nelson mondale

[04/01/2026] Where am I, here, now? The past few months have been very intense, or so I’ve been texting friends and family out of state. It’s something I’ve said a lot, but something I haven’t quite confronted. Staring out the window of my attic bedroom over our backyard driveway, and the cherry tree that hangs just so over the city skyline of Minneapolis, I closed my eyes and really listened. Through each corner of my consciousness rang a siren — a firetruck, a police car, a tree limb falling from up high, a squirrel ran over by a car — ICE agents kidnapping and murdering my neighbors. As ICE agents began taking their flights out of MSP, back to the places that they wanted to call home, to the people they called home, the visibility of this omnipresent violence diminished. Though remained in every corner a siren, every corner deeply tragic, deeply wrong. Landlords took advantage of this violence to perpetuate their wealth, police self replicated in ideology and numbers, the Minneapolis mayor clung to this violence as he is this violence. The months have been intense, but so is / was / will be every month, every corner, deeply tragic.

On Blaisdell and 28th, just a couple weeks ago (or was it days? minutes? Every time, deeply tragic), a 16 year-old neighbor was abducted. My friend and I were on patrol, and ran there as fast as we could. There, we saw hundreds of neighbors whistling, shouting, pointing, crying, washing eyes, driving, biking. ICE agents had taken a neighbor, and on their tortuous way out, through the crowd they left behind silver canisters of tear gas that replaced the air. My friend and I ran towards clearer air, stepping on the window of a shattered car, past broken phones and blaring dispatch in our ears. I’m coming up on it now, just a block away. I look up at the world around me, the world that, apparently, held / holds this violence, the intersection of roads that held / holds all those people, all those noises. It is / was quiet now / then. ('Walk sign to cross : Blaisdell.')

The violence does not start with ICE on these streets and it will not end here. Patrolling forced me out of the pleasantly deafening hum of my whiteness to understand these sirens differently. I saw and heard the way they moved through the city, through the people — West on Lake, North on Harriet at 28th, under the overpass and through to Phillips. The streets, as I recite them step by step, pushing them in order into my brain (Harriet, Pleasant, Pillsbury, Blaisdell, Nicollet, 1st, Stevens, 2nd … ), define the mode of physical movement through this neighborhood, the modes within which violence travels from person to person, home to home, streets that abstract the very violence necessary for it a grid to exist at all (Portland, Oakland, Park, Columbus, Chicago, uhh.. Eliot, 10th, 11th, ), stripping the city of visible indigeneity. These are the streets that welcomed ICE agents with open arms, the roads that sent violence as quicksilver across Whittier in moments.