I am writing this from a hypothetical 2075, looking back at the 2020s. The raids in Minneapolis weren’t just about immigration—they were the moment we accepted that the war zone could be anywhere.
A Letter from the Future Archives
I want you to imagine I am writing this from fifty years in the future. The dust has settled, and we are looking back at the 2020s trying to pinpoint exactly when the American city ceased to be a civic space and became a theater of operations. The records from Minneapolis and Saint Paul during the Trump era stand out. The localized clashes, the tear gas, the dragging of a Somali American man by masked agents—it all seems so obvious now. We weren’t witnessing ‘law and order.’ We were witnessing the border detaching itself from the map and attaching itself to people.
One must not think that the camp is a historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past... the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.
– Giorgio Agamben
The Myth of Exempt Status
The tragedy of your time—our past—is that you believed the machinery was only built for ‘them.’ You watched ICE operations and told yourselves that because you held a passport, the battering ram would never touch your door. But look at the reports of off-duty officers of color being interrogated for citizenship. The machine does not care about your status; it cares about its own reach. The moment we accepted that a neighborhood could be treated like a occupied territory, we forfeited the right to complain when the occupation expanded.
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The Silence Was the Seal
Why didn’t we stop it? Because we were seduced by the protection illusion. We thought safety required the sacrifice of someone else’s dignity. But as James Baldwin warned us decades before even that crisis:
The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.
– James Baldwin