F*ck ICE

A Chef's Perspective...

Organize to Fight Fear, This Racism Will Not Stop With Immigrants

I’m writing this as a chef, a parent, an enrolled citizen of a tribal community, and most importantly, as somebody who gives a f*ck.

It feels fitting that our streets are covered in snow and ice here in Minnesota, brutal temperatures making it awful to go outside, but we can handle the cold. That’s not the real problem. The real problem is the manufactured fear hitting us right to the core.

I’m seeing it everywhere in Minneapolis. Inside our kitchens. In staff meetings. In restaurant group chats that used to be about city and state policies, employee recommendations, connections, and operations, but are now filled with uncertainty and questions about employee safety.

Fear is moving through our city in real time. And we all know the culprit. It’s our own government and their new orange gestapo, an army of angry, violent young men, masked, emboldened, and operating with zero accountability.

This fear isn’t coming from rumors or social media panic posts. It’s real. People are being harassed, pepper sprayed, dragged through the snow, detained, disappeared. Not “domestic terrorists.” Not drug traffickers. Not violent criminals. They are targeting anyone who fits a racial profile they’ve chosen to dehumanize, who are mostly legal residents and citizens.

Employees are too afraid to take public transit because ICE is hovering around stations and routes. Families are sending their kids to pick up food boxes from pantries after hours so adults won’t seen. Parents are keeping children home because walking them into school is no longer safe from harassment, forcing local schools to quietly shift again toward hybrid online models, not because of a dangerous virus, but because of fear manufactured by racism.

The reality of what’s happening should scare and anger every American, because we are only at the beginning and it’s going to be a long road with the amount of money our own government has put into this aggression.

This fear is unnecessary.

This fear is intentional.

And we are watching it unfold in real time.

Fear Is the Strategy

ICE (Intimidation, Control, Expulsion) doesn’t need mass raids anymore. They don’t even need to arrest everyone. Their visibility does the work. They are giving people the option to self deport, and it’s working.

A few rental trucks.

A few masked agents with pepper spray.

And ongoing videos of public acts of cruelty and violence without any accountability.

Fear is cheaper than due process. Fear is faster than courts. Fear shuts down communities without paperwork.

When fear takes hold, people in our community stop going out, stop gathering, stop shopping. Eventually, they stop showing up entirely.

I love that Minneapolis has been my home since my 20s. As a chef, I’ve loved the diversity in our community and all the chefs of color who have risen to the top through the Eurocentric norms in culinary spaces. In restaurants, we love diversity. We love our neighbors. We can cuss at each other and yell at each other in the heat of the moment, but that’s because we are family.

Restaurants feel cultural changes immediately. Immigrant owned businesses lose foot traffic overnight. Workers begin to miss shifts, not because they don’t want to work, but because they don’t want to be detained on the way there. Food shelves see fewer visitors, not because hunger disappears, but because safety does.

Food systems don’t lie. Restaurants are like canaries in a coal mine, and the whistle is blowing. The danger is here and real.

What’s worse is that this is racist and economic sabotage dressed up as “law enforcement.”

This Is All Part of the Plan

What’s happening right now didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t a spontaneous escalation. It was written down and calculated.

Project 2025, driven by the racist cultural terrorist group known as the Heritage Foundation, is a blueprint to turn the federal government into an authoritarian enforcement machine serving a narrow, white nationalist vision of America and its coveted oligarchs.

This isn’t about border security. It’s about power, control and pure racism.

Project 2025 lays out, step by step, how to:

• Centralize presidential authority at all costs

• Purge federal civil servants who aren’t ideologically aligned and replace them with loyalists

• Weaponize federal agencies to do the dirty work

• Normalize fear as governance

This is the f*cking Handmaid’s Tale on ICE. Immigration enforcement is the opening act because immigrants are politically easier to isolate. Hitler did it, and so does Trump. The public has been trained to accept cruelty here first.

But immigration control and expulsion is not the end goal. It’s just the testing ground.

Where We Are Now

First came public narrative conditioning. Immigrants being framed openly as illegals and as a dangerous “invasion,” a detriment to national security. Diversity framed as a threat to all Americans. Cruelty reframed and normalized as necessity. That phase is already complete. The language and actions are now mainstream.

This was all part of the blueprint, with executive presidential orders prewritten, agency rules pre drafted, and legal justifications prepared in advance. Nothing about what we’re seeing is improvised.

Then everything moved into action. Mass firings of career civil servants. Experts attacked. DEI demonized. Unquestioning loyalty pushed over competence. Federal agencies and civil protections gutted before our eyes. A spineless Supreme Court system and fully compliant Congress.

Now we’re in a phase to define a police state, with American armed forces patrolling American streets, harassing and disappearing American people, with no accountability to stop them.

This is where fear becomes the rule of law and creates the ability to self police communities. This is why restaurant workers are disappearing quietly from workplaces and parents are pulling kids from school. Moving through public space is no longer safe.

If unchecked, the next phase is full normalization. We cannot let that happen. This is not normal, and this will only lead to more targets. Surveillance is already set to expand. Protests are being criminalized. Mutual aid will be targeted. There will be no more safe spaces. Churches and mosques will empty out. The goal is to make fear permanent, and “just how things are now.”

F*ck that.

History tells us something critical. Once a government learns it can intimidate one group with impunity, it will not stop there.

America Has Always Been Racist

As an Indigenous person with a mind for history, this pattern is painfully familiar.

This country tested its worst ideas on Indigenous people first. Removal. Containment. Starvation. Erasure. Genocide. All legal. All justified. All rewritten and hidden from public eye so all we have to worry about now is which team wins on Thanksgiving.

Black communities have lived this reality too. Racism has never died. Black ancestors endured slavery, slave patrols, Black Codes, Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration.

When have Black or Indigenous communities ever truly felt safe in white spaces?

At this messed up moment in American history, the Department of Racism has now set its sights on immigrants.

Different targets. Same game plan.

That’s why what’s happening now should scare and activate all Black and Indigenous communities, labor organizers, journalists, protesters, LGBTQ+ communities, and anyone who believes this country would never target them because It already has.

Is this really who we want to be as a country?

Is this what America wants to be?

A country that starts endless wars over fossil fuels while claiming moral superiority.

A country that normalizes mass surveillance.

A country that makes racial profiling functionally legal.

A country that uses government channels to spread misinformation and fear.

A country where food, movement, and education become privileges instead of rights.

This is not strength. This is not making America great again.

This is rot and decay.

And this is not normal, nor is this OK.

Unity Is the Answer

Fear isolates people. Community defeats it.

Unity right now has to be practical, organized, and immediate.

I’m seeing businesses step up quietly, offering food delivery, creating safe pickup windows, protecting workers, becoming informal hubs of care. I’m also seeing businesses suffer. Mexican mercados and Somali gathering places are empty here in Minneapolis. Those businesses deserve our support. Our community needs to step up and spend money there to keep them open.

Culturally specific food relief matters. When people see food that reflects who they are, it brings joy, pride and nourishment. Food sovereignty is protection against authoritarian regimes. Food gives us strength. Food connects us. It is the one universal language we all share.

Cities and states are not powerless. They must refuse ICE cooperation. They must challenge intimidation tactics legally. They must protect school grounds, public transit, food access points, and workers. Silence and non action is consent.

Right now, communities are focused on feeding people in need, driving people to work, and standing against racist narratives through action.

How Do You Fight a System Built on Fear

You don’t fight a system built on fear by yelling at it.

You fight it by making the fear fail.

Fear works when it isolates people, when workers stay home, families stay silent, neighbors stop trusting each other, and news sources stop sharing the truth. It depends on confusion, silence, and the belief that you’re alone and powerless.

So the first move is connection and unity.

Come together to talk about solutions. Call out and record the atrocities. Retell the stories of those detained. Support families who need food and money. Support businesses devastated by fear.

We face fear directly by naming what’s happening clearly and publicly. When fear is named, it loses power, because silence is its fuel.

This particular fear is displacing three things: movement, food, and information. For Resistance, we should be focusing directly on those.

If transit feels unsafe, we build ride share programs.

If stores feel dangerous, we deliver food safely.

If lies spread, we circulate truth locally and loudly.

That’s why food relief and mobility are not charity right now. They are the resistance. We don’t debate fear and its actions. We dismantle it.

The moment people eat together, move together, and refuse isolation, fear begins to crack.

History is clear. Organized communities who care and work for each other outlasts intimidation.

What We Do Right Now

This moment demands outrage, yes, but also immediate action. Here are things we should be doing right now in cities targeted by the Proud Boys, oops, I mean ICE. We are stronger together and we are not alone.

1. Support Food Relief

• Donate to culturally specific food programs

• Fund pantry boxes and ready to eat meals

• Volunteer with trusted community kitchens

Food keeps people rooted. Food is stability. Weaponizing hunger is always an authoritarian tactic, and it can be defeated by feeding people.

2. Support Immigrant Owned Businesses

• Spend intentionally, especially this holiday season

• Create and share lists of businesses to support

• Buy gift cards, prepay catering, make bulk orders

• Keep money circulating where fear is trying to choke it off

Economic survival is resistance. Use your dollars for good.

3. Build and Fund Safe Mobility

• Support and gift ride share credits

• Help organize community safe driver networks

• Assist workers who no longer feel safe on public transit

• Reach out to restaurants already implementing these policies

• Work together. Drive together. Walk together.

Freedom of movement should never be dictated by the color of your skin or your country of origin. If we are a free country, then act like it.

4. Support Legal Defense and Rapid Response

• Donate to immigrant legal defense funds

• Support and share rapid response organizations

• Share know your rights materials

Law matters, but only if people have access it and know there is support.

5. Pressure Local and State Leaders

• Demand limits on ICE cooperation

• Demand protections for schools, public transit, and food access

• Demand funding for community relief and legal defense

• Support political campaigns standing against the racists in power

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Silence is not an option

Vote out the racists

and F*ck Trump