This isn't normal

So don't let it be

Hey Leaders,

There’s a quiet addition to my morning routine these days.Before I leave my house, I pick up my lanyard, put it on and tuck its contents away. Far away enough to be obscured, near enough to be easily within reach. The lanyard holds my US passport.

It’s the first time I’ve needed to do this in my nearly 52 years of Nigerian heritage, London-born and US based immigrant life. My first 30 years were in the UK, and the last 22 years in the US: Arizona, California and since 2012, Minnesota.

Now I wear my passport everywhere I go as some kind of protection proof in case I encounter ICE. It’s a line of defense in permitted racial profiling. It’s the attempt to avoid the potential for harassment, abuse, threats, violence, dehumanization, wounds, trauma. I say attempt because we’ve seen the violence with our own eyes. The things we’ve seen cannot be repackaged, explained away, minimized, excused or justified.

I wear my passport and never has something so light weighed so heavily. I try to manage the thoughts and feelings I have about this and everything happening here day and night. In the cities, in rural areas, in the suburbs, in my suburb . Because make no mistake, all the things are still happening. They are happening to everyday US citizens, to observers who love their neighbors. To friends who’ve had guns pointed at them, warned and threatened even though their every move was lawful.

It’s still happening to immigrants with US citizenship, green cards, and visas. For those going through the long detailed expensive immigration process. For vetted refugees, asylum seekers who uprooted their lives in search of safety. For people who may be without documents, but are not without humanity. They are still image bearers.

There are people who are still in hiding, absent from work and from school. People who won’t get the medical help they need because they are afraid. There are immigrant congregations who now meet online for worship, and there are Catholic dioceses that have granted dispensations from the Sunday Mass obligation for parishioners fearing ICE raids. Students whose family members are detained and disappeared. It’s still happening.

I know where to drive and where to avoid. And sometimes I just can’t avoid where I need to be, so I drive there anyway. With my lanyard. This isn’t normal.

I have so many thoughts and feelings that I often feel numb. Except at church, where I’ve cried for the last two weeks, because I am sad, and because it’s the kind of community where it feels safe to be sad. There are no words that capture the weight of what Minnesota has endured. Still endures.

The collective weight on our souls, the heaviness, the fear/pain/ tension as a way of life, isn’t normal.

Somehow, we get on with our daily lives.

But I am human, immigrants are human. Minnesotans in all their peaceful protesting, mutual aid building, grocery delivering, righteous angering, prayer and vigil-ing, senator calling, beautiful Midwest neighboring beauty and so much more - are human. So of course we are all changed, rearranged by this.

This is not normal, or at least it shouldn’t be.

So please don’t let it become that way.

The views expressed in this newsletter are solely those of the author, Jo Saxton, unless otherwise stated.