Meet the man pledging to donate $16 million to help Minneapolis residents pay rent post-ICE surge - strib
It was a frigid Tuesday night in mid-January when John Wilson went to deliver laundry to a Columbia Heights family in hiding because of Operation Metro Surge, the immigration crackdown that brought more than 4,000 federal agents to Minnesota.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had been staking out laundromats, so volunteers would pick up laundry, wash it and return it to families. Wilson followed an assigned protocol: Drive around the block to make sure no agents were lurking, check for surveillance drones and only then park to make the delivery. A man tepidly walked out of a duplex to accept the two bags of laundry along with some diapers, candy and cash.
“You could see he was nervous,” Wilson said of the man.
He then saw a woman inside the duplex. Two kids in pajamas popped their heads out of the door. The panic-stricken family was too afraid to go outside for fear of being detained by the government. “I thought, ‘What is wrong with us?’” Wilson said. “You have to see it; then you can’t unsee it.”
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Using statewide figures and estimates from local groups, Wilson calculated that helping 5,500 households pay their rent through June would cost about $32 million.
“When I started digging around to figure out how we put money into this game and figure out how to get the money the people in need, it was a real mess,” he said. His bold vow: Offer half of what was needed for that total amount for rental assistance — $16 million — and lobby others to come up with the other half.
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