MANKATO — Sarah Beiswanger is a volunteer delivery driver for ECHO Food Shelf in Mankato. As the 55-year-old heads into a nearby town to drop off groceries at the home of a Latina woman in hiding, she calls the client to get her specific location.
“Hi. This is Sarah, and I am delivering your groceries and just trying to figure out where to go,” she tells the woman over the phone.
Once she finds the residence, Beiswanger hands off several boxes of groceries to the client in her driveway, who warmly thanks her.
Beiswanger is one of several volunteers who delivers groceries to those who are still too afraid to leave their homes due to the ongoing presence of ICE agents in Greater Minnesota. Despite federal officials saying there are fewer than 500 immigration agents left in Minnesota, Beiswanger says that enforcement operations do not appear to have diminished in and around Mankato.
There are reports from observers and community representatives of immigration agents making stops in recent days in Rochester, Worthington, Wilmar and other small towns and cities across the state.
That has many immigrants and BIPOC around Minnesota too afraid to leave their homes to go to work, to school and to shop. As a result, food shelves are trying to adjust in how they meet their clients’ nutritional needs, including delivering groceries to those without enough to eat.
So when Beiswanger gets a call that someone needs food delivered to them, she picks up the boxes from the food shelf or a storage facility, and then, using the limited information given to drivers, heads out to hand-deliver or drop off food. Beiswanger said she makes sure there are always people who know what she’s doing and is constantly checking her surroundings to make sure she isn’t followed.
As she drove one recent afternoon, Beiswanger expressed her frustration with the situation that many food shelf clients are now in.
“People just want to work,” Beiswanger said. “They want to do the right thing. In my lived experience, (it) doesn’t matter if you don’t speak the same language. We all just want what’s best for our kids and our families.”
Even before the surge started in December, food shelves had been dealing with the strain of funding cuts, a 43-day federal government shutdown and an increase in demand for services and food. Then, ICE activity expanded from the metro areas into Greater Minnesota.
The fear of ICE has caused many of those who are food-insecure to stay home rather than visit their local food shelves. It prompted food shelves and other groups and their volunteers to meet the demand by finding alternative ways of ensuring food access for clients.
Deisy De Leon Esqueda, director of ECHO Food Shelf in Mankato, said she’s noticed a decline in the number of BIPOC and immigrant households coming in person. But De Leon Esqueda said the demand for food hasn’t dropped at all, as more clients are opting to call to ask for someone to deliver essentials to them instead of risking a trip to the food shelf themselves.
“The stories that I hear, it just … it breaks my heart to hear these stories, and it’s difficult to trust people,” she said. “It’s just really difficult to trust and I think we’re being tested. I hope we pass this test.”
And De Leon Esqueda fears the impacts will can be long-lasting. She added that “we’ll see it, we’ll believe it” when federal officials stated a drawdown of ICE agents in Minnesota. She said it’s likely that even after activity does slow down, “there’s still going to be a lot of fear.”
“There’s going to be a lot of trauma that we’re going to have to deal with as time goes by,” she said. “And it’s definitely going to change the way that we perceive our community and our neighbors and the way we perceive our state.”
In St. Peter, the food shelf installed a security camera on the door. Food shelf manager Cindy Favre said they’ve been locking the door during the hours they’re open, and visitors need to verify who they are before stepping inside.
“I thought at first that people would be annoyed by it. But actually, especially from people coming to get food, they seemed relieved,” Favre said. “They seemed to feel like, ‘OK, I feel like there’s a layer of security in coming here.’”
Favre said the food shelf did experience challenges with clients being afraid to give any information, especially when neighbors or a designated proxy shopper comes to pick up groceries for them.
“They would call a neighbor and say, ‘I need food. Can you go get me food? But don’t tell them who I am. Don’t tell them where I am. Don’t tell them anything.’” Favre said. “We did have to do some adjusting … and a lot of educating and helping people understand that when they give us information, it’s not like we’re giving it to other people. That it’s for our reporting purposes and that type of thing.”
And while the number of people coming into the food shelf has dropped, there’s been an increase in the number of proxy shoppers — someone who can come to the food shelf and pick up groceries in the client’s place. Favre said it was eye-opening.
“I was imagining that somebody would come and say, ‘Oh, I’m here to shop for this one other family,’” she said. “The proxy showed up saying, ‘I’m here to shop for 18 families.’ ‘I’m here to shop for 30 families.’”
Sophia Lenarz-Coy, executive director of The Food Group, a Twin Cities-based nonprofit that works with food shelves statewide, said the responses of food shelves vary depending on the region and the level of immigration enforcement activity there.
“What we started to see was that there were these shifts in decreases in visits,” Lenarz-Coy said. “While the capacity strain I don’t think has necessarily been on, ‘Oh we’ve got a lot more people coming to the food shelf,’ the capacity strain has been on, ‘We need to have a lot of different ways for communities to access food.’”
Lenarz-Coy also said the hard-earned trust that was built over the years with marginalized communities may not be easy to get back, as layers of food support programs are getting harder to access when fear and anxiety is “off the charts.”
But Lenarz-Coy also said she’s been heartened by the number of individuals taking actions to help their neighbors in need.
“They’re feeling seen, they still belong,” she said of immigrant and BIPOC food shelf clients. “It’s how neighbors take care of other neighbors. I think that has been the heartening part of this really horrible time. So many people are going to do everything they can to make sure everyone in our community has the food they need.”