If you don’t live in Minnesota right now, and you are wondering what is true about all of the stories you might be seeing on your feed, I don’t blame you. We live in a time of such massive misinformation that we really need to be cautious of what we are being fed.

As someone who lives here, I can share with you from my point of view what’s happening in Northfield, our tiny, typically extremely peaceful Minnesota college town.

As a white person I’m pretty insulated from all this, and like I said our town is far enough from the Twin Cities that we aren’t in the middle of the most intense stuff. But even here, the weirdness is getting harder to ignore. Multiple posts on Nextdoor.com that the local meat processing plant suddenly is hiring all full time positions. But maybe these are the jobs DJT was promising?

Just Saturday, one of our favorite restaurants in town was unable to open. The beloved head cook, George, had been taken by ice when he was on his way to work, and other POC employees were rightly afraid to show up at work. This hits hard. My son used to work at this restaurant. These are our people.

…reality is setting in and it’s hard to sleep, knowing that my neighbors are being disappeared, and others too frightened to leave their homes to go to church or school or the doctor or to get groceries.

And Adan, another beloved community member, father of four, torn from his car in front of his sobbing 14-year-old and taken to a detention facility in another state. Ice claimed that he was a criminal, but he had no criminal record. Blatant lies.

They are not just targeting people who are here without documentation, but any people whose skin happens to be not white. And as you can see from the executions of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, increasingly those who are standing up for them.

Then yesterday, when I went on a grocery run to Aldi, as I was bringing my groceries out to my car I noticed a cluster of vehicles with flashing lights out by the street. I was worried it was an ice raid, and tried to get there quickly. But I was too slow. By the time I got there, there was only an empty vehicle, abandoned in the street, window open. it looked like it was still running.

There could be many legitimate reasons why this empty car was sitting there in the middle of the street, I keep telling myself. But reality is setting in and it’s hard to sleep, knowing that my neighbors are being disappeared, and others too frightened to leave their homes to go to church or school or the doctor or to get groceries. It’s nightmarish. My heart is broken.

But to tell you the truth, I would rather have a broken heart than no heart at all.

And I can’t even imagine what it must be like for my neighbors whose skin and ethnicity is different from mine.

For people who are saying that this is the price of breaking the law and not coming here legally, I call BS. It’s a misdemeanor to cross the border undocumented. Like speeding or littering. Speeding and littering don’t make us criminals.

For example, little Liam and his dad had followed all the proper channels and were cruelly apprehended and then slandered. This is not about them breaking the law and having regular consequences. And the border patrol folks are not actually even doing a good job of pretending.

For example, several enrolled members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe were recently detained by ICE — sovereign Indigenous people who were here long before the idea of private property and rigid political borders.

My heart is broken.

But to tell you the truth, I would rather have a broken heart than no heart at all.

The self-righteous attitude of those who defend this horrific behavior is so ironic it kinda knocks the wind out of me.

Is memory so short from Thanksgiving to now that they could forget the story that indigenous people welcomed white immigrants from Europe with open arms back in the day?

If you are the praying kind, I ask for your prayers. Pray for the children, for the vulnerable, for the heart and soul of our nation and for the world to wake up from this nightmare… and pray for concrete, actionable ways to turn your worry and love and care into action.

Because here is the thing: Meaningful action frees up frozen fear. if you are scared and sad and angry like me, and you want to do something to help, please don’t freeze in that posture. Don’t let the fear settle into your bones. Right now is the window when everything is still in motion, and the end of the story hasn’t been written yet.

Connect with other people. There are a lot of people who care! And they need to know that you are there, that they are not alone.

And move. Create. Dance, make art, make food, and pray. Each one of us has a unique, authentic contribution that we can make. No single one of us can be the hero here. It’s all of us together.

Spring is coming, even here in the frozen northland. The ice will thaw, sooner or later. But the actions we take now will mean everything in terms of who we are as a people when spring comes.

Trina Brunk is a life coach, singer/songwriter and mom, and a lifelong multi-passionate creative.