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.
“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.
If you want to support this effort, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Paid subscribers will receive full chapters (not just excerpts) with my author’s commentary about my process and experience at least once a month.
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 💜
Teri Leigh 💜, You bring up a great point in this essay. ICE is impacting all the children in a neighborhood, no matter their skin color. The children not seeing their own family members being taken are still indirectly affected by the losses to their friend's families.