“Are you okay?” The question is asked by a white American neighbor Veronica Svetazfrom Santa Fe living in Minneapolis for more than twenty years. For this reason, Verónica accumulates very specific knowledge about the migrant population in a state where this time of year, freezing temperatures don’t disrupt community organizing to defend people from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Her neighbor’s question summarizes organized care, concern for others and putting oneself at service in the face of bloody anti-immigration policy of the administration of Donald Trump which, in that territory, cost the lives of Renée Good y a Alex Pretti in the last two weeks. Verónica answers that yes, she and her family are fine. The exchange is simple; However, it excites her, as does taking her daughter Lola to public school and seeing how fathers and mothers organize themselves to patrol the blocks with walkie-talkies—not with cell phones, because the agents intervene—and take care of the children of migrant families.
“Right now, I am taking care of my patients through telemedicine. We are implementing everything we learned with Covid because People who look Latino are locked in their homes out of fear.. Because at this moment it doesn’t matter if you have a passport or not: “They take you the same way and you have to endure that physical violence,” He says with a voice that denotes exhaustion. Just heard the song Bruce Springsteen he wrote against the ICE offensive, it is called “Streets of Minneapolis” and it continues playing while his dog barks to go outside where the thermometer at midday reads -14 degrees.
A wounded city
Verónica is a doctor specializing in adolescence and her professional career allows her to realize the importance of inclusive and progressive laws in the field of health, but also in the formation of a well-adjusted social fabric. What happens in the social and sensitive fiber of the people who live in the place where, six years ago, the police murdered the African-American George Floyd? Why do images of white people devising creative strategies to defend migrants from ICE travel around the world as a great wake-up call to resist Donald Trump’s policies?
“Here you have a society that works and that is completely contrary to the ideals of the current national government”says. For her, the murder of George Floyd by the police was a turning point, proof of radical racism that marked a limit: “Those who are outside today are not Latinos nor are they African Americans: they are white people.”
Do you attribute the fact that white people are on the streets to the murder of George Floyd in 2020?
—Partly yes. Floyd’s murder occurred in the quintessential Latino enclave and then Covid came, which greatly affected the Latino community. It is about the wound of the city, which allowed everyone to see the injustices and inequalities of race; That is why they are now mobilizing and organizing, precisely because of that wound.
You are referring to people who might not have considered structural racism until that moment…
-And if. Notice that there are older people who never went out on the streets and are now doing so, or fathers and mothers who see their teenage children organizing in the neighborhood, taking the children of Latin families to school, bringing them food. Faced with that, can you stay without doing anything?
Revenge and resistance
Very close to where Verónica lives, federal agents shot a Venezuelan boy in the leg a few days after the murder of Renée Good: “It was full of older people, young people and families protesting. I saw it with my own eyes because it is a neighborhood above the one we live in. And there were also many white women, many of them feminists, which is another of the great stories of this government: anti-feminism.”
Minnesota has established itself as a refuge state for sexual and reproductive rights; It is called the “sanctuary” for migrants and LGTB+ people. However, according to Veronica, Starting with Trump’s first presidency, we had to resist a lot in the face of threats within universities and clinics in relation to abortion or the hormonalization of trans people..
“Renée Good had come very recently with her partner and daughter. They decided to leave Missouri after the 2024 elections; they were looking for a ‘refuge’ in Minnesota from the conservative policies of their previous state, especially security for their LGBTQ+ family. And she ends up dying here, it’s tremendous.”
I would like to return to what you said in relation to a state that works and that is categorically opposed to the Trump administration. Do you think that’s why migrants are targeted here?
—I think that in Trump’s first presidency they learned that they had to have people loyal to the project because everything they were going to do was illegal. Trump was left with ‘blood in his eye’ after Floyd in Minneapolis; At that moment he wanted to raise up to defend the police and he couldn’t. This is a revenge campaign.
What happens to you when you hear people who go out to protest sing “the people united will never be defeated”?
—We are in the year 2026 and in this country there is going to be a Soccer World Cup. I can’t help but think that in ’78 in our country there was also a World Cup and people disappeared. There is a lot of violence in the street, but unlike that time, where everything was quieter, here there is a lot of noise. They are full of machine guns, display and spectacle of terror. But everyone is also up in arms, for me it is precisely the opposite of “don’t get involved” or “they must have done something.”
Despite the organization and a society determined not to let their rights be trampled, what she observes is that ICE advances in places that were previously respected, such as clinics, schools or churches: “That undoubtedly generates fear, but Minnesota has been a wake-up call (a wake-up call) for the entire country and, perhaps, for the world.”
Cultural concordance
Verónica migrated to the United States to specialize in adolescence, In 2001 he presented a project to eliminate health disparities arguing that it was scientifically proven that when the health provider and the patient agree on their cultural identity the results are better. The clinic where she did her residency and where she currently works became a beacon for the migrant community.
You have been working with migrants for 20 years, I imagine that everything has changed a lot. How do you define this moment?
—It is a paradigm shift and it is instilling fear. But the strength is in that which moves us to take care of each other, in the first Trump administration they scared migrants by telling them that if they had a subsidy or asked for help to eat they would have problems processing citizenship. At that time we did a great job to deny that, now it is about defending hand to hand those who are in their homes afraid that ICE will take them away, the important thing is that there is always an answer.
Originally published on Page 12
