‘It’s not because we have bigger guns’: Minneapolis’ poet laureate tells why ICE found itself in trouble

MINNEAPOLIS (CNN) — In January 2025, Junauda Petrus warned, in her inaugural poem as poet laureate of Minneapolis, of residents “getting snatched in the night,” and celebrated a city of “neighbors who traded plates of food….so we could all taste where each other was from.”

The poem, “Ritual on How to Love Minneapolis Again,” has been circulating anew after the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in the midst of a Trump administration immigration crackdown.

Petrus read the poem this past fall at an elementary school poetry workshop. Afterward, a young boy with a blond mullet, who’d impressed her by speaking up in class, came up to her and told her, “This is a loooooong poem.” She told the boy’s mother and her wife “Y’all’s kid is hilarious.” The boy looked just like his mother, Petrus said. That was how she met Renee Good.

Petrus spoke with CNN about how her hometown is building off a history of Minnesota pride and building off a legacy.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What was going through your mind as you were first starting to draft “Ritual on How to Love Minneapolis Again?”

I really was like, what is the Minneapolis I know? And I know Minneapolis as a kid who grew up in the ’90s from an immigrant family, a working poor immigrant family, that had friends from all over, that got to learn a lot through those communities, that got to learn a lot about whiteness, because this is also such a white place.

Even with the diversity, there’s still a lot of ways that I think white folks here could also be like, “Oh, well, we’re not the South” and pat themselves on the back. I think we’re seeing this in complexity here. When ICE killed Renee Good, Jacob Frey, our mayor, was like, you know, “f**k ICE, get the f**k out” or whatever the f**k. He was cursing his little chest out.

And I think a lot of people who were friends of mine from outside of Minneapolis, were like, “Oh, my God, your mayor seems like about that life.” Then he went on to backpedal. Not saying, “abolish ICE,” not also questioning the way that his particular Minneapolis Police Department has done similar violence against Black and brown people forever.

It sounds like part of what you’re saying is the side of Minneapolis that people are seeing right now exists, but it also has its limits. Minneapolis is not all kumbaya all the time.

How I would phrase that instead, is that there’s been a lot of work that’s been done for the last decade —- and I would say even further than that —- particularly around policing in this city. What we’re seeing of white folks right now has been the investment of a lot of labor of folks of color, of having certain kinds of dialogues and whatnot.

Politicians gonna politic. Who’s showing up right now, it’s people who are committed. It’s people who have been doing this work, both inside and outside of themselves, for years. There’s people who are in genuine community with people of color as white people. There’s a lot of white friends who are like, “Stay yo ass at home. I’ll bring your groceries.”

But a lot of that is actually, not just “Oh, we’re these good white people that knew how to be good.” This has been decades of political history. Look up Paul Wellstone. There’s a lot of people who are connected with deep-rooted, deep-seated organizing legacies and practices.

People have been organizing around ICE for a while. Minneapolis didn’t just start resisting ICE, like there was all of these other smaller things last year and people were showing up. It was always some melee.

A lot of these big corporations will be like, “Oh, Trump is going to sue me. Before he even sues me. I’m just going to give him what he wants.” And I think what I love about Minneapolis is folks are like, “If it’s wrong, I’m just gonna stand on business.”

A lot of the ways that Trump has been able to politicize people against immigrants is the same way Black people have been also scapegoated. Back in the day, it was Black people. In this moment, there’s a lot of conversations that are being surfaced at the table that strangely, were instigated around immigration policy and policing.

What about the Twin Cities makes its residents uniquely suited to meeting this moment?

We’ve dealt with the police doing f**ked up shit and people standing up against the police. We’ve had conversations around defunding the police. We’ve had conversations around abolishing the police. And I think now it’s like, “Ding, ding. Oh, wow. Now I get it.”

What I also think has been powerful is the decentralization of the actual work that’s happening. Every community is having to build resources of care, very locally, in a way that is way more sustainable.

American individualism claims everybody who makes it in capitalism, it’s because they were smart and hard working. Everybody who doesn’t make it in capitalism, they’re stupid and lazy.

What ended up totally self-destructing ICE and this whole surge was people being like, “Well, what groceries do you need today? Oh, so-and-so, I can drive their kids to school. Oh, so-and-so has a house, you know, maybe y’all could stay at that house.” It’s soft power.

It’s not because we have bigger guns. It’s that we got very, very simple and direct around caring for people around us that we’re already in community with, and that became the thing that this powerful, super-well-funded force could not fight against.

As a longtime Minneapolis resident, do you feel like a different person than you were a month ago?

Totally. I do think it is kind of like when you go through an experience that feels so extreme and it just brings you together. You’re like, “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, we did that.” There’s a sense of exhilaration and connection.

I think theory is now being forced into practice. Like, we can’t just be like, “Oh well, we want immigrants to feel safe.” And the signs: “Immigrants welcome here.” “Black lives matter.” We’re actually forced to have to do it.

And I do feel more confidence in Minneapolis than I did, as a person of color. Like “Okay, wow. Y’all would actually stand up and do some shit.”

What I also think is fascinating, it’s like the dead of winter. It was like this Arctic pride. Even me, I was like “Yeah, I can take it! For the people!”

If we could push in these hard conditions, imagine what we could do? We’re not trying to meet their violence, and up the ante on their violence. No, we’re actually gonna double down on who we are. And that’s what’s gonna topple y’all, because y’all don’t know what it’s like for people to do things for you out of love.

At the end of my poem, I’m like, people wouldn’t understand that it isn’t cold here all the time. Something about here is actually quite warm. And it is true. There is a way that people really do want people to be okay. It doesn’t mean that I agree with everybody’s politics, or everybody agrees with mine. People are more concerned about, what are ways that we can invite people to show up, and try to integrate it into the fabric of what it is we want to be moving forward, as a culture and as a people.

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