Minnesotans stood up for their neighbors during Operation Metro Surge through advocacy, protesting, and mutual aid. Many local queer-owned businesses were at the forefront for this mutual aid, but keeping up ongoing support while the effects of the immigration enforcement push continue to be felt has proven difficult.
The Smitten Kitten, a queer sex shop in Uptown, Minneapolis, made fighting Operation Metro Surge its mission, standing behind the idea that the community has to move their feet instead of waiting for someone else to help, “because they’re not coming.” Social media manager Anne Lehman, who also runs the shop’s mutual aid effort, says the work has proven to be crucial for the community, though they are just one part of “a huge group of the people that have ended up being the most giving and helpful, [which] are usually the people that have the least and have been through the most.”
Queer shops showing up for Minnesotans in need
As Lehman sees it, The Smitten Kitten was perfectly positioned to pick up the slack where local and federal lawmakers and officials’ efforts were falling short. The store is owned and staffed by queer employees who are among the vulnerable and marginalized communities most impacted during OMS, and its location is just a few miles from where Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7, and where Winston Smith was shot and killed by Minnesota sheriffs on Jun. 3, 2021. “This stuff doesn’t exist in a vacuum to us, it affects our business and community,” Lehman says.
“It was just like, oh sh*t, Renee Good just got murdered…I don’t want to talk about lube right now,” they continued. “I want to go down to the vigil and the memorial and see what’s going on in our community.”
Smitten Kitten held–and continues to hold–rent relief fundraisers, becoming a donation center for necessary goods and hosting community events to raise more money, like the Performative Mayor Contest. Lehman says it’s become a passion project for the store over the years, and OMS catapulted them into the public’s line of sight, and emboldened them to do more. “I remember yelling at people, if you have $300 to spend on a luxury sex toy, you have $300 to put towards people’s rent or their groceries or their medical bills,” Lehman added.
The community responded in kind. Lehman says the shop was so packed with donated supplies at one point that “you couldn’t even reach the shelf.” It got so overwhelming that they enlisted the help of Wrecktangle Pizza right next door to help store the donations. “We have people coming in to donate to rental assistance, being like, ‘I’m on the verge of getting evicted right now, but here’s 10 bucks … It felt like every 15 minutes there was an SUV pulling up…like ‘I just got a car full of stuff, where am I gonna put it?’” Lehman says.
The revolution will be crafted
At Knit and Bolt, a queer-owned and staffed crafting and knitting store in northeast Minneapolis, activism came in the form of crafting–i.e. craftivism. While perhaps this activism is less flashy than other forms, owner Megan Boesen says its impact shouldn’t be minimized. Once ICE’s presence intensified in the neighborhood, Boesen started collecting “stuffies,” or stuffed toys, that they would donate to be bagged up with the groceries and household essentials that other local businesses like Smitten Kitten were delivering to families that couldn’t safely leave their homes. “We were like, what’s happier than seeing a goofy little crocheted loon come with your groceries?” Boesen notes.
Her classroom, where she teaches knitting, quilting, and crafting classes, transformed into the community stuffie hub. They’d collect donations of supplies to make more stuffies, while individuals delivering groceries to impacted families would come in, grab a stuffie to add to their bag, and dash out for their next run.
Along the way, Boesen also started to get to know local teachers who wanted to do something to help their students who suddenly couldn’t come to school due to fear. An Edison librarian reached out and prompted her to put out the call to crafters in the area to help create kits that could help local kids learn how to crochet, knit, embroider, or “any kind of handy craft.” The librarian helped distribute the kits to students who were stuck at home during the surge.
“It’s an amazing show of camaraderie and that’s what we need,” Boesen says. “We live in a very cynical time, where does this person actually stop and help somebody on the street? In Minnesota, in our queer communities and our craft communities, we do.”
Business and activism leaves for little balance
The balance between operating a business and showing up for the community became even trickier to navigate as OMS escalated. Lehman says just a few days after Good was killed, they saw someone get abducted by ICE in an unmarked vehicle. “Having these thugs drive around our city, pointing guns at people, literally assassinating people in the street. We don’t care about business in that aspect, because there’s people being f*cking murdered in the street, that’s what matters,” they said.
Still, Operation Metro Surge cost Minnesota businesses and hurt the state’s economy. Lehman explains the high amount of ICE activity in the area led to decreased foot traffic as customers felt unsafe coming to shop there. To keep up its prolific mutual aid efforts, the company had to hire more people who often didn’t get much training, due to the frantic need. It all came at a cost, as Lehman notes that the business was actually on the verge of closing around eight months before OMS. The owner has taken themselves off the payroll frequently to pay employees and keep the store running smoothly.
“We’ve probably lost like thousands of dollars just by mistakes that happened, and that’s okay, because that’s part of the messy process. But we’re going to be recovering from that for a long time,” Lehman says.
Lehman says the store is still “up and down,” but Pride Month typically boosts business. Although, the US hasn’t taken to the LGBTQ+ community kindly lately, with many Republican lawmakers attempting to rebrand June as “Nuclear Family Month,” promoting the idea of “one man, one woman, and their children” as the ideal family. Any surge in business during Pride-primarily celebrated in the Twin Cities during the last weekend of June–won’t be enough to fully recoup these losses.
What comes next?
Knit and Bolt is still running learning kits to kids who need them, and has even gotten donations “from big craft companies” to help provide them. Boesen says they have also begun running social craft nights at schools and offering a community space every Friday. She also wants to set up a raffle to “get more money into the smaller mutual aid networks like community kitchens.”
Boesen says crafters will continue their mission to bring change to Minnesota and support their neighbors in need. “Crafters are very giving people…we are going to protect our community and we’re going to stand up and we’re going to make our voices heard to help people.”
At The Smitten Kitten, Lehman emphasizes that ICE activity isn’t over and that mutual aid must continue, no matter how imperfect. “It’s not always going to be, like, super organized, it’s going to be messy as hell, and that’s part of the human condition,” Lehman says.
Lehman added that more support, too, should be demanded of elected officials, whose inaction, they argue, allowed the ICE surge to happen. “To watch them go around be like, ‘I’m so proud of my city, and I’m so heartbroken,’ OK, f*cking do something about that.”
Calling it “an honor” to have earned the trust of the community, Lehman says witnessing the impact of the work has fueled them to keep pushing even harder. “We’re big nerds, we have big hearts. It causes us a lot of problems, but it also does really awesome things, and sometimes we help thousands of people pay their rent or reverse their overdoses and stuff like that, so it’s kind of worth it, actually.”
