January 23, 2026

On January 15th, I opened my inbox to an email message (on the Rev Dr. MLK’s birthday of all days) from the Heritage Foundation, titled “Add Your Voice to the 2026 Mass Deportation Ballot.” The email, addressed to “fellow conservatives,” lays out a blueprint for mass deportations and calls on citizens to show Washington they demand action, not more excuses. 

On the surface, this is about keeping people out. But as I read it more closely, paying attention to the language, the urgency, the framing of law and order, the direct call to action, it dawned on me that it is also about control within the country, about determining who can move freely and who cannot. 

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Minnesota sits at the center of this emerging pattern.  As a state historically tied to routes of freedom, it has become the latest in a series of sites where the apparatus of state violence and containment is visible. And a question emerged in my mind: What if these border policies are not only about immigrants crossing into the U.S., but also about keeping Americans — particularly women, Black people, LGBTQIA+, and other marginalized communities — from leaving states like Minnesota? This is the lens through which we must understand the blueprint being laid before us.

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Minnesota sits on a border that has always carried meaning beyond lines on a map. For enslaved Africans seeking freedom, northern routes through states like Minnesota, New York, Michigan, Vermont, and Maine were lifelines:  Paths toward refuge, toward safety, toward life itself. These corridors were negotiated with courage, strategy, and a relentless refusal to be contained. The geography was not neutral; it was political, spiritual, and tactical. To move north was to assert agency in the face of systems designed to strip it away.  Now, more than 150 years later, the same states that once represented escape and sanctuary might actually become the first theaters in a new kind of state-sanctioned containment. 

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Minnesota is the first case study where at least a decade of escalating violence, federal enforcement surges, and militarized operations in urban areas has made the threat visible. What happened here is not isolated, but a blueprint revealing a pattern emerging along the corridors historically tied to Black freedom.  More than a site of headline violence; what is happening on the ground in Minnesota reveals the treacherous mechanisms of modern state-sanctioned containment and repeated episodes of lethal force against citizens — all unfolding in a state whose northern boundary touches Canada, a historical line of escape and sanctuary. The events here are not isolated; they are deliberate, revealing how state power can be concentrated in a single geography to test, normalize, and extend control.

***

By examining Minnesota, we can see the patterns: targeted deployment of federal agents, legal and bureaucratic strategies that limit local oversight, and the creation of conditions that deter movement and autonomy. The events occurring in Minnesota are significant in their predictive nature.  What unfolds here signals the vulnerabilities of other historically significant corridors, states where the geography of freedom has long intersected with systems of containment. Minnesota is the template. The blueprint is visible. And the stakes are national.

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If Minnesota is the first theater, then the pattern it reveals raises urgent questions for other border states that historically served as corridors of escape. New York, with its routes across the Niagara River into Ontario, was a lifeline for freedom seekers; Michigan’s Detroit-Windsor crossing carried countless journeys toward safety; Vermont and Maine offered both inland and coastal passage into Canada. Ohio, though slightly inland, functioned as a critical hub funneling movement northward. Each of these states occupies a geography that was once liberatory, a space where the agency of Black bodies shaped the land itself.

***

Now, these same geographies are possibly vulnerable to the same dynamics that have manifested in Minnesota. Time will quickly reveal this to be true, or not. Militarized federal enforcement, selective application of law, and systemic surveillance create the conditions for containment — not only of movement, but of possibility itself. The history of freedom becomes a lens through which to read modern power: if Minnesota is a blueprint, these other states are potential next theaters, where the mechanisms of control may be tested, refined, and normalized. Understanding the pattern here is essential: state-sanctioned violence is not random, and the geography of freedom continues to shape the battleground.

***

The pattern is clear: state-sanctioned violence in Minnesota is not an isolated incident, but a window into the structural logic of power. When federal enforcement escalates in a geography historically tied to escape and freedom, it does more than harm individuals—it shapes movement, behavior, and expectation across communities. It teaches vigilance, breeds fear, and signals what is possible when systems of control are unchecked.

If Minnesota is the first theater, the lesson is national. Other border states, once corridors of liberation, now stand as potential laboratories of containment. The virus of systemic racism adapts, mutates, and moves with precision. Awareness alone is insufficient. Solidarity, intervention, and refusal to accept normalization are the only remedies. Those who fail to see the pattern risk complicity in its expansion; those who recognize it must act, witness, and resist.

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The stakes could not be higher. Recognizing this pattern is not an academic exercise—it is a matter of survival, freedom, and accountability. If the trajectory visible in Minnesota is left unchecked, the mechanisms of containment, surveillance, and state-sanctioned violence will metastasize into other historically significant corridors, curbing mobility, eroding the civil liberties of marginalized groups and whites alike, and reinforcing structural racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and more. Silence or inaction allows the normalization of violence, transforming once-liberatory geographies into laboratories of control.

Awareness is the first line of defense; solidarity is the armor. Accountability—demanded at every level of power—is the only way to prevent this blueprint from spreading. Minnesota is the warning, but it need not be the precedent. History and geography have always mattered; today, they are the maps of both danger and possibility. How we respond now will determine whether freedom continues to find pathways, or whether the virus of systemic oppression claims yet another generation.