Today Minnesotans spreading love, expressing grief and anger and a message, Get the Fuck Out Ice. Refusing to turn away. Not forgetting, remembering the larger context in which these acts of terror are being done by ICE and the Trump Administration. Here’s one example of that context:
Fort Snelling
Yesterday, RJP told me that ICE had taken control of a part of Fort Snelling. My immediate reaction: that’s terrible! It was a concentration camp in the 1800s! This article bolsters my initial response:
Wednesday, the FBI took control of the H.B. Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling, a federal complex adjoining Minneapolis and St. Paul. The news broke at 2 p.m. when an immigration judge announced that she had to stop a hearing because the FBI was taking the building over and everyone needed to be out by 3 p.m.
Fort Snelling: The Advance Guard of Federal Invasion Since 1805
Today, Fort Snelling is doing what it was designed to do: acting as a site from which Washington can project violent power over anyone who gets in its way. Dakota people saw this in the US-Dakota War of 1862, when the U.S. deployed soldiers from Fort Snelling to do battle on the Dakota. When it forced Dakota women, children, and elders into a concentration camp down the bluff from the fort. When it expelled the Dakota from their homelands and oversaw the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
And we are seeing it today as federal agents fan out from Fort Snelling into neighborhoods, seizing peaceable people, and reserving the right to shoot anyone, like Renee Nicole Good, who gets in their way.
Fort Snelling: The Advance Guard of Federal Invasion Since 1805
Fort Snelling. Land stolen through a fake treaty. Land once used for a concentration camp, now as a detention center. Today, three members of the house, U.S. rep. Omar, Craig, and Morrison were initially granted then denied access to the facility:
“What happened today is a blatant attempt to obstruct members of Congress from doing their oversight duties,” Omar said. “When we appropriate funds as members of Congress, we are expected by the public to do oversight, because the public requires their money be used with transparency and accountability, and what happened today is ICE agents deciding that we were no longer allowed to fulfill our constitutional duties.”
U.S. Reps. Omar, Morrison and Craig denied access to immigration detention facility at Fort Snelling (Sahan Journal)