For Japanese Americans, today, February 19, is the Day of Remembrance, when we look back to 1942 when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066; this proclamation removed 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast and put them in concentration camps in desolate areas of the West and South. Like two thirds of those imprisoned, my parents eleven and fifteen, were natural born citizens; my father’s family was sent to Jerome, a camp in the Arkansas swamps; my mother’s family to Minidoka in a remote region of Idaho. The camps were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards in rifle towers; the facilities were hastily constructed barracks with multiple families cramped into tiny spaces and latrines that didn’t work.
In the time between Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt’s orders, Japanese Americans were subjected to insults and attacks on themselves and their property. There were signs of Japs Go Home”; newspapers blazed false headlines of “Jap fifth column activities” and “Caps on Jap Tomato Plants Point to Airbase”. Referring to the American born Japanese like my parents, an LA Times editorial declared, “A viper is a viper wherever the egg is hatched.” We were rats, cockroaches, vermin.
As a child, for me WWII was a distant reality, and the adults never talked to us kids about their wartime experiences. It was only as an adult that I began to understand what my parents and their families had gone through. But today, living in Minneapolis during the ICE invasion of our city, I have a contemporary lens through which to view what my parents and their families experienced and what they didn’t want to talk about.
When President Trump called the Somali community here “garbage” or when the Haitians in Ohio are accused of eating pets, the echoes are all too clear. With masked anonymous agents grabbing both immigrants and US citizens in the streets, asking for their papers, with agents breaking down doors and grabbing people from their homes and cars, with videos of children running from their school swarmed by ICE or five-year-old Liam Ramos with his blue bunny hat being forced to knock at his door to entrap his parents, I see a new version of the white supremacist hatred of immigrants and people of color that my parents experienced (nothing similar was done to Italian or German Americans); I see the same fear that my parents and their families must have felt back in 1942. I see people imprisoned in inadequate facilities, not knowing what will happen to them, not being given the writ of habeas corpus or access to a lawyer. I see the Trump administration trying to build mass “internment camps” echoing what we in the Japanese American community used to call our prisons.
All this tells us once again what the Trump administration means by Make American Great Again. They want to be able to go back to a past when there were no “guardrails” or prohibitions against white supremacist hatred, when the government both explicitly and implicitly reserved certain privileges and rights only for white people, where people of color like my parents could never be considered “legitimate” American citizens.
And yet, there is an important difference between what happened to the Japanese Americans in WWII and now. When the Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and imprisoned, everyone else either supported the actions or did nothing to protest the mass incarceration of citizens and immigrants.
But in the Twin Cities, for the past two months, our whole community has been fighting back against these forces of hatred and violence unleashed by the Trump administration: We are standing up for our neighbors. Tens of thousands have been working in unprecedented ways to protect each other, especially the most vulnerable among us. Ordinary Minnesotans organized to track ICE vehicles and warn immigrants, blowing horns and whistles, using phones to record the brutal actions of ICE agents, including the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. Zoom training sessions on tactics and rights have brought thousands into this fight. Given these outrageous killings and the use of tear gas and other chemical agents, the smashing of car windows, the tackling and beatings of both citizens and immigrants, the dangers of following ICE agents are clear. But this has not stopped ordinary people from doing this work, moms like Renee Good or nurses like Alex Pretti. Others transport children to school or immigrants to doctors’ appointments; others donate and distribute food to families who are afraid of leaving their homes. Others volunteered for legal services for immigrants. And of course, tens of thousands have joined in protests throughout the city and at the Whipple Government Center where both citizens and immigrants are being detained.
As many have observed, there’s something special about our community here. Part of our resistance builds on the political activism from the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. Those protests galvanized the Twin Cities (among other things, the Black Lives Matter protests bridged some of the divisions between the Somali American and African American communities here). But this activism also stems from a communal spirit that abides here, a sense of civic responsibility, the fact that we are among the second leading city with a sense of social cohesion (the first is Mormon Salt Lake City). In describing the Twin Cities, I’ve often cited a version of Scandinavian socialist mentality here, where a large portion of the white population comes from Scandinavian countries (as opposed to say the Germanic and Eastern European populations of Milwaukee). This isn’t a place whose culture focuses avidly on wealth and individual achievement; it’s not a city of brashness and braggadocio, but one of modesty, of being just like your neighbor, not better. The robust Twin Cities arts community is decidedly multiracial and was strongly engaged in social justice, long before the murder of George Floyd.
When I first moved here in the early 1970’s, there was a Black and Native American community, but the image of the cities adhered to the all-white visions of Mary Tyler Moore and Garrison’s Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. But since that time, in part because of the local liberal churches, wave after wave of immigrants have settled here—Latinos, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Tibetan, Somali, Liberian, Karin, Bosnian. And unlike in many other cities, these communities were not segregated into strict geographical areas. The Hmong for instance settled in Black North Minneapolis and East St. Paul, and I remember the late entertainer Tou Xer Xiong at Hmong Day at the State Fair, as he emceed the day’s activities, asking from the stage, “How many of you Hmong have a Black person in your family?” and shouts went up, and he said, “Yeah, we all have a Black family member and we all have a white family member too.” Yes, there were and are tensions between these communities of color, these immigrant communities, but over time, these tensions have decreased, in part because the young people all grew up together.
In my own family I have connections to the Somali and the Latino community. My middle son is married to a Somali American. He works at the Wellstone High School for recent immigrants, whose students come from all over the globe. He fears and worries for his students, and he’s asked my wife and I to deliver food to some of their families. While the violence of ICE and the protest activities are visible on the streets, a less recorded story involves the thousands of immigrants trapped in their homes and afraid to go out. It’s heartbreaking to see how terrified they are. When my wife knocked on the door of a Somali mother last week, the mother initially refused to open thinking my wife was an ICE agent and the language barrier made it hard to communicate. It was only when the mother called her son, who is a student of my son, that she finally opened the door and thanked us for the food we bought. At another home, we bought food and the wrong family came out and thanked us for the food and so we had to go back to the grocery because there were two families trapped in that same building.
So yes, there is so much fear and terror here. I teared up last night listening to a 70-year- old Latino woman on CNN as she spoke of how her business has failed because of the presence of ICE and she can’t make rent; in the next segment a mother was weeping next to her elementary school aged son, talking of how terrified she is and how she hasn’t left her house for weeks. A neighbor, seeing the black CNN van, feared it was an ICE van, and came to the door, asking if the mother was all right.
And yet, at the same time, I keep remembering my son’s description of his school’s prom where all the students sang along in Spanish to the Mexican pop hit Despacito—not just the Mexican students, but the Karin, the Somali, the Liberian. To him, this is America, the America he grew up in. It was his park league basketball team where I would drive his team of two Somali kids, one Eritrean, a Mexican, two African Americans, a Tibetan and my mixed-race son, all singing to a rap song on the radio. My children grew up in the diversity that J.D. Vance and Trump so hate; they have grown up to love those of other ethnicities and races. The resistance in our city comes out of how our children have grown up with a diversity that so many fear and we here celebrate.
Like so many, I have wept watching the videos of the murder of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, footage which only confirm what ought to be obvious: ICE agents murdered Renee and Alex; Renee and Alex were not domestic terrorists, but concerned citizens who wanted to protect their neighbors.
Since Renee, a recent newcomer to the Twin Cities, was a poet like me, I probably would have eventually met her. But that is how connected we are here. We know the places where these murders took place, we’ve driven down those roads, shopped at Glam doughnuts. The images of our everyday lives in the city now carry a nightmarish quality. These memories will be with us forever, just as that corner on Chicago Ave. where George Floyd was murdered will stay with us forever. But the site of Renee’s and Alex’s killings are now hallowed ground, a testament to their fight for justice, a site of tears and mourning, a celebration of their lives.
Yes, we have experienced trauma, but we march on, we fight on.
On the night of Renee Good’s murder, my daughter, Samantha, spoke on CNN in her role as a MN State Representative from South Minneapolis. I was proud to hear my daughter call Renee’s death a murder. And yet I was terribly fearful for her too. She had breached the national media spotlight and we all know the negative threats such exposure brings. Indeed, she was a friend and colleague of Rep. Melissa Hortman and the murder of Hortman and her husband was both a personal loss and a personal trauma for my daughter.
A couple weeks ago, I attended a town hall that my daughter moderated. Rep. Ilhan Omar spoke of how she came here at twelve fleeing from tribal warfare. She described how people from countries like Somalia looked to the United States as a place where rights were protected, lives were protected, as a haven from oppression. “We need to ensure that continues,” she said, otherwise there is nowhere else where people can seek sanctuary. There were immigrant activists there from El Salvador. One of them was organizing food distribution for immigrants who can’t leave their homes. Another, a lawyer, talked of the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti which occurred just a mile from the church where we were meeting. He then spoke of the death squads in El Salvador, from which his family had fled. He pointed out that these death squads kidnapped and disappeared people before they killed them, they didn’t just kill them out in the open on the street. So what did that say about the killings of Renee and Alex?
That night Rep. Omar spoke of what was happening in the Twin Cities as “radical love.”
In the Atlantic, Adam Serwer calls what’s happening in the Twin Cities “neighborism”—the belief in helping your neighbor, loving your neighbor, whatever their race, ethnicity, country of origin, gender, orientation/preference, and of course immigration status: “Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’ Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu”—or I might add Vietnam, Laos, Liberia, Eritrea, Bosnia, Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, Tibet and so many more.
What is happening now in the Twin Cities is a repudiation of the MAGA white supremacist vision of America. It is a celebration of what the best in America has always been, a place where people from around the globe have to come to live because we believe in democracy, in equal rights, in justice and fair play. We are saying that strength comes from love not hatred, from our diversity not our sameness, from our capacity and willingness to band together. Patrolling and warning for ICE, delivering food to those in danger, hiding and housing them, walking the streets in protest in below zero, we have gone all in. As some have remarked, it takes more courage to face the barrel of a gun with a phone than to point the gun at an unarmed citizen.
Unfortunately it took the killing of a second US citizen, a white male, that seems to have finally turned the national tide against the occupation of our cities. But it is not only Alex Pretti’s death—and brave and compassionate life as an ICU nurse—that has helped accomplish this. It is the work done by all of us in the face of Trump’s fascism. It is our communal belief in the values of the Constitution and neighborly love that has sustained us in this fight and has forced a withdrawal of ICE agents from here.
In an irony MAGA will not understand, through the work of ordinary Minnesotans, we are the ones who are making America great again.
David Mura’s most recent book is the acclaimed The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives. His previous book was on creative writing and race, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing. With essayist Carolyn Holbrook, Mura co-edited the 2021 anthology of Minnesota BIPOC writers, We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World. He has just finished a book of essays on Asian American issues and his own personal journey, Exit, Miss Saigon, which will appear in Sept. 2026.
Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, fiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity.
