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 human next to you.
Lisa hugs the two overstuffed extra-large manila envelopes to her chest, and the weight of them presses on her sense of responsibility and determination to make sure they are delivered. They are stuffed thick with crayon drawings, construction paper collages, and watercolor paintings by school children in a Minneapolis suburb for their classmates who are locked in Dilley Detention Center in Texas.
One of the envelopes is addressed to Liam Conejo Ramos, a five-year-old kindergartener who was taken by ICE with his father and immediately flown to Texas before judges could rule on his case. He was wearing a blue-bunny cap and a Spider-Man backpack when his photograph went viral on social media feeds and news outlets. Headlines read that he had been used as bait by ICE to capture his father.
The other envelope is addressed to a ten-year-old girl from the same school who was taken a couple weeks before Liam. The girl’s mother, who doesn’t speak English, was detained by ICE while taking her daughter to school. The fourth grader had to interpret for her mother and ICE during the detainment. ICE allowed her to call her father and told her to tell her father that they would drop her off at school.
Her father raced over to the school to retrieve his daughter.
School administrators met him at the door. And together, they waited. And waited. And waited. ICE never showed up with his daughter. By the time he and the school administrators realized that the never intended to bring his daughter back to him, she was halfway to Texas with her mother.
The story of this little girl grates at Lisa.
When Lisa was young, she was especially outspoken to grown-ups about injustices she witnessed. Her whole life, she has been one to stand up for the underdogs and call out the bullies. To hear about this little girl, communicating grown up things with masked armed men, the anger and injustice of it all rips at Lisa’s core. She believes that how we treat our most vulnerable is what defines us as a society, and this instance is a gross and disproportionate example of cruelty that she can’t stomach.
Standing in line at the post office, cradling the two envelopes of cards in her arms, Lisa wishes she could do more, but she knows she cannot do everything. At the constitutional observer training and community meetings, people kept repeating the same advice: pick a lane.
Rapid response carries a particular kind of risk because once agents know your face, your name, where you live, and which networks you are connected to, that risk can follow you home. Lisa lives alone, with neighbors of color. The last thing she wants to do is make herself visible enough to bring ICE closer to any of them.
Lisa still wonders if she should be doing something bigger and more visible. She watches other people put their bodies on sidewalks and in front of federal vehicles and keeps asking herself, why not me?
She is a pacifist, but lately she has started wondering if she has been using pacifism as an excuse for being passive. Still, the more she noodles on her own personal meter of protest, the more she questions whether getting arrested with a sign would be the most useful place to put her energy. She decides that she can be a pacifist without being passive.
So, she picks lanes that are active, yet quieter. She writes and calls her elected officials. She donates money to legal funds and mutual aid efforts. And she mails two overstuffed envelopes of kids’ cards to a detention center in Texas.
For the next several days, Lisa logs onto the post office website to enter the tracking number and trace the path of the envelopes. She wants to know when they arrive at Dilley.
One quiet afternoon, she clicks refresh, and the tracking page loads a new line at the top.
Under it lists every scan she has watched for days, a list of towns that runs back down the page to Minnesota. Each time a new one appeared, she pictured the crayon drawings getting a little closer to the kids they were made for.
Held at Post Office, At Customer Request
My request? That’s not true. I never requested any hold.
She drops her pen on the desk and slams her flat palm on the open notebook next to her mousepad. Then she sits up taller, takes a deep breath, and copy/pastes the second tracking number.
Held at Post Office, At Customer Request
Because she had listed the return address as the school, eventually, the postal system sends both envelopes back to Minnesota— Return to Sender. The envelopes do end up in the hands of children, the same children who made the cards. By the time the cards return, Liam and his father are already home, but the ten-year-old and her mother are still in Texas.
At least Liam will get his cards.
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.
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That’s how we work.
I love you fiercely,
TeriLeigh 💜
Lisa is perhaps doing understated work to remain under the radar, but it is still important work. I felt so frustrated for her when she discovered that the envelops had not been sent. Argh...
To be a pacifist and not be passive is indeed the goal. Thank you for lifting up Lisa's witness.