Teaching/Watching/Fearing Abroad While Minnesota Roils

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For the last four weeks, I’ve been in Ireland with a group of twenty-one St. Olaf College students. While St. Olaf is in Northfield, Minnesota, about 40 miles south of the Twin Cities, my January term course, “Love and Sex in Modern Irish History,” unfolded in hotel breakfast rooms, walk-and-talk tours of Dublin, Belfast, and Galway, and research at the National Archives of Ireland, the National Library of Ireland, and the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland.

This course is, normally, something I’m excited about. Not so much this year. When I got on the plane on January 3rd, I felt sad to be leaving my dog and my partner for so long, but even more I felt anxious about the Minnesota I was leaving behind. Increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) presence in Minnesota since late December means that I have friends, colleagues, and neighbors who have been afraid to leave their homes. Minnesotans were responding, as is their way, by providing aid and protesting. It felt wrong to be leaving.

I did my best to get excited. The students had fantastic research projects, and I’d return to the archives myself. These are good things. Plus, I got to show a new group of young people one of my favorite places on the planet.

And then ICE officers started killing protestors on camera. Renee Good on January 7, three days after we got to Ireland. Alex Pretti on January 24, three days before we were scheduled to get home. And theirs are just the deaths caught on camera, saturating my social media feed. To date, seven other people have been murdered by ICE officers off-camera: Keith Porter, Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz, and Heber Sánchez. The escalation of state violence is unfathomable; the disgusting compliance and celebration of elected officials and “MAGA” people is devastating. And as a “Minnesotan” abroad, I flinched every time someone asked where we were from. Everyone I’ve encountered in Ireland expressed empathy, disgust with the American government, fear for what America’s spiral would mean for the rest of the world.

A week after ICE’s hired thug Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good at a protest, I led my students to the edge of Falls Road, beckoning them closer to make space for passersby. I told them about the Partition of the six counties that became “Northern Ireland,” the decades of increasingly unsustainable conditions for Catholic people in the north, and the civil rights organizations that demanded change. The so-called “Troubles” started in Derry on October 5, 1968, when civil rights activists marched and Royal Ulster Constabulary rushed the crowd with batons and beat protestors, leaving many injured. But the activists didn’t stop. They took to the streets repeatedly over the years and grew in numbers, their conviction strong. There were also militants who resisted in their own way, with bombs and guns and guerilla warfare. It’s hard to say which approach was more effective in agitating for change; certainly the legacy of both is written on the walls of the Falls and Shankill Roads neighborhoods, and in the unreliability of Stormont’s coalition governments since 1998.

Like any imperialist or fascist government, though, police brutality against protestors escalated. On January 30, 1972, the British Army opened fire into an assemblage of peaceful protestors. They killed thirteen civilians: Patrick “Paddy” Doherty, Gerald Donaghey, John “Jackie” Duddy, Hugh Gilmour, Michael Kelly, Michael McDaid, Kevin McElhinney, Bernard McGuigan, Gerard McKinney, William McKinney, William Nash, James Wray, and John Young. They were fathers, teens, politicians, civil rights activists, and freedom fighters. Telling my students about 1972’s Bloody Sunday felt way too fucking close.

I blinked away my tears and saved that grief and fear for the privacy of my hotel room. I don’t normally hide my feelings from students; I don’t mind if they see me as human. But if I started crying, I wasn’t sure I could stop. The parallels between Northern Ireland’s recent past and Minnesota’s present have haunted my thoughts. Every day I watch the dog camera to make sure my partner makes it home from work, because I know he’s volunteering to watch for ICE at his middle school. Every day I wake up and check social media and am inundated with images of protestors and mutual aid causes to donate to – which are heartening, for sure – but also videos from protestors being gassed and beaten and thrown around, agents of the federal government maiming and murdering both immigrants and those documenting the kidnappings. I send check-in text messages to my friends who live in Minneapolis and St. Paul, just to be sure they haven’t been disappeared.

I feel helpless. I feel furious. I want to go home. I am afraid to go home.

When I made space during one of our discussion sessions, my students shared their own fears, how they’ve been coping with the jarring realities of being in this beautiful place and trying to focus on learning and enjoy their time away while reading the texts their family members send before going out to protests, or watching the violence unfold over social media. They shared that on one of our last nights, they went out to a club to dance, and several young men in MAGA hats harassed them. The rest of the club, including the band, booed and demanded the men leave, but my students were shocked and shaken. One of my students, Alli, later shared an encounter with an Irish man in the line at the airport:

I was in line to board my flight out of Dublin when an Irish man told me he liked Trump. “Maybe it’s different because he’s not my president,” he suggested.

Of course, it’s different. He didn’t pray for a Donald Trump loss when he was 11 years old, 15 years old, 19 years old. “There’s gonna be a blue shift,” was not his incantation, his Hail Mary, on November 6, 2024. His stomach was unknotted, unpitted when Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia stayed red. The dread never set in for him. His chest doesn’t tighten when he remembers he will be in office for three more years.

How do you resist the urge to scream in a stranger’s face? How do you feign politeness when all of the images of ICE’s violence and hatred are permanently etched into your mind, when they bleed into your dreams? How do you keep the peace when every day there is another death, another incident, another child, mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, aunt, uncle, friend, classmate, neighbor taken? When every day another family is torn apart? Do you tell him that you just saw a post that ICE is staying in hotels in your college town? Do you let him know how angry you are? How do you deal with feeling like you have no control over any of it, because you are across the world and in a different time zone, and even though you repost things and donate and stay informed and protest and try your best to help, it never seems to make much of a difference? How do you reckon with feeling so powerless?

How do you live with yourself when your only reply is, “I hate him”?^[1]

Another student, Eden, shared a moment when they’d felt overwhelmed while we were walking around Belfast. They said it felt so like Minneapolis, where they grew up, but so far away too. They said, “seeing all the disastrous chaos from so far away has felt unreal. Some days it’s really hard to fully enjoy my time here when I can’t look away from the atrocities committed on the streets of Minneapolis upon innocent people.”^[2] But then they reminded us of our unexpected conversation with a Belfast City Councillor, Seamus de Faoite. While we were on an LGBTQ+ Belfast History Tour, we happened to be standing outside Belfast City Hall when de Faoite walked by. Our tour guide, Tom Hulme, recognized him and asked if de Faoite had a few words for us, a college group from Minnesota. De Faoite, like so many people abroad, immediately knew what was going on back home. He offered us a promise that it would get better, even if it got worse first, and not to lose hope. Eden’s words quickly turned our conversation to what we could do, how we could support each other and the folks back home, and what we could do when we got home.

We are so close to the federal government’s assault on Minnesota, and yet we are also thousands of miles away. My students are afraid, but their belief in coalition-building, in the power of community, is genuine and uplifting. For Eden, de Faoite’s words “brought me hope for a brighter future for the U.S”; for me, my students’ belief in that brighter future brought me hope.

As I write this, my bags are packed, and my flight leaves in seven hours. I don’t know what to expect when we get home. I only know that I need to be part of the resistance, whatever that looks like.

When we started our walk through the Falls and Shankhill neighborhoods, there was a mural on the side of a building that served as a touchpoint in my walk-and-talk lectures. It was the face of a young man, a politician, who sacrificed himself for his political beliefs. He was Bobby Sands, the twenty-seven-year-old Provisional Irish Republican Army (“Provos”) volunteer who went on hunger strike, protesting the IRA members’ political prisoner status in the Maze prison. In 1981, he was elected, from prison, to Parliament. Just weeks later, he died. Like the October 5, 1968 march, and the 1972 Bloody Sunday, and the persistent state violence against its citizens, the world watched Bobby Sands’ death in horror. And his death wasn’t the end of that violence. Change didn’t come overnight. But the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association kept marching, kept protesting, kept facing down batons and police brutality in the name of civil liberties and justice.

We will too.

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A note from the author at publication: I’ve been home now for two weeks, and it’s still terrible. National news has moved on, but there are still over 2,000 ICE agents terrorizing our communities. It’s not over yet, no matter what they tell us. Even if the thugs pull out of our state (I’ll believe it when I see it), there are still thousands who need our help to get home.

Minnesotans continue to show up. Members of the Oceti Sakowin (Dakota and Lakota) erected tipis outside the Whipple building, where feds detain their kidnap victims. Schools, churches, bars, sex shops, and neighbors are hosting and gathering mutual aid to get groceries and sanitary items and rent money to families in need who can’t leave their houses for fear of being disappeared. We’re not backing down. Minnesota does not want ICE here.

Most of you reading this are probably like I was three weeks ago: watching from outside, anxious and angry, but feeling helpless. But none of us are helpless. Because bearing witness helps. Donating money to mutual aid networks and victims of state violence helps. And showing up to solidarity protests helps. The worst thing we can do is close our eyes and turn away. So please, keep your eyes on Minnesota. This is not the end.

Notes

1. Alli wrote this in response to my call for their thoughts, experiences, reflections on the dissonance of being Minnesotans abroad this month. Shared with her first name with permission. ↑
2. Excerpt from Eden’s Research Journal #2, shared with permission. ↑

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Featured image caption: Ruins of Dunluce Castle in Northern Ireland. Courtesy of the author