Mother of mixed-race kids finds herself on guard when it comes to protecting her children
As if parenting isn’t tough enough these days with bullying and all the social media pressures kids face, the migration of ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) officials to rural Minnesota is putting some parents on edge even more than usual.
One of those parents, who spoke to the Tracy Area Headlight Herald last week on the condition of anonymity, is the mother of two young, mixedrace children who live in southwest Minnesota. Last Wednesday, she was in the Cities for business and experienced close-up the effects ICE has had there.
“I didn’t notice it in St. Paul and Minneapolis either until they were telling me I had to go,” she said.
“They” were employees of a cafe in uptown Minneapolis, where the subject of this story had stopped to get some coffee and take a meeting over the phone. The waitress was on her phone while taking the order, something that struck the customer as rude. Little did she know that soon after she would be told to leave.
“She said, ‘I’m sorry, I need you to wrap it up, we’re closing immediately,” she said. “Everybody had to leave. I was kind of oblivious; she said there was increased ICE activity around. I picked up my stuff and asked if everybody was OK, and she just said, ‘Be careful out there.’ She told me which door to leave from, and later on I saw that they were gassing people about a block from where I was.”
The woman said she wants no part of ICE officials, in part, because from her standpoint, they are not well-trained. She said she grew up around firearms and said she felt very uncomfortable with the way ICE officials hold their weapons.
“I can see from the way they bear arms that they are clearly not welltrained,” she said. “They draw up on people in a way I don’t think is appropriate. When I went to my car, I was thinking, ‘Don’t look at your phone, walk right to your car and drive away — don’t sit in your car’ because they can’t stop you when you’re driving, but they can just, like knock on your window if you’re in a parked car.”
‘ In the mornings, the first thing I want to do is check all social media to see if there’s anything happening nearby. If there’s ICE activity around, I’m not taking my kids to school; it’s not worth it.
She said she wasn’t scared of the situation, calling her state “calm vigilance.”
But what happened in Minneapolis is just part of this woman’s story. Being a parent of two young kids of mixed race, she has had to take extra precautions, such as writing her contact information on her kids’ car seats, along with their names, in case there is no parent there to advocate for them.
“I don’t know if they are capable of communicating who to contact if the adult with them gets taken,” she said. “There’s always a responsibility for me of being the white parent in a relationship. Being the white parent is kind of a shield.”
That shield, she said, is part of how she protects her children from potential racism, something she feels she has to do now more than ever.
“I feel like I’m just dipping my toes into what it feels like to be in a minority,” she said. “That sucks … but what do I do?”
The woman carries the assumption that ICE would treat the kids’ father horribly if he were to be apprehended. She is to the point where she doesn’t even want to leave her house with her children.
“In the mornings, the first thing I want to do is check all social media to see if there’s anything happening nearby,” she said. “If there’s ICE activity around, I’m not taking my kids to school; it’s not worth it.”
The woman also said that the current state of Minnesota has made her concerned about her kids’ view of law enforcement. Although they are young, she doesn’t want them to look at local police — those who are committed to protecting and serving their communities — in a negative way. She herself developed her own suspicions while in the Cities of any man who might fit the ICE profile.
“I would look at their boots and their backpacks … I was very paranoid that every man around me could be an ICE official,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like law enforcement to me. I like my local cops — these guys, they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s like police brutality. And I don’t want my kids to be scared of our local cops; how do they differentiate? They see it on TV, too.”
While things seem to have settled down with the potential of many federal agents leaving the state, the Twin Cities area has been a hotbed of ICE activity since the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. It has been reported that as many as 3,000 immigration agents were in the region at one time, and a protest called “ICE Out of Minnesota” took place last Friday, which urged people to stay home from school and work.
