We Are Under Occupation
I live in the Twin Cities. Please read this.
We had whistles. They had guns.
- Becca Good, January 9, 2026
FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!
- Donald Trump, Truth Social, January 13, 2026
Camerados-
I have been trying to write this post for over a week. In my head, I start sentences and then the tears come or the fury or the hypervigilance or the constant check-ins with my neighbors and friends.
I get a text in the middle of wondering if the word suffocation is anywhere near the ballpark of what we are living under /in / amidst…or is it more like boiling? Neither.
Scratch that.
Start over.
Breathe.
I should mention: I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My city is occupied by ICE and several federal agencies in what is being called Operation Metro Surge.
I am a novelist. Not a reporter. Not a poet. So to try and tell you what it’s like, I think I need to tell you stories. Introduce you to characters. I want to use my own words, but I can’t help but rely as well on the words of others—of poets, primarily, because they are so good at expressing the inexpressible.
I will try my best.
Living under occupation is something akin to being caught unaware by one of the Pacific’s mighty waves when your back is turned and suddenly you’re tumbling round and round and you know you can swim but then you remember riptides and you wonder if this time, it won’t be a matter of drinking too much saltwater. You knew the ocean was there, that it was dangerous. How silly, to think you could turn your back on it.
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Living under occupation reminds me of living with my stepfather. Of walking home from school with that rising anxiety and worrying if his truck would be in the driveway. Of what mood he would be in. How did I fuck up this time? What would be my punishment? That sinking in the gut. That rising panic. The swirl of thoughts. The ifs and thens. The desire to turn back towards school. The sense of powerlessness. Also: the fucking rage. Because it was unjust. And I was goddamn tired of it. The thoughts in my head. Of what I would do if I could. What I would say if I could. The heat of that. The explosiveness inside me that I couldn’t let out but that I was afraid would come out. The consequences if it came out. Wondering if I cared. Maybe it was time to open my mouth and just see what would happen. See if the slap would come. Fuck it. Let’s go.
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Living under occupation is like putting a sleeping baby in the middle of a bed, leaving the room—you’ll be back in a sec you just have to…and then hearing the thud before the cry.
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Wednesday, January 7, 2026
8:40 am
I am walking too fast to get to the clinical DBT group I co-facilitate. I slip on the ice, then fall. Hard. Oh my god. So hard. The day feels cursed from then on. Everything feels out of order and I don’t know why. My whole body hurts. This was supposed to be a new year, a better year. In a book, we call this foreshadowing.
2:45 pm
Somehow, I don’t find out about the murder of Renee Good until my workday is nearly through. I’ve just come out of an intake with a client. I’m reading a text between my husband and our friend, who is supposed to pick up some things from our house for his new baby. But someone outside our friend’s home was shot. By ICE. Wait, what?
Living Where She Died
It could have been me.
I need all of you to hear that. When you read this story in the paper, know that you could have been reading my name. This is close to home for all of you. It could have been me.
Around this time last year I attended an anti-ICE activist training. I then set about working to prepare my Zen center to be safe from ICE and working with a local interfaith group to house asylum-seekers at our center. Due to a surprise development, the organization was able to secure longterm housing for the families and didn’t need to use our Zen center. A few weeks before the murder of Renee Good, my DBT clinic that I intern at had an ICE training and we spoke specifically about how to protect our clients about what to do if ICE came to the clinic, as the surge had already begun, with the Somali population in particular being targeted.
Then January 7th happened.
I would have done everything Renee Good did, except I wouldn’t have been as nice as her.
There were schools on the road ICE was traveling on. She had just dropped off her kid. They’ve been showing up at schools, including in my husband’s school district, trying to take kids out of their classrooms. Kids. Fuck that noise. I would have blocked the road, too. And I certainly wouldn’t have gotten out of my car. In the trainings we were told that, as US citizens, we do not have to get out of our vehicles or comply with demands that we show them our identification. They are not police and have no jurisdiction over us. She knew her rights. The officer did not identify himself, show his badge, nothing. He was masked and was behaving aggressively.
You know who carries around guns and wears masks? Banks robbers and terrorists. Not officers keeping the peace.
She was clearly calm and engaging peacefully with the agents. They chose to escalate: “Get out of the fucking car.” One of the agents in the encounter was grabbing her car door and trying to pull her out. This is not allowed in police training. It’s terrifying. If you watch any video at any angle, it is clear that Renee Good’s murderer, Jonathan Ross, moved in front of the vehicle. But not before shooting her twice from the side of the car. This is a woman who was speaking in a measured voice, who had a black Lab in her backseat, whose wife was outside the car, also acting in a chill manner, telling the guys to leave them alone and just go get some lunch. There were bystanders all alongside the street.
Renee Good’s last words to her killer, Jonathan Ross, were: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
His last words to Good, after shooting her three times: “Fucking bitch.”
I could leave it at there, really. That exchange says it all. There were two kinds of people involved in this altercation and only one of them believed the other was a human being.
Race, Grief, The Mess of It All
I want to name something important that is getting lost in the narrative: It’s true that the activism in the cities escalated sharply after Good’s death and that Good was a white woman. This is a painful thing for activists of color to experience. ICE has been operating in the cities for a year, likely longer, and aggressively since the legitimate Somali fraud scandal. To see this outcry only after a white woman is killed feels, once again, like white life is being valued more than wives of color.
I also want to name, though, that her murder coincided with the surge of agents. While I do think that her death was especially shocking because she was a citizen and activist, it’s possible that it’s also because she was white, and we’re not used to seeing white women being killed by the police. However, I think what really hit people was the nature of her murder: how preventable and unnecessary it was, that she was a mother, and the widow of a veteran, and the wife of a veteran. She was a Christian who believed, truly, in the values of loving your neighbor. She was a poet. She was a light-bringer in a dark world and Jonathan Ross extinguished that light with his darkness, his misogyny, and his inability to think clearly in a tense situation. Not only did he kill her, but he put the lives of everyone on that street in danger. He has traumatized not only our city, but our country. And I fear he will not be prosecuted. I fear there will not be justice, and that Renee Good’s children and wife will not get to see him behind bars.
Would the outcry have been the same if she had been a woman of color? I hope so. I don’t know. Our country is so racist, but the cities are so diverse and so proud of its immigrant population and rose up so strongly for George Floyd, so I’d like to think that the reaction would have been the same. Even if the brutality of the government has gotten worse, I’d like to think that the courage and hearts of the people in these twin cities have increased even more since 2020. But if I were a person of color, I’d certainly be clocking this. I know as a white person I did.
The Small Animal of My Body
Mary Oliver talks about letting the small animal of your body love what it loves, but when I heard about this shooting, the small animal of my body went berserk. It didn’t love, it hated. Ohhhhhh, it hated. There was no love in this body.
Still isn’t.
My body wants to move. It wants to throw things. It wants to throw down. Especially when I see the President of the United States saying that Renee Good’s murder was justified because she was being “highly disrespectful” to law enforcement.
Apparently, it was okay to kill her because she and “her friend”—his bigotry made it impossible for Trump to refer to Good’s widow as her wife—were “professional agitators.” He went on to lie to the American people, saying the Goods had been following ICE for “for days” and then “for hours.” Try minutes, asshole. Do your fucking homework.
The soft animal of my body hears this and it gets harder. When Trump says that, he’s saying it’s okay for ICE, for any police, to kill any of us because we are “disrespectful.” I have been told by certain men all my life that I am “disrespectful.” I have been told that, if I don’t watch it, they’ll wash my mouth out with soap.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuk yoooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Then, my body hears Steven Miller, President of the Joseph Goebbels Fan Club, give blanket immunity from the federal government to all ICE officers on national television:
“To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. Anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. The Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.”
As you’ll see from the videos posted online, ICE’s determination of what trying to “stop” or “obstruct” them looks like is very loose. Driving behind them is trying to stop them. Protesting is now considered “criminal conspiracy” against the United States. State authorities are not allowed to intervene. This means that we have a federal government that is officially authoritarian.
Even if you’re a citizen, you’re not safe. Protesters are being pushed, arrested, and brutalized.
This interview of two protestors is a really good one to watch—they do a wonderful job of articulating what happened to them when ICE arrested them.
I also want to note that when they were arrested, they were not read their rights until they were brought to the detention center.
The female was told by the ICE officer who arrested her, “You gotta stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” He was referring to Renee Good.
The male with her was half-Mexican and was told he’d be protected and offered money if he gave up the names of family members and activist leaders.
They both describe the inside of the federal building in downtown Minneapolis where immigrant and citizen detainees are being held. Here’s a great resource to see what ICE is legally allowed and not allowed to do. Reddit is currently the best place to see real documentation of their behavior. The Minneapolis and Twin City threads are where to go.
If you think they aren’t coming for you right now, or the people you love, your neighbors, or your community yet, consider this: maybe they actually are.
If you are American: Minnesota IS your neighbor. We ARE your community. We are your countrymen.
We need you to be in the streets for us. We need you to be protesting this. Your fellow citizens are being disappeared. Activists are being rounded up.
This is America right here, right now.
This is not a drill.
What are you going to do about this? What are you going to write?
Your life as you knew it? It’s done. This is really happening.
People keep texting me to ask me how I am and this is a very hard question to answer when you live under occupation.
There are moments of hope and camaraderie that are really beautiful. Deep pride. Watching the videos on Reddit and seeing community members standing up to ICE are so incredibly amazing. (Reddit TwinCities and Minneapolis is where to go. Our community is posting a lot there.) I am so proud of the people in our cities. Of the brass brand that shows up at night to play outside a hotel where ICE is sleeping alongside dozens of protestors with pots and pans. Of the people screaming at Greg Bovino, head of ICE, at the gas station near my in-laws house. I am especially proud of our immigrants and people of color who are fucking done with this shit and have had it.
This immigrant woman who refused to show ICE her ID and refused to tell them where she was born, and simply kept insisting she was a citizen.
This badass security guard at McDonalds who refused to let ICE past the registers.
This bighearted white pastor who kept telling ICE he wasn’t afraid when they kept asking, “Are you afraid yet?” when they taunted him.
Just a few examples from the past week. 🩵
Trump says he won’t stand for how Iran treats its protestors, but he’s allowing this? Kristi Norm called Renee Good a domestic terrorist, but it’s clear the real domestic terrorists are ICE and their chief organizer is the president himself, who is gleeful about raining down punishment on a city that prides itself on being a sanctuary for refugees—we have more refugees per capita in Minnesota than anywhere else in the country. I’m so proud of that. I love that this Northern territory is so welcoming and that people come here and want to stay. Despite the cold, it’s deeply warm, filled with art, culture, and a passion for social justice. It’s not perfect. Obviously. What place is? But we care about the environment, about the health of our population, about beauty, about art, about accessibility. We want people to have good lives. We show up for each other. We agitate. We don’t give up on our fellow human beings.
Which is why Donald Trump has really miscalculated if he thinks he’s going to have a victory out here.
On Bearing Witness as a Writer to Collective Trauma
Dear friends of mine live in a big old Victorian house together on the street where Renee Good was killed. They all witnessed her murder because it happened right in front of their home.
Two of those friends had just had their baby four weeks ago, the other is the grandmother of that baby. The mama was breastfeeding her child upstairs, watching from a window as it happened. Can you imagine the trauma? Her newborn baby at her breast while she sees a mother get murdered.
Last weekend, my husband and I heard each of their accounts. All of them were shellshocked. Scared. Grateful for the community, but so, so, sad. George Floyd had been murdered just a few blocks away only five years ago. And now this. Their home includes two adopted refugee kids. Everyone’s terrified. What if they get stopped? Is their status safe enough? They no longer let the kids take public transportation, which means a major strain on the family to figure out how to get two busy teens to all their activities. The children of our city are being traumatized in unimaginable ways.
They’ve already lived through COVID and the murder of George Floyd. Now, they are having to endure this. No one is safe. ICE is brutalizing anyone they can. Even if the kids aren’t witnessing harm or are white and not in danger of ICE directly, they are feeling the tension and fear. They are witnessing the disappearance of their classmates of color, who are staying home because they are afraid to go to school. They are seeing their favorite Mexican or Somali or Hmong restaurants and grocery stores closed because the workers and owners have either been disappeared or are in hiding. They are seeing ICE agents outside their schools and in their community. Helicopters flying overhead all the time. They are living in a war zone.
As we spoke to our friends, we could hear the drum circle outside at the memorial for Renee Good. There was singing, chanting, the crowd swelling despite the cold. Before visiting our friends, the Zen Master and I had gone to the memorial, where there were candles, art, messages, and lots of tears. I left a paper with a small message for Renee on it with a wax stamp of an anatomical heart with sun rays coming out of it, because in her wife’s statement to the public, she’d said Renee had been “made of sunshine.”
I wrote:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”
Give me your Good.
You see, that was the America she was fighting for. That was the America I grew up being told we all wanted. What’s clear is that the Trump administration, the MAGA movement, and anyone that is in line with them does not believe in the values of that poem. They would be happy to see the Statue of Liberty at the bottom of the Atlantic. That don’t want the world’s tired or poor. They don’t want anyone who is yearning to breathe free. Their family got through the gates of Ellis Island, or however they got here, and now they want to close the borders. Even if our country has bombed those refugees’ countries to shit, or terrorized them, or funded a proxy war that reduced theirs to rubble. We funded Israel’s destruction of Gaza, but I doubt we’ll be taking in anyone from Gaza. We made Afghanistan more dangerous than ever for girls and women, but we’re making it impossible for them to come here. Trump called an entire nation of people—Somalis—“trash.” Trump wants to send them back where they came from, even if they’re citizens. Where does it end?
Writers, we are storytellers. The only thing I know that can effectively change hearts and minds is story. The ONLY thing that I have ever, ever seen melt an icy soul is when someone hears another’s story. That’s it.
What this means is that you, me, we are now on the front lines of a war—and this is a war—against a fascist regime.
We must tell the stories.
In whatever way possible.
Here are two:
Any person of color in the city isn’t safe. One of my husband’s colleagues said a white parent was driving her kid and the kid’s black friend to school when, suddenly, unmarked (they’re always unmarked) ICE SUVs surrounded the vehicle, their lights flashing, terrifying them, so the woman stopped. A masked agent got out and walked to the car. Mom rolled down her window a crack and asked why they were being stopped. The agent didn’t say a word. He walked to the back window, where the black kid was sitting, took out his big flashlight, and shined it in the kid’s face for a long time. He didn’t say a single word. Just shined it in his face. Then he walked off, got back in the SUV, and the ICE vehicles sped away. The car was silent. Then the mom and the black teen burst into tears.
The Zen Master, my husband, is a high school teacher who teaches immigrant kids. He’s an ELL teacher—often known as ESL. His students are all immigrants, some documented, some not. They come from all over the world. Ukraine, Somalia, Mexico, Afghanistan, you name it. They bring their trauma, their smiles, their TikTok videos, their sass, their swagger, their desire to learn English, their teen drama, their shyness, their smarts, their creativity, their desire for freedom. They are not trash. They are human beings. They are equal to every single person in this country, in this world. They are children.
Long before the surge, these kids have known fear. They knew it when bombs were falling on their countries. When their family members were being murdered by cartels. When they were in hiding. When they were in refugee camps. My husband has been doing the work of loving care of these vulnerable humans day in and day out for decades, teaching not only English but what it means to show up with kindness and dignity. He has been teaching the art of being a good human.
And now? They are absolutely terrified.
For those of you who write for kids, I’m sure your story brains can imagine the narratives here.
The day after Renee Good was murdered, my husband found out that one of his favorite students and his father were taken by ICE.
This kid was part of a best friend group of three kids, two of whom were taken in by a teacher to live with her after they graduated. Now, this group is down to these two. They have no idea what will happen to him. They’re afraid to go to work because of their status, but they’re also afraid to lose the jobs they need. This is the case of so many people in the cities. Will they send him back to the home country he had to leave because it wasn’t safe? Or will they send him to some random place, like Africa? Will be be violated in a detention center? They’ve heard the stories.
No one knows.
Watching Each Other’s Backs
This administration shits on teachers. It always has. Which is why I love that my husband and his fellow educators are with us writers on the front lines of this conflict and have been from the beginning.
Since the surge, he and his fellow teachers have had to up the ante on their care, often becoming the point people for the kids and their terrorized families. Whether it’s bringing groceries to families, checking in when kids don’t show up, seeing what families need, keeping tabs on who needs what and what their levels of anxiety are, these teachers—not the school social worker, not case managers—are the ones tending to their needs. These kids trust them. The teachers know them. They’re the people who they see day, day out. Immigrants rely on those connections. It’s all about who you can trust.
What We Need From You
The teachers have created a Go Fund Me because they can’t do this alone. They need help to buy food, clothing, things these kids and their families need when they can’t go into work, when they can’t go out to get their needs met because if they go out they will be harassed, have their human rights violated, detained, and possibly deported. Even the kids who are legal citizens don’t want to go out and be traumatized: if they are black or brown, men with guns are hunting them down. And even if they are legal, their families might not be and ICE will follow them home and try to take their families.
These teachers have their kids’ backs: can you have their backs, too?
My True Names
One of the things I tell my writers is to name what’s happening to them as they work with trauma in the writer’s seat, because when you name it, it has less power over you. Name the emotion, name the fear, tell the story, and don’t worry how badly it is written.
In fantasy novels, when you know a person’s true name, they lose power over you because now you know their truth—you know something about them and that’s currency. For the women in this city and for trans folks, and for people of color, having ICE here is fucking traumatizing. If you’ve ever dealt with white men brutalizing you, having big white men with their guns out around you all over your city means that your city isn’t safe.
Because of my trauma, men with guns pointed at me is very triggering. Literally. I have had a gun pointed at me by someone with military training who was not able to regulate themselves. That gun was then pointed at my husband.
The people in ICE are a mixed bag. Some have military training and some don’t. Because of the rhetoric coming out of the White House, which includes dehumanizing language about both immigrants and activists, as well as the response they’ve received from our community, there’s no telling what will happen on the ground. ICE agents have their guns out all the time, even though they’re not allowed to have them out unless there is a legitimate threat. Unarmed observers are not legitimate threats unless you’re a complete fucking baby and if you’re a complete fucking baby nobody should have given you a loaded gun in the first place.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how terribly inconvenient it is to be a Zen Buddhist right now. I am grappling with this truth: the violence in me is the same as the violence in Jonathan Ross. He called Renee Good a fucking bitch after he killed her. He called her that for so many reasons, some of which I can guess—our patriarchal culture, the culture of ICE, the MAGA culture. Perhaps how he was raised. Experiences he has had. Feelings he has about powerful women who do not submit. Who knows what.
But when I saw what he did to her, when I saw a white man point a gun at a woman and kill her?
Oh, the violence in me. My first words about him were: “Fucking motherfucker.”
I called him that for so many reasons. For our patriarchal culture, the MAGA culture. For all the women in my life who have been so hurt. For the men in my life that have deeply wounded me. For all the teen girls and women I have counseled and the stories I have held for them. How I was raised. Experiences I have had. Feeling I have about powerful men who treat women who do not submit.
I took vows to be non-violent. I took a great many vows when I received my dharma name, Renkyo, which means lotus dwelling. To dwell in the muddy waters of the lotus. No mud, no lotus, as Thich Nhat Hanh said.
I have been thinking about his incredibly powerful poem, Please Call Me By My True Names, which sums up the impossible work of being a Buddhist in times like these. I keep reflecting on these two verses:
I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am also the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.
In Zen, we recognize that we have both of these natures in us: the wounded and the wounded.
I immediately saw this in myself when I learned that he had called her a fucking bitch. I flinched because I remembered what I had called him. I wondered if he’d felt that hot violence I felt toward him. Because I hate him. I do.
I do not know how to find love or compassion for this man.
He killed a mother.
I keep thinking about her little boy.
Her wife.
Her other children.
The very last thing I want to do is love my enemies. I do not feel capable of saying what Renee Good was able to say before she was murdered: “I’m not mad at you.”
I am. I’m so fucking mad.
My disposition has always been more Malcolm X than Martin Luther King Jr. More Weather Underground than Blowin’ in the Wind. I wish it wasn’t so. Perhaps that’s what you get when two Marines make a baby in the desert of California: a socialist who absolutely loved the film One Battle After Another.
Bell Hooks, a Buddhist (and luminary of our times), said in her essay “Love is the Practice of Freedom” (1994) that
“the practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.”
I’m just not there yet. I hope to be. Let this post serve as my witness. As a woman, I’m so damn tired of being asked to forgive. Asked to turn the other cheek. But If Black folks and other people of color are the ones telling us this is the only way—Martin Luther King Jr., Bell Hooks, Thich Hat Hanh, Oprah, that goddess, and on and on—then it must be so. Anyway, I know this anger is burning me up from the inside. My wisdom mind, all my training, tells me it is so.
I know what I would tell my clients.
I do QiGong. I meditate. I pray. I breathe: in four, out eight, in four, out eight. Vooooooooo.
But then I watch that video of Renee Good being executed.
Again
And again
And again.
Fucking motherfucker.
What a loss Renee was. We needed her so badly in this fight. We needed her goodness. We needed Good.
I think she is my teacher in all of this. I wish she didn’t need to be.
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Amanda Gorman wrote a poem for Renee and she said,
Change is only possible,
& all the greater,
When the labour
& bitter anger of our neighbors
Is moved by the love
& better angels of our nature.
It is our youth who get it, isn’t it? Thank the universe for them. That’s why we have to fight, in love—for them.
Glimmers
What’s getting us all through are the videos of ICE agents falling on their asses on actual ice. They can’t handle the Minnesota weather! It really does warm our Northern hearts. For your viewing pleasure:
Sound on for this one, for sure. You want to hear the Minnesotan glee. Please share widely.
This one makes us giggle quite a bit, too.
We may be Buddhists, but, hey, we’re human. Fuck ‘em.
Also: much love to San Francisco for your lovely message on the beach. We see you and love you for your solidarity. It honestly meant so much. If any of you can organize collective solidarity action and post it - please do! It lifts our hearts. It’s cold as hell here and it warms us up!
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Thank you to everyone who has reached out. I will try to update my notes here on Substack about the situation on the ground.
I will continue to write posts in this space, but in the context of how it relates to us as writers and artists, about how we show up in these times, and how we take care of ourselves and our artist community.
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One more thing: know your rights, beloveds! Here is a good post with leaked docs from ICE trainings, straight from the war horse’s mouth.
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Finally, this, by local poet Robert Arnold:
Viva la revolución, camerados! Stay safe. Make Good trouble.
Yours in doing right by the goddamn miracle,
P.S.
Heather, I don't even know how to put what I am feeling into words.
I fear for so many in our country.
I rage at men who are selfish and blind.
Thank you for sharing your lived experience.
Be safe out there!
Thank you for this report. I live in a neighborhood with a large Ukrainian American population that has offered homes and work for thousands of Ukrainian refugees. I feel their gratitude when they see my patches and buttons supporting Ukraine, and I want to give the same support to you in Minnesota. I hope the choices don't come down to the ones the Ukrainian people are facing, when nonviolence no longer works because the forces against them are so monstrous and so committed to their destruction.