Faith Ericson, Delegate to HELU from the Minnesota Inter-Faculty Organization (IFO)
There is a student I haven’t seen since the first week of the semester. He’s in the National Guard and has been deployed to respond to the mayhem brought on by the “Metro Surge” in the Twin Cities.
Another student tells me she watched a Somali man be taken by ICE outside her apartment shortly before the semester began. She and her neighbors, almost all international students, are afraid to leave their building, even for groceries. They’re afraid to order delivery after seeing videos of Uber drivers being arrested. And yet they know they must show up on campus. To remain in good standing on F-1 visas, they need at least nine in-person credits.
“Just don’t tell admin,” a colleague tells me when I interview her for this story. “Don’t wait for permission. They’ve failed us in so many ways.”
My survival instinct makes me hesitate to echo that view. And the institutional response has been inconsistent. Some colleges have allowed professors to move classes online. Others have held firm to in-person requirements, warning students that if they fail to comply, the school is legally obligated to report them and potentially terminate their status, or that it “may jeopardize the College’s ability to grant F-1 student visas in the future.” We can try to hold students harmless if they drop an in-person course. That does nothing to protect their visas.
We connect them to community services that can do what we’re told we cannot, like delivering groceries. There are workarounds. Our campus food cupboard might bring supplies to the curb. Individual instructors quietly step in.
Another colleague, at a college closer to the Cities, says her administration insists it isn’t happening on their campus. She laughs, not from humor but from a kind of exhausted irony. She tells me about a student she had last fall who was pulled from his car over winter break, despite having all of his documents in order. She shares his GoFundMe, created to bring Oscar back to Minnesota. His car was left on the side of the highway, keys, wallet, and phone still inside. Within 24 hours he was sent to El Paso. His lawyer secured the right to return him to Minnesota within 48 hours, yet somehow he was transferred to New Mexico instead. He made it home more than two weeks later.
“Our college president was compassionate about cases like that,” she tells me, “but I don’t know that they felt empowered to actually do anything.”
Another colleague, eyes dark from lack of sleep, looks frailer than I’ve ever seen her. She’s the one who pulled me into union work. Years ago, when I raised my hand in a meeting for contingent faculty and asked what the union would actually do for us, she called me afterward. Now I’m knee-deep in bargaining and committees, and she’s shaking.
“You want to know what to tell people about our students?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Please.”
She lives in Minnetonka. There’s a video on Reddit of a dozen ICE agents escorting a man out of a public library there. When I first asked her about it, she kept her answer measured. Students are asking to move online. They’re scared to speak openly in class. Maybe she wasn’t ready to say more.
Now she is.
“You want to know what to tell people?” she says, voice breaking. “Tell them we’re too terrified to leave our houses to go teach because we’re worried that if we aren’t outside protecting our neighbors, someone is going to take them.” She has seen it. Right outside her house. “We don’t have the energy to protect our neighbors and our students.”
She tells me she’s disappointed in the system’s response. Minnesota is big. We have urban campuses, rural campuses, colleges that train police officers, and programs in Electrical Construction Technology alongside Spanish certificates that transfer to four-year institutions. One union holds all of that. The response to the Metro Surge has been varied. Statements go out. Some members applaud them. Others bristle. For instructors training police in Central Minnesota, and for the 600 families in Northern Minnesota who lost their livelihoods when a mine closed, one statement or one silence can feel like a line drawn in the sand.
The union stands for what it believes is right. But my colleague, standing outside in the freezing cold after class, protesting ICE, wants more.
A union leader sits beside her. “I know,” she says quietly. “I want to do more, too. I almost quit twice over this.”
We are supposed to be celebrating a win. It doesn’t feel like celebration. Not here. Not now.
A colleague from Northern Minnesota, a lifelong Democrat, tries to explain. To contextualize. To complicate.
Minnetonka doesn’t want complication. She pounds the table. “They are on my street.”
He fires back, “I’ve done more politically than you for the DFL”. The DFL is the Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. “I’m wearing a DFL shirt. What do I have to do, die in the street? I’m not your enemy. I understand your frustration. I promise.”
She tells him to spend time in her neighborhood. He tells her to spend time in Northern Minnesota, where more than 600 people lost their jobs. Entire communities are reeling. It isn’t as simple as saying totalitarian governments are bad. Of course they are. But those 600 workers are trying to survive. Their towns are trying to survive. Everyone is asking what comes next.
“I care about union workers,” he says. “My dad did. My grandpa did. I do. Labor. That’s it.”
She breaks down. She has poured herself into this union and feels left alone because the union cannot say everything she wants it to say.
He reaches across the table and takes her hand.
It isn’t a solution. My friend still drives her daughters to school because they’re afraid to ride the bus. ICE has waited at bus stops. They’re afraid to go at all. My student still comes to class. The only thing I can offer is a ride to the grocery store. I still haven’t seen my National Guard student. I know he’ll be held harmless academically, but I don’t know what this will cost him.
The divide in the union is real. But so is the care in that room, even when it sounds like yelling over beer about whether something is obvious or complicated. I’m hoping we can keep having those conversations. Even the loud ones. Especially the loud ones.