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Renee Cardarelle (00:00)
When I'm talking to groups, I'll sometimes talk about Audre Lorde, who wrote an essay titled, Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. And I say to folks, can't use violence and aggression and fear and division to defeat violence and aggression and fear and division. You use those tools, you're just going to end up with more of the same. And I think Minnesota is doing a really good job of not doing that.
Kim Villanueva (00:29)
you
And welcome to Feminism Now. I'm Kim Villanueva, the president of the National Organization for Women. If you've been paying attention to the news, then I'm sure like me, your eyes have been on Minnesota. The recent raids from immigration and custom enforcement on the immigrant communities there have sparked peaceful protests and violent responses from ICE. As of this recording, two people, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Preti, have been killed by ICE officials while protesting. Threats from ICE are real and terrifying.
but the people of Minnesota are not backing down. They are out every day in sub-zero winter temperatures to protect and protest with their neighbors. And many of the people organizing the protests, taking food to families, and more are women. Rose and I began to wonder, what is it about Minnesota? So we're very happy to have a special episode today. We're speaking with Renee Carderill, the chapter president of Minnesota Now, about what it really is to be Minnesota Nice.
We'd love to hear how you're processing what's happening in this country, and especially in Minnesota. You can call now at the number in our show notes and send us a voice message or email us a voice memo at feminismnow at n-o-w dot o-r-g. We'd love to put your voice on the show. And now let's talk about Minnesota. Rose and I are so thrilled today to be speaking with the president of Minnesota Now, Renee Cardarelle. Renee, thank you so much for being here.
And I wanted to say, when we talked earlier, I shared that I was actually born in Minnesota. My dad is an immigrant from the Philippines, and he came in the 50s to go to grad school in Minneapolis. So there's a personal connection to this discussion today. it surprised me, and I'm sure it surprised a lot of people, when ICE was deployed to Minneapolis. It just didn't seem like an obvious choice to anybody. And based on your background with racial justice and racial equity work in Minnesota,
Can you tell us why you think ICE was deployed to Minneapolis?
Renee Cardarelle (02:29)
Sure. First of all, thanks Kim and Rose for having me come and visit with you today. I wasn't really very surprised when they came to Minnesota. Minnesota has been targeted by the current administration on a number of occasions. And our governor ran against Trump and Banffs with Kamala Harris, of course, in the last election. And so I think we were already sort of visible as a place that was in opposition.
to a lot of the current administration's policies. And that has continued even after the election, there has been an ongoing kind of conversation where Minnesota has been pushing back on a lot of the things the current administration is doing. So it wasn't really very surprising to me. Minnesota has ⁓ been in the news quite a bit for some of its anti-racist work. And that also set it up as being a target.
for this kind of pushback against racial equity. So, you know, of course the murder of George Floyd happened during the first term, Trump's first term. And there was a lot of outpouring of outrage from the community members in Minnesota, but there were also some riots. So most of what happened were protests and they were peaceful. But what people focused on were some riots and some inappropriate behavior.
And there was criticism of governor Walz for not responding in a timely manner to that. And I think there was a sense that somehow that this time around, if they came in with ICE and started doing some deportations and detentions, it might set up a similar dynamic that could be used then for Trump to invoke the insurrection act. So it's been in the back of everyone's mind that
It needs to be a peaceful resistance in Minnesota. We don't want to give any reason for the current administration to say, you know, Minnesotans are rioting and we need to come in with the military and shut down the state.
Rose Brunache (04:40)
What do you think ICE expected when they arrived in Minneapolis and Minnesota? You kind of touched on it, but if you can expand.
Renee Cardarelle (04:47)
So even though I was talking a little bit about the anti-racist work that has been happening in Minnesota for a long time, Minnesota is really two cultures. There's sort of our metro area culture, which is a lot more progressive and fights for racial justice. And then there's our rural areas that are more conservative. And oftentimes I call them gated communities. They're worried about
what's happening and how things are changing in the metro area. And while they'll never say it's the fact that the metro area is becoming more diverse, that is behind the words. There's sort of this sense of we have to keep them out of the rural communities, them being people of color, because it's a real protectionist sort of system of, I've actually heard farmers out in rural areas say things like,
Our family has owned this property for 150 years and no one's going to take it away from me. And this makes me think of the way that the Midwest, and I don't think this is just common to Minnesota, but it's a really Midwest phenomena. The way the Midwest was settled by taking land away from the indigenous people. happened throughout the United States, but it was particularly glaring in the Midwest with a lot of the Lands, the Homestead Act and
a lot of farmers moving into the area and settling the land and turning it over into farmland. And there was a lot of resistance from indigenous people. And it just had a particular atmosphere in the Midwest. And I think there's embedded historical trauma for a lot of the people who are descendants of those settlers, this sense of if we did it to somebody else, they can come do it to us. And so I think there's this hidden fear that comes out.
in rural Minnesota. getting back to your question of what ICE expected, I think that this conversation of the metro area being dangerous is very well known in certain circles. And so I think ICE thought that by coming into the, and they often would target specifically Minneapolis, they thought that they could, they would see a lot of resistance from
people of color and their allies in Minneapolis from the diverse nature of Minneapolis, from the diverse population in Minneapolis, and that ⁓ the rest of Minnesota wouldn't stand back and let it happen, you know, and even approve of it because there's this sort of rhetoric that's happening that suggests that there's a lot of people in Minnesota who don't like how much we're diversifying.
And so I think they thought they would have a lot of struggle in the metro area, in Minneapolis in particular, but not so much from the rest of the state. And that just hasn't been true. The whole state is kind of standing up and saying no.
Kim Villanueva (07:43)
Now getting back to the idea of the big city versus the rural parts of the state. I've spent most of my adult life in Illinois and we have the same situation with Chicago, which is a big city and very diverse and the rest of the state, which is very rural and pretty, mainly white. You know, there's pockets here and there. But how do you think that affects the politics in the state when you have a large center of population that is very diverse, know, many different populations and then...
a small minority, is white, and they feel like their power and their influence is being taken away.
Renee Cardarelle (08:13)
There's definitely that dynamic happening in Minnesota and throughout the Midwest. The more populated urban areas tend to be more democratic. So when you're talking specific politics, you'll see democratic legislators and voting for democratic candidates. And then when you get in the rural areas, you'll see a more of them, majority of people voting for more Republican candidates. Although I also want to say that in rural Minnesota, there's firmly
a third of the people even in rural areas that vote Democratic. Because we have a winner takes all system, it sometimes looks like everybody in certain areas votes for a certain way, but it's not true. So this myth that rural areas are synonymous with conservative beliefs and being Republican isn't really true. The other thing that's interesting about Minnesota is it's always been a little more Democratic leaning than some of its neighboring states.
In fact, our Democratic Party is called the DFL, which stands for Democrat Farmer Labor, which is unique in the United States. And it was really a coalition of people around the state. had some strongly rural areas that had strong labor unions in them that aligned with the Democrats in the past. So we've often seen really strong support for Democrats in Minnesota.
Rose Brunache (09:33)
You've done a lot of work with underrepresented groups in the state. Can you talk a bit about which immigrant communities end up in Minnesota and why? I guess some people are questioning why it's such a cold state. Attractive, you know, to some people who come from countries that are very warm and.
Renee Cardarelle (09:49)
Yeah, that is really funny, isn't it? ⁓ Minnesota gets terribly cold in the winter and we laugh about that a lot. know, that just even for us Minnesotans, how cold it is. You just kind of endure winter. So I was thinking about this question a little bit and who are the immigrants that have come to Minnesota? And initially it was German and Scandinavian immigrants and the Scandinavians kind of make sense, right? Cause they're going from one cold place to another cold place.
And they really had a huge influence on Minnesota's culture. So they're very much present still. And it's not uncommon to hear things like Ufta and Don'tcha Know and Minnesota. You you can get this real, you know, kind of Scandinavian feel to what Minnesota is like. With the more recent migrants, we've had migrants coming up from Mexico for a long time. And a lot of them are also interested in working on the farms.
They're our largest migrant population is the Hispanic community. And they came up to work on the farms, to work in the sugar beet farms, especially, because they're very labor intensive. up north, northern Minnesota, there's a lot of sugar beet farms. They also came to work in some of the processing plants. So like the chicken processing plants, places. And I think that's what drew the Hispanic community up to Minnesota. But we also have our second largest immigrant population
outside of the Western Europeans originally came, the more recent immigrant population is from Somalia. And that is a mystery. Like, why would you want to move from Somalia, which is so warm up to a cold place like Minnesota? And I think it has to do with this. The fact that Minnesota is in many ways very welcoming to people. And I read something in the Minnesota Women's Press ⁓ in January 2026. They came out with an article about
Minnesota's immigrant community. And they were saying that for the Somali community, the values and culture of Minnesota really aligned with their culture and the sense of community that Minnesota built also aligns with their culture. So that drew people there. But on a more pragmatic level, I think people also came to Minnesota because we have a lot of social services. We have a lot of nonprofits serving people. I know of a number of agencies that
welcome in new immigrants and help them get set up. most of the time when people are coming as refugee immigrants, especially, they're being helped by an organization. And so they're being resettled into an area where there's an organization that can support their needs. And I think that's happened a lot in Minnesota. So I think there's been large groups of people like the Hmong population that have settled here because of that. And then over time, the folks who are resettled
you know, they have family members settled in different areas or they talk amongst themselves. The immigrant communities aren't siloed from each other. And so they say, you know, there's really good things about Minnesota. Come live near us. There's jobs, there's programs that will help you. There's support for families and there's sort of this welcoming atmosphere. And so we see people moving in to the state from other states.
So they'll settle somewhere else first and then move into the state because of those reasons.
Kim Villanueva (13:14)
There is that cliche about the people from Minnesota as being Minnesota nice. So how would you describe Minnesota nice?
Renee Cardarelle (13:21)
Sure. So Minnesota nice, a lot of times when people are saying that, they're not saying it as a compliment. They're saying, that was Minnesota nice, meaning friendly to your face, but stabbing you in the back when you're not around. So, or friendly to your face and very nice to you when you're with them, but very cold and unwelcoming in other places. and it doesn't just happen to immigrant families.
It happens to anybody who is new to Minnesota. So Christine Ortiz, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris did actually a study on Midwest NICE and talked about how it can really end up excluding people from diverse communities. They come in expecting what is being said to their face to be what people are meaning, what they're going to actually do.
and then they're surprised when they don't follow through with it. So just really simple thing might be, oh yeah, we should get together and have lunch sometime and then never following through with lunch.
Rose Brunache (14:29)
How does this impact immigrants when they move in? You sort of talked about that, but you talked about more of other states. How does this impact immigrants?
Renee Cardarelle (14:38)
I think for immigrants, because a lot of the immigrants who are moving to Minnesota right now are people of color, they are experiencing discrimination. And it takes a while for the immigrant community who's moving here to kind of understand what's going on. So they move and they feel like they're really welcomed and people are nice, but then they don't get the job and they don't understand why they don't get the job. And they...
feel like people say hello to them and seem interested in their lives, but then they never call them back. And so I think that it can really isolate immigrant communities. You're never going to get to know other community members if you just keep working with white community members. And so I purposely started looking for work, which would give me the opportunity to work with people who are not just white community members.
And it's hard to do that in an area that has so many silos. I was talking to a group recently about moving to ⁓ Northwest Minnesota and wanting to connect with the Somali community that was living in Northwest Minnesota. And there was an organization I work with called New Hope for Immigrants. And I wanted to meet the folks who were running New Hope for Immigrants, but I didn't know anybody who knew them and we didn't interact naturally.
So I had to one day decide to go into their office and say hello to them. Seems like such a simple thing, right? But it was not simple. It was hard for me to take that step. And I know a lot of people in Minnesota feel the same way. It's hard to take that step, to go outside of our own silos and interact with people in different silos. I don't know if that answered your question or not.
Rose Brunache (16:27)
No it did.
Kim Villanueva (16:28)
circling back to ⁓ ICE and the impact of ICE in Minnesota. But I don't think any of us can get into the heads of ICE agents and learn what they expected when they came to Minneapolis. it's been very different, I'm sure. And I'm sure they never expected to have the resistance that they're facing. And a lot of the resistance is coming from members of National Organization for Women, Minnesota NOW. Can you talk about what some of your members are doing to support immigrant communities during this time?
Renee Cardarelle (16:57)
What we have found in Minnesota now, because it's such a large umbrella organization, that we do best when we support our members being active and involved in initiatives that come out of other organizations. So we provide a place to gather and talk about this sort of intersectionalities around women's rights and how do we fight for equity. And a lot of our members will then go out and be on the ground with other organizations.
So instead of Minnesota now forming its own rapid response team, for instance, we joined together with other rapid response teams that are existing. And that's where a lot of our members are working. They're attending rallies and protests that maybe are organized by Indivisible because they've been taking the lead in rallies and protests, or the Women's March.
that happened a few years ago. There's an organization in Minnesota that's continuing that work. And so we'll join with them and Minnesota now will sponsor their efforts. There are numerous grassroots mutual aid groups springing up with mutual aid. Sometimes it's a real organized effort with lots of volunteers and lots of people bringing food to lots of places. But sometimes it's just someone in the neighborhood saying, my neighbor,
is afraid to leave their home and they are not getting food or their kids need to be driven to school every day because they can't drive them and they're afraid to put them on the bus. So sometimes it's just small efforts by just a few people. And so we see our members joining mutual aid groups or just reaching out on their own to people in their community. And then of course, there's the folks who are doing rapid response, who are going out and patrolling.
and looking for ICE activity and using their constitutional right to record how law enforcement is interacting with the public.
Kim Villanueva (19:00)
Yeah, it's amazing to see that it's coming, as you said, bottom up from the people. And you also touched on mutual aid. I mean, I think a lot of people think that mutual aid is really charity, but it's really not. It's people helping people.
Renee Cardarelle (19:04)
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, I do not hear the people who are working on mutual aid in Minnesota talking about it as though it's a social welfare type service. It's a, my neighbor's child needs food or this family hasn't been able to work because sometimes businesses are literally laying off migrants. So there's a lot of people who have lost their jobs in Minnesota and just don't have a means of working anymore.
And then if they're undocumented, of course, they can't use it. They can't gain any social services. The mutual aid that I'm seeing is that people are not thinking of it as social welfare. They're thinking of it as we need this in our community. How do we build networks to support each other? And there's a sense of shared need, not just that the migrant community needs this, but that this is a moment in time when we could lose all of our systems, all of our governing systems and everybody.
could be in need. And so we need to build out these structures, these community-based grassroots structures that will allow any, you know, all everyone in our communities to survive and to help each other because government is failing us right now. So there's not distressing government so much as a sense of betrayal that government isn't doing what it promised it was supposed to do. Helping us stay peaceful, helping us stay
helping us have jobs, that sort of thing.
Kim Villanueva (20:40)
Yeah, the traditional safety nets are failing. people are having to come up with their own, you know, and help their neighbors.
Renee Cardarelle (20:46)
Yes, exactly.
Rose Brunache (20:47)
You mentioned Renee Goode. She was the first fatality or one of the first fatalities from ICE. It's been striking how much of resistance is coming from women. Women across the state are organizing signal chats and feeding neighbors and blowing whistles. Why are women playing such an important role here?
Renee Cardarelle (21:06)
That's a really interesting question because until I had that question posed to me, I hadn't really considered the fact that many of the people I'm working with in this sort of grassroots efforts are women. And it's not that I'm not working with any men. So men are certainly stepping up and doing things, but oftentimes the people leading the efforts are women. So they're starting the mutual aid groups, they're starting the networks, they're starting the indivisible groups or whatever group that's being formed.
And it's the women who are taking the leadership role. And so I started thinking about why that might be. I do think women are more drawn to building community. And so creating a network of support in community is something that women are drawn to do. I don't think that means men are never doing that, but I think it's been women who, well, women are more able to relate it to their own lives and think about their own children and their own family members and their caretaking role with their own families.
and then relating it to the community more easily than I think men sometimes do. So men are definitely involved, but it's the woman that I'm seeing stepping up and taking on the leadership role and saying, you know, we have to take care of our community members. And the thing that's happening right now is that like in Minnesota, the majority community is finally starting to be aware of it. And in Minnesota, that means the white community.
Other groups have been fighting against it for longer and those have often been led by people of color. So I just want to recognize that just because right now we're at a crisis point and we're seeing more white community members step up, that doesn't mean others haven't been working on this beforehand.
Kim Villanueva (22:49)
Right. Yeah. One of the things that people have pointed out about the murder of Alex Preti is that he represented a different kind of masculinity, you know, talking about the roles of men and women. And a lot of the talk about traditional masculinity is about protecting and providing for women. So we have, the Ice Asians who were swaggering and, know, claiming they're protecting the community and defending the homeland. But that's just leading to very violent extremism.
But Alex Pretty was a nurse, which is a nontraditional role for a man. And he died truly protecting someone, a woman. So is this a kind of masculinity you see a lot in Minneapolis and Minnesota?
Renee Cardarelle (23:28)
So I've always believed that masculinity and femininity are on a continuum and that if you were to sort of line women and men up, ranking them from how masculine they were to how feminine they were, you would find men at one end of the continuum more similar to women at that end of the continuum than to other men. So in some ways, know, this idea of masculinity and femininity is kind of
of falsehood because it is a continuum. And having said that, I also think that there has definitely been a shift in our cultures over the last several decades, 30, years, in which masculinity has become more and more driven towards the idea of being aggressive, fighting for what you want, being
strong, a warrior, owning guns. So I do think that is problematic. And at the same time as that's been happening, I think I have to talk about femininity at the same time, that women are questioning their roles. They're questioning the traditional gender norms, and they're also questioning their relationship with men. So I think as men have the cultural idea of what's masculine and
male has shifted towards more violence and aggression. The women have shifted away from some of their traditional roles of being protected by men and and being passive towards being active and independent. And this is setting up a clash. think, you know, this tension is really visible in our community. I have a young man who ⁓ recently joined Minnesota now, and that's one of his most important messages he wants to get out is that
be a man, you don't have to be violent and aggressive and misogynistic. You can be caring and, you know, want to be supportive of women also. so that's fantastic. You know, he says he really wants to talk to other young men about this and how to rethink the way men and women are interacting and the way they define masculinity. So I think there's always been a continuum. I just think we're getting a lot of attention on the far end right now.
you know, and we need to have more positive messaging that moves us away from that.
Rose Brunache (26:02)
What is something that you've seen on the ground in Minnesota that you wish more people outside the state knew about?
Renee Cardarelle (26:08)
A lot of times I think people feel like the way to overcome some of what's happening, the way to overcome fascism, the way to overcome dictators, the way to overcome people coming into your community armed with guns, assault weapons, is violence. You hear that a lot. And I think that's been part of the cultural norm that we've been fed that isn't really true, is this idea that we have to use violence to overcome violence.
And there is a study that was done by Erica Chenoweth, and she wrote a book called Why Civil Resistance Works. And she started off with the same belief that a lot of people hold that the way to overcome these sort of violent regimes is through, the only way you can do it is through violence. And her study did not show that. Her study showed that the way, it was much more effective to use non-violence, that it produced better results and it was longer lasting. So I think that's something
that Minnesota has exhibited really well. There has been a very strong effort in Minnesota to use non-violence to not fight back. And despite some well-publicized examples of people fighting back in some circumstances, that's largely not been the case. People have been resisting in very non-violent ways. One of the trainings that they give to people who do rapid response is called
constitutional observer. And the emphasis is on just observing, not interfering, not taking action, just recording what is happening and observing. And that very act of observing often stops some of the behaviors that are not as good. It sometimes stops some of the immigration enforcement from happening, just the act of observing. So I think that's something that's really important to recognize.
that's happening in Minnesota is this movement is very nonviolent. When I'm talking to groups, I'll sometimes talk about Audre Lorde, who wrote an essay titled, Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. And I say to folks, we can't use violence and aggression and fear and division to defeat violence and aggression and fear and division. If you use those tools, you're just going to end up with more of the same.
And I think Minnesota is doing a really good job. I'm not doing that.
Rose Brunache (28:34)
Finally, what's going on in Minnesota right now is so hard. It's so important to have hope and we want to end every episode on a more positive note. What is giving you hope right now?
Renee Cardarelle (28:44)
I think the thing that I think is most hopeful is the way in which people are becoming aware who weren't before. So this isn't new what's happening in our country, but more people are becoming aware of it and they're doing something about it. And people who previously thought that had the assumption that this country was taking care of their needs. And I'm thinking of the white community in particular in Minnesota.
that the government was serving their needs really well are starting to recognize that the government wasn't serving everybody's well. And I'm hopeful that that's going to continue once this immediate crisis ends, that people are going to continue to say, wait a minute, we need a society that serves everybody's needs, not just a few people's needs. So like Maya Engel who said, you know, we do our best until we know better and then we do better.
And that's what I hope is happening in Minnesota.
Kim Villanueva (29:46)
a wonderful way to end. mean, that's truly the idea of mutual aid is helping everyone. Well, Renee, thank you so much for joining us today. And we really so much appreciate all the work that you're doing and all the work that your chapter members are doing in Minnesota. So thank you again.
Renee Cardarelle (30:02)
You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
Rose Brunache (30:08)
This is Rose with a statement from National Now. Over the past few weeks, we've been posting to social media asking people to call their senators and representatives to fight back against more funding for ICE. And you did it. You came through, you called your representatives. You have shown that together with our voices, we can make a difference. But it doesn't stop here. The government is still talking about funding ICE. But there's no limits, no body cameras, and no rules that will make people safe. We at NOW are calling our government
and we need you to do it too. Check out our social media pages on Instagram, Blue Sky, and Facebook for scripts. Let's stick together and keep calling.
Kim Villanueva (30:48)
Thank you so much for joining Rose and I this week as we talk with Renee Cardarelle, the Chapter President of Minnesota Now. We're so proud of her chapter and its work. This has been such a tough time for all of us, and we are so thrilled to hear from the people who are doing the hard work of justice in all its forms. That means we'd love to hear from you. How are you holding up during this troubling time? What keeps you going forward and doing the work? You can give us a call at the number in the show notes. There you can record a voice message.
or you can email us a voice memo at feminismnow at n-o-w dot o-r-g. Then keep an ear out for your voice in a future episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for our next episode in two weeks.