WoMN used their voices to make ICE offer a handshake and leave without detaining anyone.

Sasha - Their Calm Made ICE Melt

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.

Sasha

Sasha was standing at the entrance to a mobile home park with about five other women, wearing reflective vests over their winter gear and whistles around their necks.

Women show up every day, twice a day, as trained legal observers to make sure the kids from the mobile homes get on and off the bus safely each day. They knew the school bus drivers, and the bus drivers knew them. The women have come to know all the families, their kids, their struggles and needs. They bring each other coffee and donuts, and the mothers occasionally gift them with homemade tortillas or a jar of salsa.

When two ICE vehicles parked at the entrance to the community, the women knew what to do.

Sasha stayed back a bit, blowing her whistle.

The signal rippled through — don’t come outside, stay inside, don’t open the door. The elder women in the group moved forward to meet the agents as they got out of their trucks. Sasha held her position a few steps back, watching how her elders knew to use their voices before the agents could use their force.

There were four of them, all men, all carrying the recognizable ICE energy, cold, fierce, and uncompromising. Their bodies were loud, and their voices were piercing with anger. They were clearly annoyed that they had to deal with these women they considered to be “obstructions” to their efforts.

The elder women didn’t raise their voices to match. Some raised their phones to film while others asked the questions they were trained to ask.

Do you have a warrant?

DO YOU KNOW YOU ARE PROTECTING A RAPIST?

What’s your authority to be here?

YOU’RE STOPPING US FROM ARRESTING A CHILD MOLESTER!

Do you even know whose trailer you’re approaching?

No response. . . because they didn’t know.

The women’s simple questions created a perimeter, a verbal boundary blocking the threshold to the mobile home park, and the men started coming apart inside it.

The men continued to throw the ugliest language and most ferocious energy they had into the air, as the women remained calm. Their calm made all the agents’ efforts melt into puddles on the pavement.

Then, in a surprising move, one of the agents held out a hand, offering a handshake like men do at the end of a negotiation. Maybe they didn’t know what else to do with their hands. Maybe somewhere inside the gear and the masks there was a muscle memory of humanity that responded automatically.

Men who had just been posturing and accusing and trying to intimidate, now reached out their hands as if they wanted to pass back through the narrow gate of civility on their way out.

The women accepted their handshakes.

The men shook their heads, clearly unhappy about the outcome, but unable to assert violence or force as they’d been reputed to do elsewhere in the cities.

One by one, the agents got back into their vehicles and drove out of the park.

They circled back and wrote down every license plate in the cul-de-sac where the women had parked.

Petty.

The women quietly smiled, unafraid. What mattered most was that the agents drove out of the trailer park without detaining anyone.

The buses came.

The kids got on, and Sasha stayed with her whistle and her reflective vest until the school bus drove away too.

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Kelly used her voice pinned to the pavement with a man’s body on top of hers.

Frances watched a woman use her voice face to face with a young agent whose eyes filled with tears.

And here, in a mobile home park in Minnesota on a bitter cold day, a group of women used their collective voices to force ICE back into their vehicles.

That is another thing Renee gave us.

When she died, women all over Minnesota learned that their use-of-voice power can outperform any use-of-force. . . except a gun.

A woman’s voice can de-escalate a punch.
A woman’s voice can call to the frightened boy inside a uniform.
And women’ s voices can protect a whole community.

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. 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 💜