‘We have to keep showing up for each other’: In Minnesota, caregiving is a form of resistance

Ashley Fairbanks felt anxious as she scrolled through seemingly endless reports of federal immigration agents arresting and detaining people in Minnesota.

It felt personal for Fairbanks, who lives in Texas but grew up on the south side of Minneapolis. Her closest friends and family still live in the area, including her dad, who works near an intersection where agents are active.

“I just had so much fear in my heart about what happens to them,” she said.

Fairbanks, who has a background in political organizing, launched a website in mid-January that allows people to give directly to individuals and organizations on the ground. Just two weeks later, the offers of help on Stand With Minnesota have become vast: People can donate to mutual aid funds that connect people to relief for rent and groceries. They can help with someone’s legal defense if they’re arrested, and they can support small businesses that are struggling financially amid the presence of thousands of heavily armed agents. 

Someone can pay rent and utilities for nearly 300 families in the metro or assist with bulk orders of groceries for more than 20 families. Residents stuck in their homes are being offered first aid supplies, prenatal vitamins and virtual access to free mental health services. They can request in-home veterinary care and dog walking. A church’s “sanctuary and resistance fund” is helping transgender and immigrant refugees with housing and food. Towing companies are collecting cars — abandoned in the frigid temperatures after the driver was arrested by agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — to make sure they’re returned to families. People are donating airline miles to help people who have been temporarily detained out of state.

“We have to keep showing up for each other,” said Fairbanks, whose site already has almost 2 million visits. “And we do that by starting with the really small things.”

Resistance has taken many shapes in Minnesota, including formal protests and monitoring and recording ICE and CBP agents — observers like Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were both shot and killed by federal agents last month. But for many others, their way of pushing back has been providing direct support for those who are too scared to leave their homes because of federal intimidation and warrantless searches. These are acts of caregiving — in all its loose definitions — and it’s at the heart of what fighting back means for them.

This scope of collective help stands out in part because care is often under the radar and gendered, said Gayle Goldin, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. She is also a former deputy director of the Women’s Bureau for the Department of Labor under the Biden administration.

“If you think about it, historically, the devaluing of women’s work in care, it’s isolating. It’s often something you do in your home — care for somebody else, or it’s a one-on-one thing. So we can feel so separated from a greater social fabric,” she said. “This is really weaving it all together in a way that I think actually is showing the power of togetherness.”

Fairbanks has intentionally elevated mutual aid funds and rent relief efforts, including from school-based groups led by parents, often women. She noted that the first of the month had brought a lot of anxiety for people who haven’t been able to work for most of January.

“It’s those PTA moms who are going to make sure people’s rent gets paid,” she said.

Fairbanks has vetted formal groups on the site offering aid, but she also links to GoFundMe pages with more direct pleas from impacted people. Maintaining the site — run by Fairbanks and one other volunteer — includes administrative tasks like answering dozens of daily messages from strangers about where they can donate items like whistles or how they can seek services. Fairbanks tries to clarify that her site is a repository of information, but she feels compelled to make sure that people who appear to be in need are connected directly with information.

“I have to explain that I don’t have any money to give them, and I do my best to connect them to resources, but I don’t feel good leaving any of those messages without a response,” she said.  

Justin Lewandowski, organizing director of the Hamline Midway Coalition, a community organization in the Twin Cities, said he’s never seen this kind of “grassroots relational connectivity” in his 15 years of community organizing. His group has been collecting funds since early January to buy diapers, formula and other hygiene and medical supplies.

“It has been nothing short of a whiplash between rage and joy, and sorrow and community,” he said.

To date, volunteers who manage diaper needs — Lewandowski calls them “diaper fairies” — have helped distribute more than 200,000 diapers around the metro through a network of schools, faith groups and mutual aid networks.

“We get a call and they say, ‘We’re completely out of size fives and sixes and sevens — go, go, go,’” he said. “We need five diaper fairies to relay 28 box diapers, these sizes stat,” he said. “Then we get the order in, we load them up, and then that site, within 20 minutes, has got diapers on hand so they can keep getting families what they need. It’s crazy, it’s beautiful — and also that’s the level of urgency of need right now.”

Sol Of The Cities, a youth development organization in the Twin Cities, set up a rapid relief fund for emergency rent and utility assistance, as well as groceries and school-related needs. Sparkle Wimberly, one of the group’s co-founders, said the group has been connected to a handful of immigrant families through intermediaries like sports coaches and school administrators — leaders in the community who built long-term connections with now-struggling households.

“We don’t always have all the information as to ‘the who,’ but we do know these are trusted people,” she said. “We’re hoping to offset long-term harm by some short-term stabilization.”

Pam Fickenscher, a senior pastor at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Northfield, a college town about 40 miles south of the Minneapolis and St. Paul area, has been making sure that her community knows how to access local resources as federal agents encroach into areas beyond the metro. 

In Northfield, where over 10 percent of the population is Latinx, some of the most prominent acts of caregiving began with parents of school-aged children offering to drive their neighbors’ kids to and from school. Soon, volunteers were sending those kids home with something for the whole family: a gallon of milk to help with the week ahead, or a pizza for dinner.

“Some of these efforts always sort of start really ground up, and then at some point it gets big enough that they’re like, ‘OK, we need a little more infrastructure,’” Fickenscher said. That’s where she steps in.

Fickenscher thinks a lot about who’s helping the helpers, some of whom have been at this for weeks or months. When car rides accelerated, she made sure volunteers had gas cards to offset the extra costs. She recently coordinated dropping off cookies at the local community center where staff have been distributing items like rice, dried beans, diapers, toilet paper and menstrual products. Some volunteers have been working such long hours, Fickenscher worries about their potential burnout.

“They’re feeling quite overwhelmed, so just to make sure that we see them and all the work they’re doing every day,” she said.

Fickenscher was among more than 100 faith leaders who were recently arrested during a related protest at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. She gave a Sunday sermon days later.

“We are seeing the very best of people in the worst of times. And I try to lift that up as a pastor,” she said. “I try to remind people that mutual care, small acts of care, are super important and the more we do that and tell the story of that, the more we fight back against this narrative that armed people are the only thing that keep us safe. What keeps us safe is knowing our neighbors, and looking out for each other.”

She added: “I have never been more proud to be a Minnesotan than I am right now.”

Caregiving as an act of resistance is rooted in history, said Jennifer Wells, a community organizer and social worker in Alabama who is director of care economy for the national advocacy organization Community Change, leading a team around child care and health justice issues. She noted the localized coalitions and mutual aid efforts that sprouted up in 2020 — amid the dual realities of the pandemic and the racial reckoning after a police officer murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis. Going further back, care was at the center of organized protests like the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott of the 1950s that challenged segregated seating. There was organizing around carpooling and community care that highlighted how everyone found a way to contribute. 

“Often they give Dr. King credit, but how many women were behind that movement, that strategy? How it was actually able to last the amount of days it lasted, it was because care was a part of it,” she said. “People were making a system of how people could get to work. There was a woman who said, ‘OK, I will cook for the movement.’ That was hugely important. You cannot — on a hungry belly or not having eaten — continue to strategize or stand strong. Care has to be a part of how we stand up.”

Wells said there are practical lessons for everyone about Minnesota’s embrace of caregiving, and it’s to have a plan if ICE enters other states and communities. People should have conversations now with family, neighbors and their local school district, and they should learn their rights if they encounter agents.

“This is almost like storm preparation,” she said. “How do you anticipate getting food to people? How would you anticipate getting to and from school if this threat is upon you? You will find how resourceful you and your community actually really is. They want you to feel powerless. They want you to retreat in terror or fear. One thing Minnesota did show, they did not retreat. They showed up. And so knowing you have a plan allows you not to react or respond in pure fear or panic as they attempt this in other places.”

Fairbanks said one of the most hopeful spaces in her work right now is a submission portal on the site that encourages strangers to send “love notes” to people in Minnesota. The frequency of incoming messages keeps Fairbanks’ phone literally buzzing. She is from the Minneapolis neighborhood of Powderhorn, where an annual May Day parade emphasized the power of collective care and community solidarity.

Fairbanks has offered to help others set up mirror sites to share mutual aid offerings and links in other states if ICE activity expands into more communities.

“Mutual aid is the politics of our city,” she said. “Taking care of one another is a very Minnesota ethos … it’s a very common idea that we just take care of each other.”