‘Hyper vigilance:’ Minneapolis residents with Chilkat Valley ties reflect on federal immigration crackdown
- Chilkat Valley News
- 2 hours ago
- 11 min read
By Will Steinfeld
Chilkat Valley News
Over the past two months Minneapolis has seen a surge of federal immigration enforcement activity. The Chilkat Valley News spoke to Jasper and Skye Posey, and Sydney Mintz — three individuals with Chilkat Valley ties — about their recent experiences in Minneapolis. The Poseys, who grew up in Haines, now live in Minneapolis. Mintz, a rabbi and seasonal Haines resident, participated in clergy protests last month in Minneapolis.
Skye Posey
Skye Posey grew up in Haines before moving to Minneapolis in 2021, where they currently live. Posey has been participating in neighborhood and community organizing efforts that have formed in the city in response to a large influx of federal immigration-enforcement agents.
Will Steinfeld
What I’ve seen from my vantage point is it seems like a lot of the national news has kind of moved on (from Minneapolis). I’m wondering what life is like for you right now.
Skye Posey
It definitely feels like the sort of attention and buzz around everything has kind of died down. But it’s far from normal. We’re all in these neighborhood-based Signal chats to coordinate with one another and keep an eye out, and do rapid response and all that. My phone is still blowing up all day, every day. It’s just too much to try to keep up with. The number of reports (of federal immigration activity) has not changed that dramatically from mid- to late January to now.
It has been like two months of sort of hyper vigilance every time you leave the house. I’ve never experienced the amount of just sort of ambient paranoia.
When did that feeling of having to be constantly vigilant start? Was it a sudden change, or did it start increasing at some point?
I grabbed some friends and went to a constitutional observer training in early December. Our guards have been up since probably November, but it felt like the tension was sort of gradually growing. And then January hit, and it just kind of got crazy because we had, I think we had a sort of Chicago-, Portland-amount of federal agents running around for a few months in the fall, and then after Renee Good was killed, it was like everyone’s attention was on us, and the numbers went just way up.
How often do you feel like you’re seeing federal agents on the street or protesters on the street? Does the world look different than it did two months ago?
A lot of people keep signs in their windows and houses. Most businesses that you walk into, including my workplace, have signs on the door saying, “if you’re a federal agent, you’re not allowed in here.” You’ll see people carrying whistles around.
In terms of protests, I grew up in Haines. I’m not exactly one to throw myself into a big crowd at any opportunity, but the protests that I have gone to have been massive, tens of thousands of people. My partner and I went to the vigil the day that Renee Good was killed, and thousands of people were there with less than a day’s notice. The giant downtown march was insane. A lot of the time when I’m driving around I’ll see people posted up on the corner or doing smaller organized marches downtown that have gone past my office.
When you talk to people in Haines, are there parts of what you’re experiencing that you feel like you want to try and convey to them that aren’t getting through on social media or in the news?
I want people to understand the feeling of the lack of safety that absolutely everyone here is having to deal with right now.
I have never in my life experienced the feeling of not being safe when I leave the house that I have now.
It’s hard to describe to people that the way we’re grocery shopping right now is akin to when a big blizzard is about to happen. And it’s very obvious here that it is just not about illegal immigrants who are also criminals. They are going after anyone that they think is kind of suspicious, which usually means you’re not white, and then if you try to intervene, you also become a target.
Is that something you’re seeing firsthand or experiencing firsthand?
I’m a kind of timid person, so I’ve been involved in my neighborhood as much as I can, but the risk calculus definitely shifted over the last month or so when (federal agents) started targeting observers more. That has been kind of the scariest part, because now I want to intervene if something is happening in front of me, but also, you don’t have the sort of safety net that people probably assume you have as someone who’s white.
Most neighborhoods have patrol networks, just civilians jumping in a car with a friend and keeping an eye out, running license plates and all that. Federal agents have been getting out of their cars to take pictures of these people, telling them to their face that they’re running them through a database. I have been on these calls, and someone says, “an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent is following me right now, and then they were driving to my house.”
Do you know people who are immigrants or people of color who are feeling the stakes of this immigration operation firsthand? Was there a point in the past few weeks or months where you got a sense of what the stakes were for this?
I have a lot of friends who are immigrants, or have family who are immigrants. I’ve heard from friends instructing their dad on which papers to carry around and how to respond if they are stopped. I have friends who are citizens but who aren’t white who’ve started carrying photocopies of their passports everywhere they go. I know of people who have been wrongfully detained at the Whipple building for days at a time and released at 11 p.m. with no jacket on. I have co-workers who are on visas, and they’ve been riddled with anxiety constantly for months now.
Are there any specific images or memories that stick in your head of times when you’ve felt encouraged about this community effort or about the city you’re living in, like you were talking about before?
I’ve had a lot of just small interactions with people on the street that have really felt encouraging. I think there’s a really palpable sense of having each other’s backs and knowing that if you’re in trouble, people will be around and willing to help.
The vigil that we went to on January 7 was the first time I had ever attended anything even protest-adjacent and I was just crying the whole time, because I’d never witnessed that many people gather so quickly for something and be passionately on the same page that something is wrong.
So I moved here in fall of 2021, I went to the University of Minnesota, and that’s kind of how I ended up here. But I keep being reminded of Haines in 2020.
It really reminds me of after we had the landslide, everyone was doing everything they could to make sure that their neighbors were safe and supported. That outpouring of completely apolitical love and action, that’s kind of the feeling here right now. It’s like, “I don’t give a shit if we don’t agree on which candidate to vote for or like how to spend tax money. Everyone is saying, hey, this is messed up.”
It’s something that I didn’t think could exist outside of the small town context. It’s really special to see that it can.
Is there anything else you want people in Haines to know?
I feel like Haines is kind of a bit of a divided place. And I would just encourage people to really get to your common humanity with people you disagree with and find things that you can agree with them on, even within things that you disagree about. And just coming at political conversations from a place of, we’re all trying to make this place a good place to live for everyone. Creating a safe, prosperous environment for us to do the things that our country is supposed to be able to do — all that is based on finding points of agreement.
Sydney Mintz
Seasonal Haines resident Rabbi Sydney Mintz passed through town this month after a trip to Minneapolis. In Minneapolis, Mintz was part of a group of clergy from across the nation who assembled to protest in the city following the killing of Minneapolis resident Renée Good by Department of Homeland Security officers.
I’ve spent my summers up in Haines since about 2010, increasingly longer every summer, and now I have a place out in Mud Bay.
The other 10 months, I’m in the Bay Area. I have a synagogue in San Francisco called Congregation Emmanuel, and I’ve been the rabbi there for 29 years.
My colleague, who I worked with at Temple Emanuel in San Francisco for almost 10 years, left San Francisco, went to Minneapolis, and became the rabbi at his home synagogue — where he grew up — about a year and a half ago.
And so when the ICE activity started, I checked in with him and his family and his congregation, and it became really clear that things were not normal there, and they were progressively getting worse.
Once Renee Good was killed, a very large group of clergy started gathering, and we got there for a Thursday and Friday action. There was community organizing, and then the next day was the massive protest, and the day after that was the day that Alex Pretti was killed. I left that day.
In between those 48 hours, there were clergy actions: 100 (members) of the group got arrested at the airport. When you’re outside of Minneapolis, you don’t realize that three or four planes of people every day are being detained and flown out of Minneapolis Airport.
So this group of 650 clergy — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, almost every religious background — came together and did some community organizing and training and meeting with people on the ground. And what I found when I was there was this sense of, everyone is my neighbor in Minneapolis, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to protect my neighbors. People in Minneapolis started organizing and getting groups together, neighborhood by neighborhood, to make sure that if people were going to go into hiding and were no longer able to work or go get groceries or get medicine, that there were going to be literally squads of people who took time off from work and from school and went door to door and brought food and medicine to their neighbors.
My colleague’s synagogue adopted a school that is made up of about 50% immigrants down the street from them in urban Minneapolis.
It was a school with 800 students. Four hundred of the families were in hiding and not sending their kids to school, so half the school was empty, and the other half was covid-style, back on Zoom.
Today, still, those kids are home with their parents, are in fear, doors are closed, shades are down, there’s just that sense of fear in Minneapolis.
When you were at those actions, what kind of people were surrounding you? Who were the people you were talking to?
When I was there, I was surrounded by people who were in our delegation of priests and ministers and rabbis and imams and pastors, but then also just everyday people from Minneapolis. It was 30 degrees below zero, wind chill factor on the Friday that the city was shut down. I was surrounded by families with kids, and it was not violent.
People were singing songs. There was this amazing, huge brass band from Minneapolis that kept popping up, almost like a New Orleans brass band, and playing. And when you hear a brass band, you can’t not be happy.
So it was all different kinds of people, young people, old people, people of color. But I will say there was a sense of fear. If you’re a person of color in Minneapolis, you’re afraid. I think there were a lot of people who wouldn’t come out for the protests because they felt like — and they could’ve been a fourth-generation American — but they felt like, because of the way they look, they could be targeted.
You were saying you were seeing this on social media before you went (to Minneapolis). What did you see when you were actually there that was different than what you saw on social media?
I saw a lot of love. And what you get (on social media) is the fear and the protest and the violence. You get the masked men and the sense of a militarized zone. You do see that when you land on the ground there. But then you get the other part: people were bringing food and medicine to their neighbors. I got a real sense of people being so proud to be American: proud to be Americans, proud to show up as Minnesotans — really working hard together to define Minneapolis as a sanctuary, a place of pride, a place of love.
Do you feel like there’s a role for clergy to play going forward in these protests? How do you see your own role as clergy?
Well, you serve as a religious witness … But it’s not just for the people on the ground — we go back and we speak to the people who are our congregants and our congregation. It’s as important, or even more important, for people to feel like their faith leaders are leaning into the values and the ethics of the part of this country that really cares about religion.
I think it’s of value for a minister or a pastor or a priest or rabbi going to their congregation saying, “I went there, I saw this.” Also, to encourage communities to start breaking down the barriers that divide them in their own home cities and towns, so that they get to know their neighbors who might need protection at some point.
Jasper Posey
Will Steinfeld
How are you getting your news about what’s happening in the city?
Jasper Posey
It’s mostly things that are shared through social media.
There are also group chats that get created in different communities that you can sign up to join. It’s sort of a rapid-response network of people who live in certain neighborhoods, who will text these group chats to like, just tell each other, “Hey, I just saw ICE at this place or at this intersection.”
In such a big city, you kind of have that sense of anonymity. You don’t really know most people you see, and that’s just normal. So then being in one of those chats, getting messages from people who live a few blocks from you, and realizing that there are people, just like you, a couple blocks away, that are also reacting to the same things — it sort of increased my sense of being in a community.
When do you feel like this started building up? Was it gradual, or was it a pretty sudden change?
It was gradual before the actual operation Metro Surge happened. The one time I saw agents was before that. And then when the actual announcement of Operation Metro Surge happened, that’s when it was a sudden change. There was just a sense of fear that was suddenly everywhere.
You see all these videos of people being tear-gassed and shot in some cases, and this sort of bad feeling takes over everybody. Particularly after the shootings happened, it was very, very grim.
If you’re talking to people back here in Haines, is there anything that you felt like you’ve been trying to convey to them about what you’re going through that might not be coming through big newspapers or social media or however people are learning about it?
I think the amount of video evidence and coverage that it’s been getting is pretty all-encompassing. You can’t really ask for better visual evidence or documentation of it, because there’s just been so much footage that people have taken.
Are those kinds of stories things you hear people talk about with friends or out in public? Or is it mostly online?
The more sort of crazy ones for sure come up in conversation. A lot of these things happen in neighborhoods that I frequent.
I still lived in Haines when George Floyd was killed, and I remember watching that, all the videos of it, and kind of having that disconnected perspective where I was like, oh my god, this is so upsetting, but, you know, it’s not something I can personally relate to.
Now seeing the same sort of footage, it’s like, that’s the record store I like to go to. Or I can see in the background of this video that it’s a restaurant I’ve been to.
When you recognize the place where it happened, you have to sit in it a little bit more. You know for sure it’s a real place, that this really happened, yeah, and I guess you relate much closer to the people who are affected.
• This article originally appeared in the Chilkat Valley News.
