There is no such thing as other people’s children

by Erik Hane

This morning I was standing next to some tropical fish when I looked down at my phone to the messages. ICE had shot someone on a Minneapolis street, again, this time next to the donut place I often take my kids. We were at the zoo because even during what has been a violent occupation of our city, it is our job as parents of young children to Act Normal during the smaller and smaller windows where that’s possible—it wasn’t my shift on neighborhood patrol, so here we were. No word on the victim's condition until suddenly there was. No video until suddenly there was. “I see him, buddy,” I told my four-year-old about the gibbon he was pointing at. Do not go to the scene, my patrol communications were saying. We can’t get pulled from our positions. 

All of this has been terrifying. Our neighbors, friends, teachers, and children have been harassed, stalked, kidnapped, or worse. People know about ICE murdering Renee Good on the street; they know now about the murder this morning of a peaceful observer named Alex Pretti too. They’ve seen clips of the other violence and terror ICE has brought here—including the revelation that they kidnapped a five-year-old and tried to use him as bait to draw out even more people they hoped to harm. But even these disparate events do not get across the blanketed feeling of occupation here right now, how disruptive ICE has been to our community. Churches and schools have closed under threat of violence. My neighbors have correctly assessed that it is no longer even safe for them to walk down the street to the store. Every minute here, a thousand hidden tragedies like this play out. ICE is rolling back people’s basic freedom and security. The experience is intolerable; I know for certain that the trauma of this time will stay with residents here long after ICE leaves the city.

But I believe that the response from Minneapolis offers a glimpse at why, in the end, we are going to defeat fascism in the United States. Minneapolis is no stranger to responding to violence from the state, and we do not wait for sclerotic elected officials to lead that response. The activist tradition is quite strong here, especially since the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd. I remember so much about that summer, but what has stayed with me is a simple refrain: “There’s no such thing as other people’s children.” 

And that’s what eats at me: this morning, my children went to the zoo. Liam Ramos, the preschooler whom ICE kidnapped off the street, is supposedly already in a detention facility in Texas by now. That little boy is of this beautiful city as much as my children are, and it is a stain on this country that our government does not see him that way, and is willing to carry out such extreme violence in service of that view. It is intolerable. For him alone—for Renee Good alone, for Alex Pretti alone, for every last person in Minneapolis who has even had to look over their shoulder while they walk to their car after work, or assess the risk of attending a church service, or worry about whether it’s safe to go buy groceries—the mass organizing and uprising you are seeing happen in this city is not only worth it but necessary.

Here is something simple and beautiful: the vast majority of the residents of this city agree. In the days since ICE murdered Renee Good, something new has happened. Everyone is activated. Ordinary people—as in, people who don’t normally think that much about politics or where they fit on an ideological spectrum—have looked up and said, “No, what ICE is doing in my city is unacceptable, and I am going to be part of the opposition.” Networks for supplies, groceries, shelter, rides, medical care, and neighborhood patrols have burst forth on the sheer strength of everyone participating. This is part of all of our daily routines now, just as much as our jobs and our personal lives. Groups that started with whole neighborhoods in mind soon became so full that they’ve splintered into ten-block chunks, then five-block chunks, then specific locations within those areas. There is nowhere ICE can go in this city where they won’t soon be met by a dozen locals ready to record and impede their actions, and the whistles we’re all wearing mean that many other people will soon be at that location too. 

They made a mistake in picking Minneapolis. They came here believing that the same old lines of division that animate their entire political project—race, culture, class—would be reason enough to keep people in their homes while they went about their violent work. Instead we are out there in every place they are, showing them that every person in this city is one of our own, that there is no such thing as other people’s children, that collectively we are not afraid of staring them in the eye. They can sense this. We can see them re-running calculations in their heads, every time we turn them away by being willing to stand there, get in the way, observe and document their evil. This enrages them. As we saw this morning, they are now killing us for it.

That, of course, is terrifying. But if we mean what we say about solidarity, what choice is there? If every abducted child is our own, if every person they want to make disappear is someone Minneapolis cannot and will not live without, the decisions on how we must respond have already been made. And as reports appear that ICE is planning to do this elsewhere, I believe these other places will be making the same decisions, because they have to. We all have to.

Amidst the horror there is joy in this. I know my neighbors better than ever before. I have started friendships that will last long after we remove ICE from our city. The solidarity we are cultivating right now will inform the way the people of Minneapolis relate to one another for the rest of our lives. Just the other day while guarding our daycare, a parent I’d never met was showing off his new ice-fishing boots; it was -20 degrees out, after all, and he used the dire circumstances and the fact that he had to stand out here as a way to get the purchase past his wife. We laughed. We introduced ourselves. And then we got back to running license plates on suspicious-looking trucks that were driving past too slowly.

ICE is feverishly looking for some top-down reason this is happening. They are trying to infiltrate, but you cannot infiltrate a city’s collective character. They want to find the “orchestrators,” the “paid activists,” the political professionals scheming up the city’s response to their crimes. They won’t find any, because there are none. It’s parents worried about the safety of their daycare and schools. It’s neighbors worried about the family down the street. It’s anyone with a conscience—which is to say, it is everyone. And we are going to win. 

Erik Hane is a literary agent and writer in Minneapolis.

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There is no natural way to immediately go prone and immobile when you are being manhandled by a half dozen cops. Any single natural impulse your body has will be explained away as a violent provocation.

And yes this is what policing of any kind has always been in this country. The difference, and it is small relief, is that regular cops still have to go through the motions of maybe getting in trouble when they kill one of us before getting off later on down the line. These guys summarily execute someone and the Trump administration goes on TV and says they deserved it fuck you the end.

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I never caused any kind of fuss to be clear. Kept my head down. All in all it bought me maybe fifteen months tops. Which isn’t so bad all things considered. And come to think of it was I not entitled to that reprieve? A kind of reward for my loyalty if you looked at it a certain way. 

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