Teri Leigh
Grief this huge needs somewhere to go.
These truths cannot be flattened into headlines, or lost to time, or swallowed by the churn of the next terrible thing.
Our rage, courage, tenderness, humor, devotion, and resourcefulness brought out a brilliant bright light of Fierce Love.
And that is worth keeping, and growing, and passing from hand to hand.
The WOMN Project
grassroots mutual aid healing
During the winter of 2025/2026, when ICE infiltrated Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, the WOMN of Minnesota showed the world how to love fiercely.
I have interviewed eleven of these women.
These stories are written with anonymous first name pseudonyms because every woman is phenomenal.
She is you.
She is your mother.
She is your neighbor.
and your third grade teacher
and the stranger you locked eyes with at a protest.
These stories are the pure, unfiltered, human truth of what these women experienced, survived, and became.
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A woman who was physically assaulted by an ICE agent in a Target parking lot.
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A green card holder from Europe who puts on a reflective to make sure immigrant children get to school safely.
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A woman whose fiancé was deported to Mexico, and now knows what tear-gas feels like.
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A protest frog — and the things she witnessed from inside her costume at protests at the Whipple Federal Building.
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A woman whose MAGA family rejected her trans child, and who found her way to something bigger than herself.
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A VA nurse who lives between Renee’s and Alex’s two memorial sites.
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A Jewish mother who has no more fucks to give and calls her resistance her sacred obligation to repair the world.
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A woman who works with a team to bring home detainees released from detention centers in Texas back home.
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An ER social worker who watched the injuries from ICE assaults.
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A mutual aid master who raised over $80,000 and paid more than fifty rents for families in need
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An elder care nursing aide who protested at the Whipple Federal Building as a form of "group therapy" she needed.