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Joy, Healing and the Resolve to Keep Fighting at No Kings in St. Paul

Some 200,000 people crammed the grounds of the State Capitol for a celebration of the area’s resilience and defiance of the Trump regime.

Over 200,000 protesters gathered at the No Kings rally in St. Paul, Minnesota, the flagship rally of the March 28 No Kings protests.

St. Paul, Minn. – Minnesota’s Twin Cities have been the site of grief and suffering for more than three months, since the ICE siege began, but on Saturday the streets were filled with joy. This was the official “flagship” of the global “No Kings” protests, and some 200,000 people crammed the grounds of the State Capitol for a celebration of the area’s resilience, community and defiance of the Trump regime. 

Yes, they showed up to hear Bruce Springsteen sing his hymn “Streets of Minneapolis,” to listen to indefatigable Senator Bernie Sanders and local anti-ICE stalwarts Governor Tim Walz, Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan and Attorney General Keith Ellison, and to see the octogenarians Joan Baez and Jane Fonda, along with Maggie Rogers and Tom Morello, rock out and dance to the civil rights anthem “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” alongside the astonishing locals Brass Solidarity and Singing Resistance. But mostly they came to celebrate one another, and to heal.

If you’ve ever tried to figure out how the Twin Cities resisted Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security so successfully, you heard some great stories. I want to focus on two. Natalie Ehret, the founder of Haven Watch, recalled how her pro-immigrant work began when she and her two sons were delivering hand-warmers to anti-ICE protesters at the Whipple Detention Center, and her 21-year-old son Jack discovered that two young girls had been released from custody and were “wandering in the cold, freezing,” she told the crowd. He put them in the family car, gave them food and water, and lent them his phone so they could call relatives. Haven Watch started that day, recruiting volunteers to meet immigrants being released from Whipple, without food, winter clothing, money or their identification papers. That led to a more robust program to meet the ongoing needs of the detainees. “It wasn’t organized or well-rehearsed. We didn’t know what to do. We just acted,” Ehret said. “Strangers paused their lives. They showed up to stand and watch at a gate…without regard for their own safety or comfort, or even their own lives.”

It turns out Jack had been diagnosed with brain cancer three years earlier–I had heard of Haven Watch, but I didn’t know this part of the story. “He has always been kind, but that experience changed him. He understands now what most of us don’t: How short........

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