE agents.

Alice mutes the volume. Her hyper-sensitive hearing has become even more sensitive lately. The sound of whistles and car horns is both terrifying— ICE is near, and comforting— neighbors are showing up.

She unmutes the video.

“FUCK ICE!” voices yell over the piercing sound of the horns and whistles.

She mutes again.

He’s a Hmong elder.

And then pushes pause, and takes a moment to fully absorb the aura of this gentle elder man. He’s got the tenderness she recognizes in all the Hmong people she has known personally. He reminds her of the father of one of her high school students from her teaching days.

When the surge started, Alice developed a practice of muting and unmuting and pausing and unpausing the reels and videos she watched. It started as a way to protect her sensitive hyperacusis ears from the whistle screams, but evolved into a sort of meditative practice to be more mindful of her doom-scrolling. She can’t stop herself from watching and re-watching the videos, so, she interrupts the scrolling with muting and pausing as miniature moments of silence for herself.

Over time, she recognizes this practice as her way of building an apothecary cabinet corner in her brain for the moments that hit her the hardest. Renee Good has a drawer. Alex Pretti has a drawer. The clergy getting arrested at MSP have a drawer.

Now, this Hmong elder and his fleece blanket in the snow have a drawer.

As she pushes play on the video again and again, she embroiders all the details of his story into an ornate cloth to line the apothecary drawer.

Something about this particular video feels— familiar. She knows the streets and neighborhoods around the Hmong Village and Hmong Marketplace, and suspects this home is near her own home. So, she pauses the video on the frame where she can read the address of the house and google-maps the location. It’s just a few blocks from the duplex where she lived for four years before she moved just a mile away.

I recognize that house, we’ve parked in front of the house many many times to go to Brunson’s.

The block goes into the embroidered cloth, with Brunson’s sign at the end of it.

ICE didn’t serve a warrant when they took ChongLy “Scott” Thao from his home at 1:30pm on that snowy cold Sunday afternoon. They just broke down his door and entered with guns drawn pointed at Thao and his daughter-in-law. Thao’s five-year-old grandson was in the room, crying and terrified, having just woken from a nap.

Alice stitches the boy, still sleepy, into the cloth with a fuchsia flower and green leaves.

Did someone in the neighborhood report him?

Alice had heard rumors that ICE was door-knocking, asking neighbors “where do the Asian people live?” And when Thao was taken, those rumors were confirmed by St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, the nation’s first Hmong-American mayor, in a press conference.

She has to find a black thread for this one.

Alice pauses Her’s press conference to double check the lock on her own door and make sure her Ring camera has enough battery charge. She lives in a community that is dense with Hmong neighbors. ICE could come knocking on her door.

If they come, I won’t answer. I’ll just watch them through the Ring and let the dogs bark them away.

Alice sits back on the couch, takes a deep breath, and pushes play on the press conference again.

“I’ve been advised to carry proof of citizenship in my city, where I am the Mayor,” Kaohly Her states before she goes on to explain that her own parents, also U.S. citizens, are afraid to leave their homes.

Her’s voice chokes as she looks right into the camera and explains that this particular ICE abduction is personal for her. ChongLy Thao is a long-time family friend whom she considers an uncle. Her’s mother-in-law knew ChongLy Thao’s mother, Choua Thao, in Laos.

Alice pauses to search the name Choua Thao. She was a nurse at Sam Thong during the Secret War. She helped a Lao woman deliver premature twins. The mother couldn’t care for them, so Choua adopted the boy while another nurse adopted the girl. Choua brought ChongLy to Minnesota in the mid 1970s. They’d been in America fifty years. She had just died on December 26, 2025, and her funeral was planned for February 7-9, 2026.

ChongLy was planning his mother’s funeral when ICE took him.

Alice stitches the Secret War, the adoption, the fifty years, December into her cloth with ornate layered stitches.

She knows there’s more.

Then she hears the teenage giggles of Frank Vue, Moua Vang, and Kou Yang, pulling a thread loose from twenty-five years back. Alice closes her laptop and goes to the closet rummaging for a box of yearbooks buried behind the winter coats.

For four years, the same kids, last names starting with V-Z spent the first twenty minutes every day ignoring school announcements during homeroom. In a mostly white western Wisconsin farm community, Alice’s homeroom was twenty-eight students, all but three of them, Hmong.

Frank Vue is in the second row of the photo, second from the left, smiling a big wide cheesy grin she remembers oh-so-well. He’d grinned that same grin at her that time he forgot his field trip permission slip at home.

“Just let me call them,” Frank said, holding the receiver of the phone on Alice’s desk.

She nodded.

Frank’s mother answered, speaking Hmong. He spoke back in Hmong and then he nodded at Alice.

“Ask her,” he said.

“Does Frank have your permission to go on this field trip?” Alice asked.

“Yes.”

Frank speaks again in Hmong before hanging up.

“She didn’t have any clue what I said, did she?” Alice says.

“Nope. She doesn’t speak a word of English,” Frank says, smiling his big cheesy grin. “So she never understands the paperwork she’s signing anyway. I sign all the permission slips for my sisters and cousins too.”

Alice rolls her eyes.

“Only you, Frank,” she says. “Don’t you dare tell anyone else that I let you do this.”

“I promise,” Frank says forming a cross of his heart with his index finger, “I won’t get you in trouble.”

Frank was the oldest of six in a house with his aunts and uncles and grandparents in it. He ran the school affairs of every child under that roof. He got straight A’s and participated in several extra-curriculars and ran the volleyball club too. His parents named him Frank because they wanted their son to have a name that would keep him from being teased.

In the row behind Frank is Kou Yang, with bunny-ears fingers over Frank’s head and that familiar mischievous grin on his face. Best friends, and opposite characters.

Kou missed a lot of class. When he wasn’t driving his mom somewhere or helping out at the family restaurant, he was ditching class for some adventure he would recount to her in detail the next day. He always turned in just enough work to squeak by with a C-. School was easy for him. He just didn’t care.

Their senior year, they enrolled in a Leadership elective course that Alice taught. The class was a semester-long student organized group project that required leadership within the community. Frank, Kou, and Moua produced a play about a Hmong wedding and funeral. They wrote, cast, directed, promoted the play and coordinated all the behind-the-scenes efforts including booking the venue and donating ticket fees to a local charity.

Moua Vang played the bride, and Kou played the uncle who drinks too much while Frank narrated from the side of the stage, explaining the go-between, the negotiation, the joining of two clans, the offerings to the ancestors. One of the characters dies after the feast, and the play ends with a funeral.

One of the Hmong elders in the audience played the qeej as the other parents and grandparents chanted from their seats. The theater filled with a mournful dirge. Alice sat in the dark theater and cried.

She flips through the entire yearbook and doesn’t find a single picture of the play. There’s no record of it beyond her memory.

Remembering the haunting song of the qeej, she threads the memories of Frank and Kou and Moua into ChongLy Thao’s cloth. A single tear drops from her chin onto her lap.

Alice closes the yearbook, and opens her laptop again to find new reels with different angles of ChongLy Thao’s abduction.

She plays them on mute, reading the captions instead of listening.

He was released without charges.

The Department of Homeland Security said officers were investigating two convicted sex offenders whose last known address was ChongLy Thao’s home.

The family says the men never lived there, and ICE offered no apology and no explanation.

Alice finds the black thread again.

Then she goes back to pause on the frame where he’s mid-step in the snow. He has the same tenderness in his face as Frank’s father had.

The embroidered cloth is bigger than ChongLy Thao now.

She stitches until there’s nothing left she knows.

Alice closes the laptop. The apothecary drawer in the corner of her brain’s memory closes over the cloth.

https://theworld.org/stories/2026/03/12/minnesotas-hmong-community-feeling-a-sense-of-betrayal-amid-ice-crackdowns

https://sahanjournal.com/immigration/st-paul-east-side-hmong-man-detained-ice-chongly-scott-thao/

https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-chonglys-family-after-ice-raid-trauma

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ice-broke-into-minnesota-home-dragged-barely-clothed-man-into-snow-2026-01-20/

The women I interviewed about Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota confronted their privilege with a clarity they had never experienced before and discovered that the same privilege that had insulated them could also become protection, access, amplification, and power in service to their neighbors.

These are the stories of women who realized that because they had the ability to stand where others could not safely stand, and speak in ways that others could not speak, they also had a responsibility to use that power.

WOMN documents that awakening.

As Sasha steps off the plane and onto the jetway, she switches her backpack to her left shoulder, and then back to her right shoulder, and then decides to loop both her arms through the straps because it would be easier to hug Miguel with both arms free.

But then he would have to hug her backpack and that wouldn’t feel right either.

She finally stops in the middle of the jetway, takes off her backpack entirely and loops its straps over the handle of her rollerbag, balancing the weight of the backpack on the top of the rollerbag.

As she starts to walk again, the backpack tips and sends the rollerbag tumbling off its wheels to the ground. She shakes her head and rolls her eyes at herself. What is she thinking? She still has to go through customs before she can see Miguel.

She’s nervous.

Or maybe she is just overly excited.

She’s never been to Mexico, and she hasn’t seen Miguel since he was kidnapped by ICE and deported several months ago.

And she is pretty sure this is the man she wants to marry, and she’s about to meet his entire family.

The whole time she’s in line for customs, she rehearses her Spanish. For months she’s watched how her home country treats Mexicans. The traffic stops. The home raids. The political sanctions. The beatings and the detainments and the deportations. Her country is the reason Miguel and his brothers are back in their homeland sixteen years later, unable to support their families like they had been for over a decade.

As her turn through customs nears, all she can think is that Mexico has every right to turn away any Americans they please.

She’s so embarrassed.

How is she supposed to prove to Miguel’s family that she is not what her country has been doing to theirs. Who is she to request to be welcomed across their border and sit at these people’s table and ask them to receive her — an American, arriving with an American passport, from the country causing all this harm.

She does not feel owed a welcome.

She doesn’t believe they owe her anything at all. She’s fully prepared to have to earn it — to walk in and somehow show them, in a language she doesn’t speak, that she is not the thing they have every reason to fear.

But the customs and border patrol agent greets her in English before she is even able to say hola. He looks at her paperwork, flips open her passport, stamps it and wishes her a pleasant trip.

That was so easy!

“Gracias,” she says in barely a whisper and loops both her backpack straps over her forearm of one hand and drags the rollerbag with the other towards the automated doors.

Miguel is waiting for her on the other side, flowers in one hand and a welcome sign, in English, in the other.

An hour later, Miguel carries Sasha’s bags into his family home, and his mother greets her with open arms.

“Sasha! Sasha! Sasha! Welcome home. Dis,” She motions around the small living room, “your home now!”

“Our home is your home,” Miguel’s brother says, pronouncing the word “is” with a double long ee and a soft s.

“No hablo Espanol,” Sasha says shaking her head in embarrassment.

At dinner the first night, Miguel’s mother sets a bowl in front of Sasha. It’s dark and slow-cooked, and she cannot even try to name what it smells like. She takes a small bite and her mouth is flooded with flavors she’s never experienced before, in all parts of her mouth. Her whole face lights up in delight, and she looks at Miguel and then his mother and just smiles as she chews.

The whole table laughs, and suddenly they’re all talking at once, passing food to each other and pushing more things toward her. His brother passes her a bowl of something bright red, but Miguel grabs it before she can receive it. He shakes his head and gives his brother a glare. Even though she barely understands the words flying across the table, she has never felt more included in a conversation in her life.

On the last afternoon, Sasha’s bags are packed and Miguel is loading them into the car to take her to the airport. His mother comes running out to the car waving a camera. She wants a photograph of all her kids.

Sasha steps out of the way, but Miguel’s brother, Rafael, grabs her elbow and pulls her in line next to him. Miguel drops her backpack into the trunk and rushes up next to her. She tries to protest, but both men have their arms wrapped around her.

Because Miguel and his brothers have been in the United States, they haven’t all been together for a photo in that long as well. Sixteen years. Sasha doesn’t feel like she belongs in the picture. This is a reunion for the siblings. She tries to say no and pull away one more time, but Rafael holds her tight.

“You’re the reason I’m here,” Rafael says, reminding her that she helped him self-deport before ICE could abduct him.

“You belong in the picture,” Miguel says as he squeezes her waist tighter.

The camera shutter clicks.

Sasha doesn’t move. Miguel and Rafael hold her a second longer than the picture needs, and she lets them. She is in it now, where the family put her, where she is sure she doesn’t belong. But she cannot pull herself away.

As she gets into the car with Miguel and clicks her seatbelt in place after saying goodbye to the family, Sasha looks at Miguel. She’s speechless.

“You’re family now,” Miguel says.

“I thought I was just visiting.”

A Loon Can Kill an Eagle

In July 2021, Danni Dickson watched a bald eagle swoop at a pair of nesting loons on Papineau Lake in Ontario. Moments later, the eagle struggled its way to shore, collapsed and died, while loons called from the water. Dickson found blood and a puncture wound in the eagle’s breast, consistent with the dagger-like bill of a loon.

The most powerful creature in the sky can make a catastrophic mistake when it assumes the creature below the surface is powerless.

Most of us Minnesotans didn’t know that a loon has the ability to kill an eagle. And we certainly don’t want to be put into any kind of position to use our dagger-like beaks that way.

Like our common loon state bird, we are used to being underestimated, and we like it that way.

In early December 2025, ICE came to Minnesota in force, and they underestimated us, big time.

The federal government called it Operation Metro Surge. As more than 3,000 federal immigration officers poured into our state, our immigrant friends sheltered-in-place while the old white ladies (OWLs) and neighbors blew whistles, honked horns, stood guard in reflective vests, and provided mutual aid to protect our neighbors.

We got arrested for legally observing, pepper-sprayed in the face, and assaulted for exercising our freedom of speech.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

On January 7, an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good, a 37 year old mother and poet. A few hours later, ICE agents appeared at Roosevelt High School during dismissal where kids and teachers were pepper-sprayed at close range.

So we organized a massive protest action on January 23. 50,000 people filled our downtown streets in sub-zero weather for the ICE OUT general strike and march.

And the unthinkable happened, again.

The next morning, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37 year old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center.

That’s when we knew that things could never go back to normal.

Normal doesn’t exist anymore.

The loon is calling. Sit down at the fire with us. Every Tuesday, a new story from the WOMN of Minnesota. Free subscribers get the stories. Paid subscribers keep me writing them.

Look for the Helpers

We have experienced so many scary things that we are still uncovering and dealing with and figuring out, and will be sorting out for years to come. Because we didn’t know what to do with it all, we turned to a simple childhood lesson given to us by a kind man in a cardigan singing to us about neighbors in his land of make-believe with puppets, Mr. Fred Rogers.

“Look for the helpers,” he said.

“Uffda— apparently, we are the helpers,” we replied.

Each time the actions of ICE get worse, we discover deeper wells of love inside us. Our hearts have stretched so thin that they have ripped wide open, again and again. Every one of those gaps has filled in with a love so huge and so fierce that our hearts have grown to sizes and powers we didn’t know were possible.

Evidently, our childhood science teacher was right too: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

So, while all of this is happening (cuz it’s still happening today), we just keep doing what needs to be done, quietly taking care of each other.

We are the WOMN.

Our stories didn’t make the news.

The journalists can report what happened: who was detained, who was shot, how many agents came, how many people marched, which lawsuits were filed, and when the operation supposedly ended.

Our stories are the interior ones, revealing our emotional truths as WOMN who are living inside these horrors, bandaging our wounds while still in the midst of our battles.

At sunrise, Alice faces eight ICE vehicles at the city park where she walks her dog. A man in a reflective vest walks the perimeter, and settles her. On the drive home, Alice notices the vests everywhere. Amber is one of them — standing outside a mobile-home park, waiting for the school bus with the children so that their parents can stay in hiding. She keeps checking her phone for a message from her daughter Sasha who is at MSP airport, using her white body as a little extra protection for her future brother-in-law on his way back to Mexico.

By nine, Lorraine is taking attendance in a high school history class that has lost two-thirds of its students. Across town in a different school, Julia hears a child crying outside her door and spends her lunch period organizing mutual aid for his classmates.

All the while, Vox is at Whipple, serving as emergency medic at the protests.

We are teachers and nurses, mothers and grandmothers, social workers and artists, business owners and retirees, medics and legal observers. Some of us have spent years, decades even, organizing and protesting. Others of us have never been to a protest in our lives. We don’t want attention or accolades for our efforts. We just want to help, because we can’t not.

The WOMN Project

I’m TeriLeigh, and I’m one of the WOMN of Minnesota, and I’m collecting and writing these stories.

After Renée Good died, like many of the women in Minnesota, I lost myself. For weeks, everything I tried to do felt frivolous and pointless in light of the horrors happening on the streets of my home state. When Alex Pretti died I picked up my pen.

Writing helped, but writing is a lonely venture, and healing happens best inside of a community. So I put out a quiet little call, inviting sensitive soul Minnesota women to gather. And they showed up. We sat in a circle and poured our stories on the ottoman between us in my living room.

And I kept thinking,

I need to write these stories.

So that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve collected stories from 13 women into a book, but that’s only the beginning.

Thirteen women shared with me their truths about what they lived through. These are the stories that hide inside the tears shed behind bathroom doors, underneath the floormats of cars delivering mutual aid, and inside the pages of private journals. For whatever reason, these women felt safe telling me their stories, and I don’t take that lightly. Being the face and the voice of their truths is the most important work I have ever done.

And there are thousands more.

So I’m building an archive. I’m creating a network where women can bring me their stories to write, and eventually I want to gather a team of writers who share this passion and this skill, because there are far too many stories for one person to carry. The WOMN Project is a living, breathing, growing record of what we did here, and what it cost us, and what light poured out of us because of it.

Become a Paid Subscriber

I am an independent, self-employed author working full-time to gather, research, and write these stories. There is no publishing house, newsroom, or institution funding the work.

A paid subscription keeps me at the desk doing the work. It also adds your voice to the collective message from this momentous time in history.

I love you fiercely,

Thank you for giving a shit,

TeriLeigh 💜

WOMN brings readers into the places the headlines never reach.

Come sit in Lorraine’s classroom and watch a teacher make the decision to teach with Google Translate so that her students can read and write in the language that makes them feel most comfortable, since nowhere else in their state feels safe.

Lorraine cannot control what ICE may do outside her classroom. She can control what happens inside it. By the end, the lesson is about what one adult can do to make safety feel real.

I am and independent author, self-employed and working full-time to interview women, research what happened, and preserve the stories the headlines left behind. I intend to bring this book into the world the same way Minnesota responded to ICE: grassroots, heart-driven, and sustained by ordinary people showing up for one another. Upgrade to paid and help us bring this book, and this message into the world.

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“Miss P, English so hard.”

Lorraine looks at her student and instantly makes a blanket decision about her classroom that she would apply for the rest of the school year.

“You know what?” she says, looking her student right in the eye, and then she pauses before saying anything more. This kid had just told her that English was hard, and here she was, talking back to her in English. That just doesn’t feel right.

“Un Momento.” Lorraine holds up one finger and fakes her way through the two word Spanish phrase with a terrible American accent. Then she grabs her phone and frantically types into Google translate.

One of Lorraine’s Latine students looks up at her with a paper and pen in hand

Write in a language that makes you feel comfortable because you deserve to be comfortable right now.

When she finishes typing, she links her Google Translate app on her phone to the loudspeaker in her classroom and projects the sentence to the whole class. A mechanical voice speaks in choppy Spanish, and the eight students in her class looked up at her from their desks.

“Do you mean it?” one asks.

Lorraine nods and types.

I’m gonna teach myself how to translate. But I’m gonna translate everything.

“Really?” another one adds.

Lorraine nods again. As she types into her phone again. She thinks to herself that this might be the stupidest decision she had ever made as a teacher. It doesn’t matter. She will figure it out. She has to make her classroom a place where these few kids can feel safe and supported.

She hits the loudspeaker button again and the mechanical voice speaks for her.

You want Spanish. I’ll give you Spanish. I don’t know any Spanish, but I’ll figure it out. We’re reading in Spanish. We’re writing in Spanish. I’m putting all my instructors in Spanish.

And then the classroom goes quiet. All eight kids sitting at their desks frantically writing.

Over the next ten minutes, one by one the students bring their papers to her desk, in less than half the time a similar assignment took them last week.

“I’m teaching with Google Translate now,” Lorraine hears herself telling her son at the dinner table that night.

Her son rolls his eyes.

“I have to do everything I can to stop these kids from disconnecting and disappearing.”

“You know you can’t control whether ICE disappears them, right?” Gavin says as he heaps a second helping of mashed potatoes onto his plate.

“I accidentally marked a kid absent yesterday, and he came in really upset today telling me that his dad got the text message of absence and he thought ICE had been to the school.”

“Mom, you’re doing so much for these kids. Don’t beat yourself up over a simple mistake,” Gavin says.

“I know, but I didn’t mean to mark him absent. I didn’t mean to create that harm in his life. I just feel so sorry,” she says while scraping the last of the mashed potatoes out of the bowl onto Gavin’s plate.

Gavin rolls his eyes again.

“At least I can make them feel like my classroom is a safe place.”

“Mom,” Gavin says in that annoyed teenage voice, “you are the safe space cuz you’re all about the safe space.”

Lorraine smiles and licks the mashed potatoes serving spoon.

Help keep WOMN alive

I am an independent, self-employed author working full-time to gather, research, and write these stories. There is no publishing house, newsroom, or institution funding the work. This project is structured the way Minnesotans built the response to ICE: from the ground up, with heart, trust, and ordinary people contributing what we can.

A paid subscription keeps me at the desk doing the work. It also adds your voice to the collective message carried by this story:

Our immigrant neighbors belong in our communities. They are part of our lives. When they are torn away, we all feel the wound.

Subscribe now

I love you fiercely,
Thanks for giving a shit,
Teri Leigh 💜

WOMN brings readers into the places the headlines never reach.

Come through the door with Julia as she drops the groceries and catches Sisa’s shaking hands moments after ICE shoots a man only blocks away. “Where on this planet do I go?” Sisa pounds her chest as panic takes over. Julia presses her forehead to Sisa’s and breathes with her until her heartbeat slows.

Then she stays.

“As the level of evil and attack intensified in our city, simultaneously the level of care and aid and genuine empathy exploded.” ~Julia

She stays through dishes, bedtime, tears, and the soft weight of a sleeping baby on her shoulder. Julia supports Sisa through a panic attack, and Sisa gives Julia the space to process her own grief.

I am and independent author, self-employed and working full-time to interview women, research what happened, and preserve the stories the headlines left behind. I intend to bring this book into the world the same way Minnesota responded to ICE: grassroots, heart-driven, and sustained by ordinary people showing up for one another. Upgrade to paid and help us bring this book, and this message into the world.

Subscribe now

“Where?!” (gasp)

“on this planet” (sob)

“do I go?”

Her hands shook as she pounded on her chest while pacing the small living room. When she finished the last word, she stopped right in front of Julia and stared her straight in the eyes. Julia was no stranger to fear in the eyes of a child, but in this moment she watched a grown adult’s face and eyes transform to that of a terrified child. Sisa’s pupils were slightly larger than normal, and every muscle in her face tightened.

Julia dropped the groceries on the floor and grabbed Sisa’s hands as she pressed her own forehead into Sisa’s.

“Breathe,” Julia said with a slow breathy voice, just a notch above a whisper.

“I’m here. I’ve got you,” Julia took a long slow breath looking Sisa right in the eye, just inches apart from each other.

“Breathe.”

Sisa took a slow stuttering breath, and then another.

“I’ve got you.” Julia breathed slower as she put her left hand on Sisa’s chest.

THUDTHUDTHUD. THUD. THUD. . . THUD. . . THUD. . . . . THUD.

Julia breathed slower and willed with her mind for Sisa’s heart to slow as well.

Minutes later the two women sat down on the floor of the tiny apartment, knee to knee, with bags of beans and rice and a box of diapers spilled around them. Sisa’s daughter wandered in from the other room wearing headphones and carrying her school tablet, clearly oblivious to the raucous she had just walked into.

Sisa’s eyes tightened again.

“It’s okay,” Julia soothed, “she’s got headphones, she has no idea.”

Sisa exhaled deeply.

Julia’s phone had buzzed seconds before she knocked on Sisa’s door. The rapid response Signal chat alert informed the neighborhood that ICE had just shot a Venezuelan man a few blocks away. Julia knew Sisa had gotten the same alert, hence the panic attack.

The shooting was close enough to Sisa’s apartment building that they could faintly hear the whistles and hollers in real time.

“We’re okay right now. You’re safe right here.” Julia said, and Sisa looked up at her, more color in her face this time, and a tenderness in her eyes that read like gratitude rather than panic.

“The country I’m from — we are indigenous.” Sisa finally explained once her breath came back to a normal rhythm.

“They took advantage of us there. So we fled to the neighboring country. They took advantage of us there. So we came here.”

She took a deep shuddering breath in, exhaled fully, and sobbed a bit before continuing.

“And now they’re trying to kill us.” Her voice squealed and quivered on the last two words.

Sisa stopped breathing, her face turned red as her chin quivered.

“Breathe.” Julia took a long slow breath in, and Sisa followed.

“Where on this planet do I go?”

Julia tapped Sisa’s chest, mimicking a heartbeat and took another long slow breath.

“Right now, you stay right here, with me.”

Sisa nodded.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Sisa nodded again.

That’s when the sirens started. Just a few blocks away, rapid responders were clashing with ICE agents. The corner of 24th and Lyndale had become a war zone complete with flashbangs, pepper balls, and federal agents in riot gear.

“Let’s get this stuff put away,” Julia said, standing up, picking up a bag of groceries, and reaching a hand down to help Sisa off the floor.

“Should we put on some music?”

“Good idea.”

Julia had been delivering mutual aid supplies to Sisa once a week for several weeks now. At first, she was just a delivery driver. See a need, fill a need, go to the next need. But each week, time stretched. What started as a simple polite greet-and-drop turned into helping unpack the groceries, and then holding the baby for awhile, and then staying for dinner, and then helping with bedtime, and then just not leaving until the grown-up talk slowed into yawns.

Julia was the only adult contact Sisa had all week. And Sisa hadn’t left her apartment, not even to take out the trash, in several weeks, so Julia just got used to staying, and taking out the trash on her way out.

An hour later, as the two women stood hip to hip at the kitchen sink doing dishes, Sisa washing and Julia drying. Julia tried to open a hopeful conversation.

“What are your hopes and dreams?”

Sisa let go of the sponge and started swirling her hand around the diminishing soapy suds at the top of the water.

“I can’t even imagine hopes and dreams right now. I just feel sad most of the time.”

“I get that,” Julia said, picking up a plate she had already dried and going through the motions to dry it again. “The biggest thing I know about trauma is that the brain cannot process it all at once. It releases little parts of it as the body starts to feel safer. So I know that as things start to feel calmer, the work of healing and processing will happen, and that’s when the hopes and dreams will return again. They’re there, just a bit hidden right now.”

Sisa fished the last remaining forks from the bottom of the sink and washed them between her fingers without the sponge, pressing her fingernails between the tines.

“Someone told me once when I was a teenager and feeling sad about having to feel sad, that some day I might learn to embrace it.”

Sisa sighed, handed Julia the forks and swirled her hands some more.

“They suggested that the spectrum of emotions expands downward through negative emotions,” Julia said, reaching into the sink and pulling the plug. The two women watched the water swirl downward.

“As much as it expands downward, it can also expand upward through the full range of positive emotions.” Julia took the small pothos plant of the windowsill above the sink, turned on the tap and let the water drain into the pot. Then she replaced the plant on the windowsill and gently touched the top-most leaf.

“That’s how I see all this. As the level of evil and attack intensifies in our city, simultaneously the level of care and aid and genuine empathy explodes to levels we could never have dreamt of.”

Sisa turned to face Julia, tears streaming down her face, a look Julia had gotten used to seeing. She’d stopped offering tissues weeks ago.

“We have to care for each other for us both to get through it,” Sisa said, and Julia nodded.

They walk back to the living room where the baby sleeps in a small bassinet and her daughter plays with legos on the floor.

The baby fusses, and Sisa lets out a big heavy sigh.

“I’ve got him,” Julia said, picking up the boy and rocking him on her shoulder. He instantly falls back to a purring sleep.

Standing in Sisa’s living room with a baby on her shoulder, the world slowed down to the pace of the soft quiet breath in her arms. She felt it on her neck, warm and steady, and it comforted her in ways nothing else could.

“You have no idea how many people are behind you right now,” Julia said softly, swaying with the baby. “What started as a few parents and teachers has turned into over two hundred people supporting ninety families. Our little school community alone raised two hundred thousand dollars in a couple of weeks just to keep families like yours housed.”

Sisa stared at her.

“It’s not just me, Sisa. Everyone wants you here.”

Sisa’s daughter crawled up on her lap as Julia sat down in the rocking chair with the baby. She had no idea how long she stayed there. Long enough for Sisa and her daughter to fall asleep.

Julia laid the baby back in the bassinet, pulled a blanket over the two of them, took the trash out, and locked the door behind her. This was not the first time she’d let herself out because Sisa and the kids had fallen asleep.

When she got to her car, she started it up and turned the defroster on full blast. She didn’t want to get out and scrape the frost off her windshield, so she pushed the seat heater button and just sat there, watching the fog on her windshield slowly clear.

She sat with her hands in her lap and let the ache arrive.

She wanted to sit inside the sadness and let it be what it was.

Julia knew that Sisa needed someone who didn’t live inside those walls to come through the door and stay. So Julia stayed. But Julia also stayed because she needed something too.

Sisa’s apartment had become the space in Julia’s life where her own grief had permission to slow down and be felt. As the frost on her windshield melted at eye level, she thought about what she’d told Sisa at the sink — that the spectrum expands in both directions.

Other people’s terror had stretched her capacity for a gentler and slower kind of empathy that exists in being rather than doing.

She could still feel the baby’s breath on her neck, as the seat heater warmed her low back.

Julia had always dreamed of a better future. She wondered if that future was growing from the roots of evenings like tonight.

When the windshield had fully cleared, Julia put the car in drive.

Help keep WOMN alive

Julia entered Sisa’s apartment to provide mutual aid and discovered that Sisa’s home had become a place of safety for her too.

WOMN exists to preserve these relationships—the ones that grow quietly through grocery deliveries, shared grief, washed dishes, and sleeping babies.

I am an independent, self-employed author working full-time to gather, research, and write these stories. There is no publishing house, newsroom, or institution funding the work. This project is structured the way Minnesotans built the response to ICE: from the ground up, with heart, trust, and ordinary people contributing what we can.

A paid subscription keeps me at the desk doing the work. It also adds your voice to the collective message carried by this story:

Our immigrant neighbors belong in our communities. They are part of our lives. When they are torn away, we all feel the wound.

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I love you fiercely,
Thanks for giving a shit,
Teri Leigh 💜

WOMN brings readers into the places the headlines never reach.

Come sit on Annie’s porch on her first day off in ten days, where a warm loaf of sourdough transports her to a memory she hasn’t touched for thirty years. As steam rises from the bread, she is carried back to a green bean factory, two toddlers, twelve-hour shifts, and the older Mexican women who loved her when she needed love the most.

This story shows how the immigrant communities of Minnesota are deeply embedded into the fabric of our society as a whole. When ICE abducts them, we lose a deeper sense of ourselves.

I am and independent author, self-employed and working full-time to interview women, research what happened, and preserve the stories the headlines left behind. I intend to bring this book into the world the same way Minnesota responded to ICE: grassroots, heart-driven, and sustained by ordinary people showing up for one another. Upgrade to paid and help us bring this book, and this message into the world.

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“Knock Knock,” Alice says, waving at Annie through her porch window.

“Oh hi!” Annie says, stubbing out her cigarette. “Come on in, pardon my mess. It’s my first day off in a ten day stretch. I don’t know up from down.”

“Oh, I don’t care about your mess, what mess?” Alice says as she steps inside the porch. “I brought you some sourdough.”

“You know, last time you brought over a loaf, I think I only got one slice. My kids ate it all.”

“Well then, you’ll have to hide at least half of this loaf. Same thing happened to me with the bowl of strawberries you gave me. I left them on the counter thinking I’d make a pie that night, but when I got around to it, they were mostly all gone.”

“I got more, just pick as many as you want,” Annie offers, pointing at the strawberry patch.

“I just might do that,” Alice says as she opens the porch door to leave. “Make sure you have a slice soon, it’s always best when it’s fresh out of the oven.”

Ten minutes later, Annie cuts into the loaf and the steam rises from the crumb. Zadie is looking up at her hopefully, her tail wagging and her nose sniffing.

She closes her eyes and breathes in the scent of the fresh bread.

Thirty years ago, another kitchen. She’s a single mother with two toddlers looking up at her while she opens a package of tamales, steam rising out of the package.

“La Chica,” she says out loud to nobody in the room, mimicking the accent the Mexican women had when they called her that so lovingly. “Wow, I haven’t thought about them in so long,” she says looking down at Zadie who spins in a circle of hopefulness.

As she slathers butter on the thick cut heel slice of bread, she goes deeper into the memory of working twelve hour shifts at the green bean factory where she was the only white woman under 40. It was an absolutely terrible job. She hated every minute of it.

Except the people.

She loved her co-workers, older Mexican women who were so, well, maternal. They mommed her in a time in her life when she really needed momming. At the time, she hadn’t realized how traumatic being a single mom was, and how much she needed maternal support. And they just gave it to her, naturally, like it was the normal thing to do.

All they wanted to do was feed her.

And they were always bringing her food. The tamales were her favorite. She’s never had tamales like that since then.

She breaks off a tiny corner of the crust and hands it to Zadie, who chomps at it so excitedly that Annie snaps her hand back.

“Damn, being a single mom was hard,” she says to Zadie. “Feeding you is so much easier than it was feeding those two little munchkins, even if you do try to bite off my hand.”

She wraps the over-buttered bread in a paper towel and goes back out to the porch where she can eat it slowly.

She picks up her phone and starts scrolling through social media, stopping at a reel of a ten-year-old Mexican girl protesting at Delaney Hall Immigration Detention Facility in New Jersey because ICE won’t let her visit her mother who is locked inside.

Annie takes the first bite of the bread and holds it on her tongue without swallowing, the way she used to with the tamales. She doesn’t swallow until the reel is finished.

Then, she puts a hand on Zadie’s head before speaking out loud again, to nobody in the room.

“God, I hope they’re okay.”

Help keep WOMN alive

WOMN exists to preserve these quiet relationships—the immigrant women who fed us, cared for us, taught us, and became part of who we are long before ICE tried to reduce them to an immigration status.

I am an independent, self-employed author working full-time to gather, research, and write these stories. There is no publishing house, newsroom, or institution funding the work. This project is structured the way Minnesotans built the response to ICE: from the ground up, with heart, trust, and ordinary people contributing what we can.

A paid subscription keeps me at the desk doing the work. It also adds your voice to the collective message carried by this story:

Our immigrant neighbors belong in our communities. They are part of our lives. When they are torn away, we all feel the wound.

Subscribe now

I love you fiercely,
Thanks for giving a shit,
Teri Leigh 💜

WOMN brings readers into the places the headlines never reach.

Come sit in the passenger seat beside Brianna as she grips the steering wheel through a Minnesota white-out blizzard, terrified she will crash but unwilling to turn around because a Venezuelan family hiding from ICE needs food.

This story shows how driving through white-out blizzards prepare…

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“Duck,” Livie says as she taps Carson’s head with the palm of her hand.

“Huh?” Carson says, confused. Livie looks back at him with an equally confused look.

“Duck,” she says flatly again as she taps Brenden’s head.

“What kind of duck?” Brenden says, stopping Livie in her rotation around the circle.

“What do you mean?” Livie stops where she is, halfway aroun…

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What you are about to read is a full chapter from WOMN, the interior experience and emotional truths of the women of Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

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This is the full chapter about OWLs (old white ladies) and how we embraced our white privilege as a super power during the surge. I hope you enjoy.

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Lake Wobegone

“Hello, and welcome to A Prairie Home Companion, coming to you live from the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota.”

Garrison Keillor’s voice echoes from the top of Linda’s avocado-green fridge at the family cabin up north. It’s Saturday night in June, and she’s rolling dough for pies at the counter while her mom sits at the kitchen table, embroidering herb plumes onto flour dish towels.

“How many you got left, there?” Linda asks.

“I finished the rosemary, basil, and lavender. I just have the thyme, mint, and sage left to go.”

“Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown…

The rest of the family is outside. Linda’s husband, Dad and the uncles at the fire pit, somebody’s transistor radio out there too, the Twins game is on low underneath the sound of the lake settling into evening. The occasional loon call punctuates the air as the younger kids chase fireflies around the edges of the yard.

The screen door bangs every few minutes — someone coming in for bug spray, someone else going to use the bathroom — and each time it bangs, the someone says “smells good, when’s the pie gonna be ready?” and Linda always answers “Almost”.

Mom doesn’t look up from the dish towel. Linda doesn’t look up the dough. Outside, someone laughs at something. The screen door bangs again.

We all know that up-north kitchen. Even if we didn’t have a cabin in our own families, we all got invited to spend a weekend at one at some time or other. If the appliances weren’t avocado green, they were autumn gold, and the kitchen table was always a wobbly worn wood, or some form of sparkled formica.

Garrison Keillor’s voice came on the radio every Saturday evening, blending stories of Lake Wobegone with the smell of Grandma’s best recipes wafting from the oven. And in that voice, week after week, was a made-up town on a made-up lake, that became famous for nothing special across the world.

We listened to gossip in the aisles of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, where if you can’t find it at Ralph’s, you can probably get along without it. We heard about the Sons of Knute lodge, where serious men gathered to discuss matters of grave importance and ended up talking about the weather and the price of corn. And we grimaced at the sermons given at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, where the congregation shuffled in every Sunday because you still go to church every Sunday, even if you are on vacation. It’s just what we do.

We knew that congregation. We were that congregation.

Keillor tells us about the quiet week, where nothing much happened but everything mattered. He tells us about the Tollerud family and how they found their lost cat, and the Bunsen boys latest not-quite-run-in with the law, and Pastor Ingqvist’s latest attempt to say something meaningful to people who would rather he kept it brief. He tells us about the Norwegian bachelor farmers who eat their meals standing over the sink and about the Swedish farmer who loved his wife so much he almost told her.

Almost.

We are, all of us, fluent in almost.

We Minnesota women are known to almost say something, and be glad we didn’t. We almost ask for help, and are grateful when someone notices and offers without our request. The almost is just part of the air in Minnesota, like lake humidity that almost forms into rain but never quite does.

Garrison Keillor’s radio show is slow and steady, with a tinge of melancholy, finding the humor in the sadness and the sadness in the humor. And, like a hymn we already know by heart he reminds us every week that in Lake Wobegone, all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Linda pulls the pie out of the oven as Mom sets down the embroidery hoop and holds the dish towel up to the kitchen light to check her stitching. They have each other’s hands.

Of course the women are strong. What else would they be?

Outside, the screen door bangs. Somebody holler that pie’s ready.

We are Lake Wobegon women. White women. We are women who grew up fluent in the language of almost — we almost said something, almost made a fuss, almost asked for what we needed, we almost told someone how much they mattered.

Then ICE came to Minnesota in Operation Metro Surge.

And we white women tossed the almost into the trash like an over-burnt pie.

ICE broke our almost wide open and we started saying something, making the fuss, asking for what we need, and telling everyone how much they matter.

**Paid Subscribers get access to the full chapters of WOMN.

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What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, the interior experience and emotional truths of the women of Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

Share

This is a scene from the chapter about OWLs (…

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This is a scene from the chapter about OWLs (…

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What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, the interior experience and emotional truths of the women of Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

Share

This is the introduction from the chapter abo…

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summary written by claude.ai

I’m an ally and he’s a force. Reverend Kevin Taylor and I have been talking in comments and on Zoom for a while now, and we finally sat down together to talk about the corruption of law enforcement and how it’s shaped the way our whole society is shifting right now.

This one got heavy. It also got hopeful. Here’s what we covered.

A Jeep in a Parking Lot

I opened by telling Kevin about the ICE vehicle I saw that morning on my way to walk my dog. No front plate, windows blacked out so completely, even the windshield. The windshield was total black! It was parked in a strip mall parking lot facing the street, lights on, surveilling the street I drive to my dog-walking park every morning. It was not normal. I went through a whole gamut of emotions in about half a second: first that’s an ice vehicle, then fear, then rage, then this is our normal now.

Kevin pointed out that the vehicle didn’t have to do anything. It just had to be there. And that’s the whole point of it.

History Doesn’t Repeat, It Rhymes

Kevin brought Mark Twain into the conversation, walking through the parallels between what’s happening now and the post-Reconstruction era, when Black voter turnout hit 90% before disenfranchisement tactics like poll taxes and black codes brought it back down to single digits.

His point: the tools have changed, but the strategy hasn’t. Voter ID laws like the SAVE Act, he explained, aren’t about preventing fraud that barely exists. They’re about making it harder for the people most likely to vote against those in power to get to the polls at all.

We talked about how the same dog whistles get recycled with new packaging. States’ rights. Compassionate conservatism. The caravan. AI as the boogeyman. Different decade, same playbook, designed to make people vote with fear instead of their actual interests.

The Rage of Women Finding Their Voice

I told Kevin what I keep hearing from the women I talk to: fear, then rage, then a fierce protectiveness for their kids and their people.

Kevin and I agreed that this anger, especially among white women who’ve held it in for decades, is becoming a real force. He was honest that not every woman channels that energy the same way, and that some have been taught to surrender their voice entirely. But the women showing up here are doing the opposite. We’re writing. We’re speaking. We’re using our words like spells, and it’s working.

Substack as Sacred Space

We both talked about why Substack feels different from other platforms. It’s a place for authentic voice, not algorithm-chasing. Kevin shared the story behind his publication, the Unpaid Ledger, named for the part of Dr. King’s 1963 speech that came before the dream, the part where he called America’s promise of equality a check that bounced. He also told us about his second Substack, a space for people who are grieving, struggling, and need to hear they’re not alone.

I shared a little about Fierce Love and the WOMN Project, the fifteen Minnesota women I’ve interviewed who showed up during Operation Metro Surge. Their stories aren’t about what happened. They’re about how it felt, and how it changed them.

The Bricks on the Corner

Kevin and I also talked about George Floyd, about the memorial near his and Renee Good’s, and about something I haven’t talked about publicly very much: what it was like here in Minneapolis during those days, watching cars without plates flood streets that were nearly empty because of COVID, and seeing pallets of bricks appear on corners with no construction in sight. Kevin affirmed that this fits a documented pattern of outside actors using moments of unrest to deepen division.

Where We Landed

For every 3,000 ICE agents, there are 300,000 people who love each other. That ratio is the whole hope of this thing. The real power isn’t power over someone else. It’s love with someone else.

Thank you for being here, for staying for the whole conversation, and for giving a shit.

I love you fiercely.

Thanks for giving a shit,

TeriLeigh💜

What you are about to read is full chapter from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to someone next to you.

Share

Fort Snelling

It’s been too long since I’ve been…

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If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

Share

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