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.
“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.
I love you fiercely,
Thanks for giving a shit,
Teri Leigh 💜
I think about Minneapolis constantly.
The absolute horror of living through a modern-day, small-scale holocaust.
The fact that Minnesotans have rallied around eachother so swiftly & so unquestioningly.
The fact that they have fought back so hard & so intentionally that it has actually had a ripple effect in slowing down ICE deployment/escalation everywhere else.
The fact that Minnesotans are essentially acting as a human dam; holding a lot of the worst of the ICE behavior within the Minneapolis city limits…
It is an absolutely unforgettable and heart wrenching moment in our country’s and our world’s history.
Freedom and justice for the people of Minneapolis.
May every single ICE agent, collaborating police member, state rep, congress person, judicial branch member, and executive branch leader responsible for it all be sent to The Hague.
In fact, we just insist upon it.
The depth of emotion is so well conveyed in this essay, TeriLeigh💜. This is some of your very best writing.
As ICE has been moving from one town, city, state to another, I have watched more and more communities adopting very similar tactics for dealing with ICE. Minnesota has definitely taken and holds the lead in how to rally and support families.
Your first hand stories are so very important right now.