The Enforcer Can't Eat Here

The Situation

Gregory Bovino is staying in Bloomington.

Not commanding from Washington. Not remote oversight. He's physically here - at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Fort Snelling - running the largest immigration enforcement operation in US history from three miles away from where his agents killed Renee Nicole Good.

He's in one of the best food cities in the Midwest. And he can't eat anywhere.

The Menu He Can't Order From

• Grand Szechuan - no slouch

• Little Szechuan - legendary dan dan noodles

• Tea House - authentic Sichuan

• Wok in the Park - neighborhood staple

• The entire Asian mall

• United Noodles complex

• Szechuan Spice

• Hmong Village - 200+ vendors

• Little Mekong - Vietnamese district

• Lake Street - Mexican corridor

• Cedar-Riverside - Somali restaurants

• Frogtown - Southeast Asian epicenter

• University Avenue - the whole stretch

The Twin Cities have one of the most diverse food scenes in America. Somali. Hmong. Vietnamese. Mexican. Ethiopian. Sichuan. Cantonese. Korean.

Gregory Bovino can have none of it.

What He Can Have

• Sonic Drive-In (Bloomington)

• Applebee's (Mall of America)

• Chili's (494 corridor)

• The hotel breakfast buffet

• Duluth Trading Company (good selection for short men)

The man disrupting immigrant communities is surrounded by the food those communities created - and he's eating tater tots in his car.

The Isolation of the Occupier

This is what occupation looks like from the inside.

Three thousand federal agents controlling a city they can't actually be in. They can patrol Lake Street, but they can't eat at any of the taquerias. They can raid Cedar-Riverside, but they can't grab lunch at Safari. They can set up checkpoints near Hmong Village, but they can't shop there.

They have the authority. They don't have the community.

Fort Snelling has always been like this. The commanders never mingled with the people they controlled. Separate mess halls. Separate lives. The fort exists adjacent to the city, never part of it.

Bovino is living that history. He's three miles from some of the best Sichuan food in Minnesota and might as well be a thousand miles away. The room goes cold when the immigration guy walks in.

The Whipple Irony

The building Bovino works in is named for Bishop Henry Whipple - the Episcopal bishop who begged Lincoln for mercy for the Dakota in 1862. Whipple was a man who crossed lines, who entered communities not his own, who advocated for people the government wanted to punish.

His name is now on a building commanded by a man a federal judge found "not credible" - a man who, per Judge Sara Ellis in Chicago, "lied multiple times under oath."

Whipple broke bread with the Dakota. Bovino eats at Sonic.

The Food Court Democracy

Here's the thing about food courts and strip mall restaurants and ethnic grocery stores: they're democratic spaces. You show up, you pay, you eat. Nobody asks for papers. The food court doesn't judge.

Unless you're the guy whose face has been on every local news broadcast for a week. Unless you're the guy whose agents killed a mother of three. Unless you're the guy the city is suing.

Then the democracy closes. The community protects itself the only way it can - by making you unwelcome at the table.

Welcome to Minneapolis

Gregory Bovino has the full weight of the federal government behind him. He has three thousand agents. He has the authority to detain, to arrest, to deport.

He does not have a decent lunch option.

The Twin Cities are closed to him. Every neighborhood worth visiting, every restaurant worth eating at, every community worth knowing - all of it behind a wall he built himself.

He can have the Mall of America food court. He can have the Bloomington Sonic. That's his Minneapolis.

The rest of us will be at Little Szechuan.

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The author lives in Minneapolis and can eat anywhere he wants.

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