Minneapolis’ Response to ICE 2026

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I’ve had a few friends and family members tell me that if Renee Good and Alex Pretti had only stayed home, they’d be alive today. That’s probably true. If we all just stayed in bed all day, we’d be safe. After all, if we drive our car to work or run an errand, we could get killed in a car crash or by a falling meteor. If we cross the street, we could get hit by a truck or struck by an errant jolt of lightening. If we go to school or church or a shopping mall or a concert or a movie theater, we could get shot. It’s safer to just never venture out or take a chance. It’s safer to see evil and look the other way.

I live in Minneapolis. I now have a sense of what it’s like to live in a war zone or an occupied country. I don’t think some people have an idea of what it’s like to live in Minneapolis under this ICE occupation. Do they think there are just some ICE agents rounding up convicted criminals? No, they are terrorizing the entire community, breaking in doors, including those of American citizens without any reason, or court order, demanding that people of color show them their papers and even if they say they are citizens, they drag them off to a detention center not allowing them to even call their families or an attorney for hours. They release them into the freezing cold without worrying how they’ll get home. One 10th grader was detained and the agents sold his phone to a pawn shop. The economic cost of this occupation will be staggering because people are frightened to leave their homes to even get food. Costs of overtime for our police are skyrocketing. People are too scared to go to work. Our children will suffer because so many are scared to go to school. I dread running errands because I don’t know if I’m going to get in the middle of one of ICE’s attacks on someone on our streets and I don’t know what my reaction will be to see them brutalizing someone. I’m angry. No one should live this way.

 I didn’t know either Renee Good or Alex Pretti, but I think I know why they were there on the streets of Minneapolis bearing witness, resisting.

Hitler created enemies the German people could blame their difficulties on including Communists, Social Democrats, Labor Unions, Jews, Roma, Slavs, disabled people, Blacks, Jehovah’s Witnesses and LGBT people. One of the shocking revelations about Hitler’s rise to power is that churches turned over their own members with Jewish ancestry to the Nazis.

In the U.S., we’re to believe that immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, are the cause of our difficulties. They are the enemy.

Donald Trump was a bully at a young age prompting his parents to send him to a military school where he perfected his bullying. Now he bullies law firms, media, colleges, and CEOs of large corporations. He bullies Republicans who are afraid to tell the simple truth that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Even the Supreme Court seems scared of him (I wonder about that one). In December of 2025, he decided to bully Minneapolis.

Trump sent thousands of masked, paramilitary, troops into the streets of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and surrounding areas, who began brutalizing Americans including an elderly Hmong-American man, a 17-year Target employee taken, beaten, then dumped off at a Wal-Mart miles away, sobbing and bleeding, without his cell phone, a disabled women on her way to the doctor had her car window smashed and she was dragged off, and who can forget the image of little Liam Ramos, used as bait to try to get his mother? All these people were citizens of the United States or legal immigrants with no criminal record. Is it any wonder that people of good conscience took to our streets to protect our neighbors?

This isn’t about criminals. Of 61 court cases, 1 was found to have a criminal background. Our police arrest criminals, build cases against them, and they are tried in our courts. We don’t allow criminals to just run freely through our city creating mayhem. What this is about is retribution because we didn’t vote for Donald Trump in the past three elections. Pam Bondi is demanding our state’s voting data. It’s punishment. It’s a shakedown. It’s the dangerous beginning stages of rigging the 2026 elections.

 Renee Good and Alex Pretti are American heroes who saw bullying and evil and resisted it. They were both executed in the streets of Minneapolis because they refused to allow these ICE agents sent here by Donald Trump to terrorize our community without any opposition. We see what we are dealing with when these men feel comfortable executing people in our streets while being observed and filmed by dozens of citizens. I don’t know if the people of Minneapolis and Minnesota are more versed in history than other people. I do know they are not going to sit back like the citizens of Germany or Russia and allow a tyrant to gain so much control they can’t be stopped without lots of bloodshed.

So when people tell me that Renee Good or Alex Pretti would be okay today if they’d just minded their own business, I want to ask, “Have you no concept of history?” History is full of bullies. The Roman Empire. Adolf Hitler. Josef Stalin. Vladimir Putin. Bull Connor. Reading about them as a child, I wondered why people tolerated them? Why didn’t people stand up to them before they gained so much power they could destroy anyone who resisted? I’m thankful for Renee Good and Alex Pretti because they have exposed the evil in the streets of Minneapolis.

When I was in third grade and my sister in first grade, a fourth grader grabbed a handful of snow and rubbed it in my sister’s face making her cry. I didn’t think about the fact that the fourth grader was older, bigger, and heavier than me. I didn’t think period. I grabbed a handful of snow and ice and ground it in the fourth grader’s face. She was big enough to have beat me up, but instead she ran off crying for her mother. I didn’t feel good about what I’d done, but no one got to make my little sister cry and get by with it. I don’t recall that 4th grader ever bullying someone again. I learned something about bullies that day.  

There was a time when I didn’t stand up to a bully. I regretted it. The event haunted me for a long time and I promised myself I’d never stay silent again. I wrote an essay about the experience and it was published in 2016 in The Commonline Journal’s Fall 2016 edition. Here is that essay:

I Didn’t Speak Up

By Bonnie Wilkins Overcott

          I recognized the woman, with the bleached hair, dark roots, and a life-worn face, struggling to pull her ponderous body up the steps of the bus. She was the woman who attempted to leave her child in the church nursery Sunday morning so she could do some shopping. She wasn’t a member of our church, but it was across the street from the grocery store, and I’m sure she knew her son would be safe with us. Something within the boy, though, did not want her leaving him, he created such a fuss and cried, so she took him with her when she left.

          She sat down on the seats facing me at the front of the bus, rifling through her purse for the bus fare. She was drunk. At one point, she put her arm and hand around her stomach and said, “I don’t feel well.” I was in no mood to get vomited on by a drunken woman, so I moved to the middle of the bus.

          A young, professional man got on the bus and sat where I had been sitting. When she told the bus driver that she was just sure she had bus fare, the man across from her said, “I’ll give you the money for a bus ride, if you get off and take another bus.” People on the bus laughed. The woman began to weep as the bus driver assured her he’d drop her off when she reached her destination.

          As she wept, she complained to the bus driver that she didn’t understand why people were so cruel. The young man wouldn’t let up. He berated her during the entire trip as the rest of the passengers laughed and clapped. Finally, she reached her stop and thanked the bus driver for his kindness before she got off. As she put her foot on the ground, the entire bus cheered. She walked home with the insults and jeers echoing in her mind. And I never spoke up.

Raven

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Raven, the cat, lives in the bird seed store where I buy seeds, suet, bird feeders and other supplies for my back yard feeding station for the wildlife in the neighborhood. When he first came to live there, he was a young, feisty kitty. He’d spar with me and snoop in my purse. Gradually he settled in. Most days when I arrive, he is napping in his cat bed on the counter or just sitting near the counter waiting for a pat on he head. He’s a fixture and a favorite of customers. You can buy Raven cups or t-shirts.

Recently, I came in and Raven strode up to me, sniffed me all over, then strode off into the storeroom like he was on some kind of patrol. “What’s with Raven?” I asked, “Normally he’s napping and too sleepy to greet me.” “We have a mouse,” said the woman working that day. I watched as Raven marched around the store and the storeroom while I shopped. He was on full alert.

A mouse in a bird seed store is a catastrophe. Mice will nibble holes in every bag of seeds. They will pilfer seeds and stash them in their nest. Mice don’t just live alone. If you see one mouse, it’s very likely there many more. They live in colonies or family groups.

Raven had a mission. He was needed. He had a purpose.

It occurred to me that we all need to have a purpose in our lives. My wish for all of you for 2026 is to be like Raven. Find a purpose and pursue it with all the vigor and joy of Raven hunting for that mouse.

Baby Squirrels

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I work in my kitchen on a counter that spans a bay window overlooking my back yard. I live in the city of Minneapolis, so there are houses behind me, but my gardens are visible. I had landscapers install a feeding area for bird feeders, bird baths and flat, irregular-shaped, slate stones set into the ground.

From that window, I watch the wildlife. There are cardinals, bluejays, gold finches, house finches, robins, mourning doves and a myriad of other birds. Sometimes a flock of turkeys visit. When there is heavy rain we get ducks, who eat the corn I throw to them. Some of the feeders are on the ground for the ground-feeding birds. Bunnies, squirrels, chipmunks and an occasional opossum appear at the feeders. That’s okay. There’s plenty for all. We’ve taken so much of their habitat, we owe it to them to share.

This fall I’ve watched two baby squirrels playing in the ornamental apple tree just outside the window. They chase each other up and down, around the trunk, and through the branches, having so much fun. They are a joy to watch. Once in a while, they’ll pluck a dried apple from the branches to eat. They’re so cute when they go to eat seeds near the feeders, their tiny bodies sitting all hunched up eating the food I’ve put out.

I heard a fuss outside and looked up. A hawk was pursuing one of the baby squirrels, chasing it around the trunk of the tree. The squirrel escaped into a hedge of honeysuckle shrubs near the tree. The hawk pursued it. It lost sight of the squirrel, so it flew to the top of one of the poles holding the bird feeders, and perched. All the birds and squirrels were hiding. The hawk waited, watching for movement in the honeysuckle shrubs, and was prepared to strike.

I know hawks need to eat and mice, chipmunks, baby squirrels, and baby bunnies are their food source. But, these were my baby squirrels, darn it. I just couldn’t bear to think of having to watch the one left alone, playing all by itself, after its sibling was taken by the hawk. So I put on my shoes, went out onto the deck, down the stairs and into the yard. When the hawk saw me there, he he flew off to hunt in an area where no people interrupted him. I thought, ” Go and eat a baby squirrel from someone else’s yard. These little squirrels are mine.”

Yellow Raspberries

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I love raspberries. Decades ago, I was deciding what kind of raspberry bushes to plant in my garden. I talked to my Uncle, Ed Mickelson, and he said yellow raspberries had the best flavor for eating fresh. He told me he couldn’t grow them in their Cambridge, Minnesota, garden because it was just a little too far north. My garden is in the City of Minneapolis where we have the advantage of a heat-island, and they do grow here. I took his advice and now I have a patch of yellow raspberries that yield their delicious berries up until the first frost.

Ed wasn’t technically my uncle. He was married to Wilma Wilkins. Wilma was my father’s double cousin. Her mother, Annie Otten, and my father’s mother, Jennie Otten, were twin sisters. They were married to brothers, Wilma’s father, Walter Wilkins, and my father’s father, John Wilkins. Annie died very young leaving Walter with four young children. In those days, there were no day care centers for single parents who needed to work. So Walter asked for help from relatives and my grandparents took Wilma and raised her along with my father, William, and his brother, Gerrit.

As a child, I was aware of this arrangement. When I was older, I told Wilma that I was confused about our relationship. I knew she was Dad’s cousin, but she was also his sister. I was never sure whether she was my cousin or aunt. Wilma responded, “I’m your aunt.” And that was that.

Wilma had her two brothers in John and Jenny’s home. She had a brother and two sisters from Walter and Annie’s family. Years later when Walter remarried, Wilma told me of visiting another sister because Walter’s wife, Margaret, had a daughter. When she married Ed Mickelson, he became my uncle. And that’s the story of how I got those yellow raspberries.

My Writing Life

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When I left my last position, I did not retire. I determined to pursue my lifelong interest in writing. My B.A. degree was in Communications and Labor Studies. I started out as a journalism major and ended up writing my own degree program.

I received the Human Resources Professional certification at one point, and I began a blog “Working in the 21st Century” in which I gave career advice, commented on current employment issues, and listed resources for job seekers. I wrote columns like “How to Make $100,000+ Without a College Degree” and “Bad, Bad Boss.” I took courses at The Loft Literary Center and began writing creatively in earnest. The more I worked on my creative writing, the less I was interested in giving career advice. I ended that blog.

In 2015, I got my first piece of work, fiction, published in Work Literary Magazine. It was based on a down-sizing and restructuring experience at a former empoyer and titled “Passed Over.”

An essay was published in The Commonline Journal, “I Didn’t Speak Up,” about a bullying incident on a city bus. http://www.thecommonlinejournal.com/2015/09/i-didnt-speak-up-by-bonnie-wilkins.html?m=1

Since then, I’ve had many essays published in various online literary journals.

My current project is a book. It’s about District 32, a school district in Milo Township, Mille Lacs County, Minnesota. I attended the one-room country school from 1st through 5th grades. District 32 was more than a school district, it was a community. In a world where community seems to be disappearing, documented in books like Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam, I wanted to document what that community meant to me and my family. My mother wrote a newspaper column, “District 32,” for the Mille Lacs County Times newspaper for many years documenting the lives of the people in District 32. The people of this farming community had rich social and civic lives. I watched the women of District 32 finding them to be strong role models, who lived life on their terms, and helped shape the world around them.