Deportation on the Rich Man’s Runway

Yesterday, I witnessed a deportation flight at MSP from beginning to end, a quiet little American horror film playing out on the same tarmac where billionaires sip champagne in their private jets and NFL teams fly out for away games. The same runway where George Lucas’s aircraft lounged like an idle god as steps away fifteen-passenger blacked-out vans rolled in like funeral carriages.

This is where the wealthy come and go untouched. And yesterday, it’s where our neighbors, families, and friends were kidnapped and processed for disappearance.

The “Signature” private hangar, the marble-floored gateway for Minnesota’s rich and powerful, was doubling as a launching pad for state-sanctioned exile. Across from it, Target Corp’s massive hangar glowed with red beams like an omen. Beneath it, ICE and DHS agents flashed their credentials, guiding living human beings through a gate as if they were merchandise scanned for shipping.

Their vans crept down the road: a death-march of the American Dream.

Why I Was There

Because silence is complicity.
Because witnessing is the smallest possible act of courage in a country addicted to looking away.

Because our relatives have stood here before, on this exact land, swallowed by the same machine of American cruelty.

In 1862, hundreds of Dakota women and children were driven to Fort Snelling, interned at the world’s first concentration camp, right here at the confluence of the rivers, right beneath the flight paths of today’s planes. They were penned into the Fort Snelling concentration camp through the winter, left to starve and freeze, and many of them did. Just as the United States wanted.

History remembers that atrocity politely. Minnesota tells it with plaques. But the echoes still scream.

And another part of my bloodline, like the Eagle and the Condor, comes from Mexico, from the brown-skinned cousins south of a line that was never anything but a colonial fiction. Once upon a time our trade roads ran into South America. Now, those same peoples are “illegal” on stolen land.

Yesterday, they were shackled and loaded for removal, stripped of their humanity.

History doesn’t just repeat, and America simply refuses to stop reenacting the same crimes echoes through the chambers of time.

The Tarmac

From the 7th-floor of the MSP Gold Ramp, I watched the choreography of the deportation: three black vans circling the plane’s nose like Conestoga wagons forming a white-settler defensive ring, bracing for an imaginary threat by “Savage Indians”.

ICE dropped more shackles from a bag, the metal winking in the sun like something proud of itself.

One by one, the agents hauled men, women, and children off the vans.
One by one, they patted them down.
One by one, they shackled their feet like livestock.

People hobbled up the stairs in chains while families on vacation rolled their luggage into the main terminal unshackled, unbothered, unaware that human beings were being disappeared thirty yards from their Mickey Mouse backpacks.

America runs two airports: one for the free, another for the condemned. They share a runway but not a moral universe.

When the Planes Passed Each Other

As the deportation jet prepared to lift off, a Delta flight taxied by first, a commercial plane stuffed with people who would fly home, or to Cancun, or to a conference in Denver, blissfully ignorant that they were inches from a vessel full of shattered lives.

I wondered if any passenger peering out that tiny oval window recognized what they were seeing. I wondered if they saw the shackles.
I wondered if they would care if they did.

The deportation jet lifted, slicing across the Minneapolis skyline, a metal needle stitching a wound nobody wants to claim.

People on the ground stared up at the fading dot in the sky.

Did any of them know?

Did any of them imagine what was happening inside?

Did any of them care?

The Final Thought Nobody Wants to Face

We like to pretend these things happen in the shadows.

They don’t.

They happen right next to us at the airport where we pick up loved ones, at the hangar where the rich store their toys, at the same gates where the American Dream pretends it can be reached with enough hard work and TSA-approved liquids.

Yesterday, I watched that dream die again.

And the worst part?

Most people will never know.

Many people will never care.

But some of us will remember. Some of us will speak.

Because someone has to.

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