As most are aware, ICE has been out in full force in Minnesota the last few weeks. Targeting and deportations had begun in Minneapolis and St. Paul and surrounding areas in late 2025, with a major ramp up in the first couple weeks of this year. I guess even Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs get to celebrate the holy days of Christmas and the like. 

ICE was in Otter Tail County hitting Fergus Falls on Saturday, Pelican Rapids on Sunday, and then moving on to other regions that are really close to home because they are communities Vaimo and I frequent frequently as they are in her large service area. ICE took people in Detroit Lakes on Monday, and Park Rapids on Tuesday. 

It is not a hyperbole to say that Minnesota is under attack. 

The volume is loud here. And it’s not just confined to the metro. 

I had a panic attack on Saturday night. One that awoke me out of my slumber. I marvel at my body when it does this. Oh, yes, I see, I was finally fully relaxed and the panic strikes me now. This is not the first time panic has pulled me out of sleep. I’m sure it won’t be the last. 

The good news about this panic attack is that I can 1000 percent say it was not because of the self-imposed stressors I put my nervous system through on the regular. This one was all external factors and probably my body trying to move through ancestral trauma; the kind that wracks me with anxiety but no amount of self care individual efforts alone can dissolve. 

Limpias, prayer, ceremony… might come close.

2025 brought me more panic attacks than I’ve had in a while. And I’m only now realizing that maybe I’ve been too hard on myself. Like the first Trump term, others are now at a level of anxiety I have come to know and endure daily since my teen years. Under these conditions, without totally taking myself out of society, perhaps panic attacks are inevitable. What if, they are one of the only forms of release my body can muster? Who can blame my dear scorpio with taurus rising sensibilities that relish in holding on so so so so tightly to any little thing that finds its way into my grip? 

I know release is a way to move through this pain. It’s why I talk to my therapist. Why I breathe on my yoga mat. It’s why I try to alchemize personal and collective pain through my paintings. 

I know not releasing anger, frustration, sadness, has taken a physical and emotional toll on me - the likes of which I am still paying for in the form of chronic pain. 

However, I know what I don’t need to hold on to - and that is the myth of safety facilitated by ICE. 

My body, spirit, and mind know there is nothing safe about ICE for anyone involved. 

The thing is, however, I also know that ICE is not inevitable. 

Every morning this week I have turned to an essay from Rebecca Solnit’s collection No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain (2025). The short essays are a treat that demand to be savored. I’m purposefully reading one a day so that I can sit with the words and ideas Solnit shares and hold them in my mind and body and turn them over within. 

This is a gift and a joy; to have space and time to sit, to read, and to think. You’d think that would be a job requirement as a professor, but wowza the time to be able to do that seemed so scarce. Sure, now no one pays me to attempt to read and think, but I get so much more time to do so now. Ahhhh the freedom and wonder of this artist life. 

Back to Solnit though, in the collection Introduction and in the essays she gathers, she reminds us of all the ways that unpredictability is actually possibility. When change that tilts toward more good for more people occurs, it’s often in the face of what pundits, economists, politicians, and the masses suspected would happen. These ruptures take place all the time, even as the human mind longs for certainty. Even if that certainty is offered to us in the form of fascism, control, domination, unchecked power, rule of law, surveillance, false promises of safety in the name of othering. 

“The likely happens often, but the unlikely happens often enough that it cannot be disregarded” (p3). 

I, like all who were born in the previous century, know a time when ICE only meant the frozen form of water. 

I, rounding the bend toward 50 years on this earth, have known in my lifetime a time before the militarized US/Mexico border. 

I, a third generation born Mexican American of Kansas, carry the epigenetic resonance of border crossings in this body. 

There are many who assume ICE is inevitable - that it will continue to terrorize our communities, that it will continue to grow in budget and staff - and I am here to assert that this future is not inevitable. 

This is not to make light of, or to not reckon with the very real violence we are enduring under ICE occupation in Minnesota right now. Nor is it to forget the over thirty people who died in ICE custody in 2025, or the folks injured or killed in this state in the last few weeks. 

My nervous system takes each of these deaths seriously, as does my heart, my spirit, my humanity. 

Making art in these times feels simultaneously frivolous and absolutely necessary. I’m reminded that we all have a role to play, and mine is to lean into my visionary mode - to articulate what the future can look like whether through words or more likely images. This is the role into which I lean to fuel the collective. 

We never know what might be the moment that tips the scales into the direction for change in the way we hope. For me, I hope it comes through the paintings I channel, but I’d also settle for these words to resonate.

A world without ICE means no more masked kidnapping of our neighbors. People are free to move across borders without search and seizure or activated nervous systems. We work to heal from past traumas by acknowledging the wound of borders. Everyone has enough to eat. Our water sources are clean. No one sleeps outside unless they’re camping. There are myriad ways to contribute to society and the hierarchy of documentation no longer privileges citizens over those without papers. 

How often do you use your imagination to dream the world toward the future that aligns with your values? 

Try not to get caught up in the “but what about” in the practicality of it…that may be a sign of an underused imagination muscle. Yes, there might be some application challenges, but American optimism can be used for good in this instance - there is a way - perhaps just not yet realized. We must hold onto the possibility for change toward freedom, otherwise why resist? 

Solnit’s writing has been a balm for me this week. And because this message to you is but one part of a larger story still unfolding I do not aim for a tidy end. 

I’ll share that I have been met with love and care, concern, and fierce commitment to protect each other in these difficult times across our state, I am proud of the people of Minnesota who continue to put their lives on the line in the name of freedom and justice. I am heartsick, but as safe as I typically feel from this rural outpost. I remain committed to a different possibility, a change in the trajectory of ICE’s brutality.

“For so many of our destinations, no straight road takes us there. The route is over mountains or through forests and beyond what we know —and it may also be through inconceivable beauty and transformation as well as peril; it may be uncharted, or steep, or take decades or centuries to traverse; we may get there through storytelling, alliance, or the appearance of some unanticipated participants. That’s a declaration of difficulty and uncertainty but also of possibility that I offer as encouragement to keep going.” (Solnit, 6)

Here’s to more beauty and transformation in our perilous times.