After an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good last week, I fell into a kind of stunned silence. Not just the shooting but all the other stories coming out of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the surrounding suburbs. Overwhelmed. Filled with sorrow. Brimming with rage. How to respond? What to do?
Protests, vigils, online giving campaigns, writing letters to governing officials, offering words of support to immigrant friends and neighbors, running errands for those same friends and neighbors when they are afraid to leave the house. These are things we do.
Finding words of response felt harder. And I’m a writer, so that is really saying something. Other people were saying all the things. I didn’t want to add to the cacophony. I pointed readers to the words of others. I reposted and reshared prayers and testimonies and eye-witness accounts. I sat and tried to listen to my anger, confusion, grief, disgust, and fear for our individual and collective futures.
In Slow Theology: Eight Practices for Resilient Faith in a Turbulent World, theologians Nijay Gupta and A.J. Swoboda offer spiritual practices to cultivate deep faith in precisely the kinds of times we find ourselves in, here in Minnesota at the start of 2026. They offer suggestions geared toward Christians, such as spending time in Bible study. Other practices can easily be adapted to people of other faiths, or no faith: prayer and meditation; slowing down our decision-making process, which they refer to as applying the concept of Sabbath to our thinking; being willing to sit with questions and mystery and not demanding answers; facing difficulty without avoidance; taking time to make space for and notice transformation – taking a long view of faith.
Slowing down comes with an amount of privilege. I am not being hounded to prove my citizenship while at the grocery store or the gym. I don’t carry my passport n my purse. Slowing down requires intentionality, and faithful slowing down entails eventual action and response, not a quiet hunkering down or disappearing act.
Part of my slowing down this week has been to reflect on my personal experiences, which shed light on issues of humanity, dignity, justice, and compassion.
I have been undocumented occasionally.
No one chased me with guns, demanding to see my papers. There were fines and threats of fines. There was no threat of arrest or deportation or violence. I was not afraid to leave my house.
Most readers here know that my family lived in a region of the world referred to as a “shithole” for over twenty years. We are American citizens, born and raised in Minnesota. This is important because other foreigners living in that country were afraid to leave their houses sometimes. They were threatened with arrest and deportation. Never with guns. Never with tear gas. Never by breaking into houses while heavily armed and masked.
We tried, always, to keep our residence cards valid and up to date, but that wasn’t always possible. The offices were closed, there was a massive backlog, the wrong box was accidentally checked…for any number of reasons, there were periods of time in which my papers were not valid.
I also had a traffic violation.
If the situation were reversed, the local version of ICE would be coming after me, slamming me to the ground in front of my children’s school, pointing loaded guns at me, yanking me from my car and leaving it abandoned on the street, locking me in prison for months with no legal representation and possibly none of the mediation I require daily as a cancer survivor, and then shipping me off to who-knows-where without my husband or children or any of my possessions or other papers like diplomas, medical records, etc.
That never happened in that “shithole” country, and this week I have been sitting with that reality, that privilege, that perspective, trying to parse out what it means when it is happening in Minnesota. Slow theology, slow thinking, has allowed me to reflect on my experience, and that is shaping my response, which includes acknowledging this past, my social positionally, and the incumbent responsibility to demand the terrorized and those in danger be treated as what they are: fellow human beings.
Dignity and respect, kindness and compassion, a listening ear and slowness…these are what belong. What we need. What breeds community and hope. We need people to show up at vigils with candles. We need high school students to march through my suburb insisting on dignity for all. We need grandparents donating to legal campaigns and office mates looking out for daycare employees. We need neighbors dropping letters into mailboxes offering support and strangers delivering groceries to frightened neighbors. We need police officers trained in deescalation.
Weapons, cruelty, violence, threats, dehumanization…these have no place in our city.
This sounds hopelessly naïve and not actionable. I know that. I’m sitting with that, too.
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