#somali-american-communities

#somali-american-communities

With Don Quixote, it's like seeing how this knight, it's not just that he is crazy and out of his mind, but also that he just wants to do good in the world.

Unlike virtually all other non-European ethnicities, SWANA - or Middle Eastern/North African (MENA), as used in the show - is grouped under "White" on the US census. It's not just the census, though. It's medical forms, college applications, just about anything with a check box for ethnicity. Efforts have been made to change this, with some success. More institutions are adding a separate category on forms - and one might appear on the 2030 census.

We're exposing all of you. Every single one of you, you're all going back. Then in the early hours of New Year's Day, there was a break-in at the daycare. It was heart-breaking to me, said Abukar Mohammed, a part-owner of the business. I never thought that in America there would be racial things, that this could happen in America. I was shocked.

At the center of the physical space - a fomer Café Cerés location near Minnehaha Falls - stands a gold-tiled structural pillar that the owners want to turn into a literal pillar of the community. Customers snap Polaroids, tack them to the pillar and add handwritten notes about where they're from or their hopes for the future. The goal is to eventually cover the entire surface.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Luke Breen, co-owner of specialty bike shop Perennial Cycle in uptown Minneapolis. The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity. Perennial is a specialty bike shop. We do cargo bikes, city utility bikes, and commuting bikes, and have been a niche business for 33 years. Perennial focuses on community events. Last year, we did 35 organized community rides.

As Elle Neubauer drove before dawn past the darkened windows of the immigrant-owned businesses on Lake Street in Minneapolis, her co-pilot and friend Patty O'Keefe scanned the passing vehicles with binoculars, searching for signs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. As the sun rose, more community patrollers arrived on Lake Street, keeping eyes on the Ecuadorean grocery stores, Somali restaurants and Mexican taco shops that line the street.

Despite the stories the federal government is telling, video evidence shows neither victim was a threat to the agents at the time they were shot. Good was shot at least three times while driving away from ICE agent Jonathan Ross, and Pretti had already been beaten to the ground for helping a woman who had been shoved by an agent when he was shot 10 times. Officials claim he was holding a gun. Videos show he was not.

America has never seen a moment in modern history like the federal occupation of Minneapolis. Thousands of masked federal officers with uncertain authority are rampaging through the region, assaulting protesters and innocent people, abusing constitutional safeguards, staking out daycares and schools, snatching people off the streets in unmarked vans based on the color of their skin or their accent, and recklessly, relentlessly provoking violent confrontations with civilians-all against the loud, repeatedly expressed wishes of local and state officials.

"Stand up for America," Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, implored on Saturday, after federal agents shot to death another one of his constituents. "Recognize that your children will ask you what side you were on. Your grandchildren will ask you what you did to act to prevent this from happening again-to make sure that the foundational elements of our democracy were rock solid. What did you do to protect your city? What did you do to protect your nation?"