It’s Tuesday morning, and Pow Wow Grounds is swarming with activity.
A small group is gathered in lawn chairs around a fire in the parking lot of the Minneapolis coffee shop. Drivers navigate around the assembled unit, backing minivans and SUVs into the few available parking spaces off Franklin Avenue before unloading their trunks, which are packed with instant ramen, chips, and flats of bottled water. Inside, nearly every seat in the cafe is full, as organizers and ICE patrollers warm up with free coffee and soup before heading back out into the cold.
Last Thursday, one day after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis, Pow Wow Grounds and the adjacent arts space All My Relations Gallery announced that they were being activated as a headquarters “for ICE patrol observation, rapid response coordination, and community support.” Angela Two Stars, director of All My Relations Arts, says that on that day ICE was positioned across the street, where masked agents tried to take a young Native woman from her vehicle. Immediately, she wanted to turn the space over to the community.
“It’s reminiscent of after George Floyd—the same thing happened, our place kind of became a headquarters,” she says. “We have organizers, legal observers, protectors, needing a place to station out of while coordinating their efforts in the community.”
Donations for those organizers have flooded the space, and the gallery floor is now packed with bags of coffee, granola bars, and energy drinks.
“We wanted snacks for those that are volunteering and observing: Come in to warm up, grab a snack, go back out. And what the community does is, they want to help, and so they—” Two Stars gestures to the room around us. “They help.”
Similar scenes are playing out at restaurants, bars, and coffee shops across the Twin Cities, as people look for any way to help out during the ongoing federal occupation of the region. Some restaurants are collecting donations in support of immigrants, volunteers, and protesters; some are handing out whistles and information about ICE encounters; others are acting as hubs for volunteers and observers. Many have posted Monarca Rapid Response Line signs, or a version of them, on their doors or windows: “Private Property. No ICE or CBP Access.”
On Tuesday morning at Moona Moono in Uptown, 10 or so volunteers hustle about, moving bags full of food from the cafe floor to cars that await, trunks open, in the back lot. Nearly as soon as the drop zone behind Moona Moono’s counter is cleared out, it fills again, with a near-constant flow of people dropping off boxed mac ‘n’ cheese, jars of peanut butter, and canned tuna.
“If we put out an ask for something, within 15 minutes, someone is dropping it off,” says Kirstie Kimball, the beyond beurre blanc food critic who’s organizing this donation drive. That morning, she had just put out a request for ice melt. Within the hour, no fewer than five plastic jugs of the stuff sat at the ready, all delivered by community members.
Moona Moono owner Angie Lee says the donations started pouring into the coffee shop when she saw Kimball, a regular, posting about an emergency Uptown food drive last week.
“I saw that she had a call for donations, and I was like, ‘Are you giving out your address?’ And she was like, ‘Yes.’ And I was like, ‘Don't! I might be cynical, or you might be naive, but don’t do that,’” Lee laughs.
As a woman of color, Lee herself has been anxious to be politically active “out of fear of being targeted,” but she wanted to be sure that there was a secure and safe place for donations. Her shop felt like that place.
The number of donations has been overwhelming; at one point Moona Moono’s entire basement was full of bags as Kimball (who is also a Racket contributor) looked for other area food shelves and nonprofits that could take donations. “Yesterday we moved 12,600 pounds of food,” she says. “I believe we’ll move more than that today.”
Throughout the drive, which concluded Tuesday, Kimball canceled plans and rescheduled work meetings, setting up a makeshift office at one of Moona Moono’s tables. (If you still want to donate, a similar drive is ongoing at Smitten Kitten and Twin Cities Leather; you can find a list of needs at Pow Wow Grounds here or donate to @powwowgrounds on Venmo.) Kimball says that though she’s hosted food drives during “flashpoint moments” a number of times in the past, this is the biggest response ever from donors and volunteers.
“To be honest, we thought it was going to be, like, 50 people,” Lee says. “We did not think it was going to be a huge outpouring.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” adds Kimball. “The scale of it is so, so massive.”
Not every local donation drive is on the scale of the ones at Pow Wow Grounds and Moona Moono, but rapid, robust community support has been a constant.
At Duck Duck Coffee on 38th Street in south Minneapolis, a regular was connected with three families, all of whom had a father deported and were trying to figure out how to get their stuff together to rejoin him. So the coffee shop decided to host a luggage drive.
“In less than 24 hours, we had over a dozen bags donated—good, quality, overhead-sized bags,” says Duck Duck owner Kat Naden. It was more than the families would need.
At Briar Bar in northeast Minneapolis, owner Hilari ZiaiMehr says they’ve given out more than 500 whistles and "Know Your Rights" zines over the last week. Briar Bar erected a "mail your elected official" station where people can fill out postcards demanding accountability—so far, they’ve mailed out 100—and a protest sign-making station.
And when a Briar Bar regular approached the shop about collecting donations and shelf-stable groceries for home deliveries, they started a food drive.
“By that evening, the donation bin was full,” ZiaiMehr says. “That's what the goal is: to help each other, provide support, and keep fighting.”
“People keep on printing us whistles—we’ve gone through so many bags of whistles,” Naden says, along with stickers, zines, and posters from Burlesque. “People just keep on bringing stuff, and we keep on providing stuff. We are just the vessel for all of this community work.”
Nearby at Northern Coffeeworks, where yet another bowl of whistles sits out on the counter, accompanied by zines and information about ICE interactions, head roaster and director of operations Naomi Vaughan echoes that feeling.
“Northern is a community hub—we have a public bulletin board and support local causes and organizations that align with our values,” Vaughan says. “If we can offer customers a no-barrier entry point to participate in local action, which they may be aware of but not know how to take part in otherwise, that is fulfilling our role in the community.”
She adds that the demand from the community is clearly there: “That bowl of whistles has been repeatedly cleared out as soon as we fill it.”
Many of the restaurants we spoke to expressed some version of this sentiment: Being part of the community means standing up for that community no matter what.
“We’re literally talking about our customers, employees, and neighbors here—we wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for these people, so we absolutely will use our space for comfort and our platform to raise awareness,” says A Bar of Their Own owner Jillian Hiscock. Her women’s sports bar has been distributing whistles and providing the materials to make protest posters, buttons, and more. When classes were canceled for Minneapolis Public Schools students last week, the bar held pajama and movie days, providing coloring pages for kids.
“People are just like, ‘Hey, I can provide meals, I can provide rides.’ People are just looking for things that they can do in order to help,” observes Duck Duck’s Naden. “And to be able to have a space where people can connect with each other to hopefully find their purpose—it’s hard to find your purpose in stuff like this—being able to connect is really, really important.”
The restaurants mentioned so far are, it goes without saying, the ones that have been able to stay open amidst the ongoing ICE invasion. As MSP Mag’s Justine Jones notes in this excellent guide to supporting Minnesota’s immigrant community, the restaurants hit hardest by the immigration crackdown are those that are immigrant-owned and -operated, and which rely on a largely immigrant customer base.
For some restaurants, the best way that they can support and protect their staff is closing, either temporarily or indefinitely. A Star Tribune report earlier this week estimates that in some heavily immigrant corridors, roughly 80% of businesses have closed.
There are stories of restaurant owners (who wish to be unnamed for obvious reasons) who are driving their immigrant employees to work. Some community members are collecting funds for Latino restaurant workers who feel unsafe going to work right now.
They’re right to be concerned. Wrecktangle Pizza’s Jeffrey Rogers, Breanna Evans, Elizabeth Klimenko, and Gabriel Campaña-Blatti, answering jointly by email, say they initially felt helpless about the ICE invasion but knew they had to do something, especially since the targeting of immigrants directly affects the restaurant industry.
“What we DO know how to do is make food, especially pizza,” the Wrecktanglers say. They decided to host a “buy a pizza, give a pizza to a family in need” event over the weekend, along with collecting funds and nonperishables. The restaurant sold 1,636 pizzas across its locations, more than 600 of which have already had their accompanying pizza donated, and has received $83,000 in donations.
Almost immediately after Wrecktangle announced those totals earlier this week, federal agents attempted to raid the pizza shop’s Lyn-Lake location. They were immediately chased off by community members.
“Seems like a pretty weird coincidence … our hours are posted to open at 3 p.m. on Mondays, and they showed up at 3:25 p.m.,” the Wrecktangle team says. “We feel lucky that our doors were locked, as we weren't able to open on Monday due to the overwhelming support from our community this past weekend (and always).”
The possibility of retaliation is known to Ty Barnett, co-owner of Workhorse Coffee Bar on University Avenue in St. Paul, where they’ve been running a “FUCK ICE” cold brew deal with a portion of the proceeds going to MN Immigrant Rights Action Committee. But it also won’t stop her and her staff from doing what they think is right.
“Does it put a target on us? Sure, 100%. Worth it,” she says. Workhorse has been raising hundreds of dollars a day; after their Instagram post about the deal took off, people from around the country have been calling in to order pay-it-forward Fuck ICE coffees for people in the Twin Cities.
“The reality is, we’re always very vocal about our politics,” Ty continues, gesturing to the “Coffee Makes You Queer” sign that hangs above the bar. “Now more than ever, it fucking matters.”
