El Qué Intermodal

Early December 2025 I got back from a 5+ month road trip around the country. Doing the Van Life thing. Mostly couch surfing with rellies and friends, but also several weeks’ worth of campgrounds and rest areas for overnight stays in the lightly tricked out GMC Savana.

I got home in time to hear about Operation Metro Surge, the Donald “I Am Your Retribution” Trump’s promise to punish Minnesota and with particular disdain, Minneapolis-St. Paul for supposedly giving sanctuary to immigrants without proper documentation, who entered the country illegally. The President, twice rejected roundly by the popular vote, but elected to his first term due to the Electoral Gerrymander College, put a cherry on top of his protofascist pie by claiming it was in response to rampant fraud here.

Soon enough the pretense for a crackdown on fraud and immigration violations was wiped off the spit-stained federal agents’ tinted motorcade windows. Immigrants following all the procedures for work visas and citizenship were rounded up in random “raids” far more often than the stated worst of the worst of hardened criminals without documentation. And so much for the legality of their operations on all levels–“administrative warrants” for home invasions that require the judicial kind, stopping constitutional observers in their cards, arresting them violently, and keeping them indefinitely in detention, and the ultimate prize for the authoritarian leader of the Republican Party, executions of practitioners of the 1st and 2nd Amendments.

I’m surely not the only person wondering when the opportunity would arise to join the already thousands of protesters in documenting the daily catalog of abuses. But arose it did, when the Border Patrol’s top dog Bovino arrived at the gas station on our block, escorted by whistling and honking protestors. Although late to the proceedings, I turned on my phone before I got out of my house, started the camera as I reached my fellow-travelling peacemongers, and captured one of the few orderly retreats conducted during the siege. This was no turning over of leaves; a judge days before had ordered DHS et alia to stop gassing, shooting at, and rounding up peaceful protestors. We may never know why Bovino had his secret police (no names, no badge numbers, just a camo balaclava topping off a Dollar General get-up–but real guns) high-tail it out of the station. The manager refused the Team Trump players service. Even Bovino looked a smidge contrite on one blogger’s video.

But that was not to last. A few hours later, another judge lifted the order and blocks away, the tear glass flowed like a mighty polluted river.

Days later, another ICE vehicle pulled over onto our block, ahead of a modest caravan of observers, who patiently waited at a full stop in the middle of the street. After a couple beats, the ICE SUV peeled away, with the patient observers resuming the chase at a distance.

I attended the rally at Target Center, joining ten thousand Minnesotans from more than just the metropolitan area, to add to the meaningful human visual.

I joined our neighborhood’s Block Aid Blockade to sign up for notices of families in need, marches planned, and other escalating acts of protest plus mutual aid for businesses that have lost employees to the feds’ violence, or threat of it, and with it, much of their business for months.

That is all I did. I can’t say I feel like I’ve done a lot. But when I think back to the gas station, and how fifty people looked like ten thousand against the inhumane dozen in the station’s lot, my being one person is enough, it is enough when the call comes out, to be one more bearing witness. One is enough, when counted among hundreds who gather up groceries to deliver food safely to families living out an Anne Frank existence. One is enough, when writing ones congressperson to affirm the non-negotiable requirement of DHS to force their KKK–excuse me, DHS, CBP, ICE and other Orwellian Ignorance is Strength officers–to drop the masks and order them to show the courage of their misplaced convictions by putting their name and badge number on their uniforms.

I’m only one witness, one voice, one voter. But E Pluribus Unum, after all.