Reflections

The Shadow Descends: Reflections on This Day of ICE OUT

By Dr. Afton Blake

January 30, 2025

Today, January 30th, 2025, a cry rises across America. In Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, small towns and great cities alike — people are closing their shops,leaving their desks, gathering in the bitter cold to say enough.

They call it the National Shutdown. ICE Out. No school, no work, no shopping. 

But those of us who have spent our lives tending the depths of the human psyche know it is something older than a protest. It is a collective expression of what Jung called the moral instinct — that ancient knowing in the human soul that recognizes when the fabric of communal life is being torn.

I have sat with people for fifty years. I have witnessed the shadow — personal and collective — in all its manifestations. I have learned that what we do not face within ourselves, we project outward. And what a nation refuses to integrate, it enacts violently upon the most vulnerable among us.

We are watching our shadow in uniform.

The administration speaks of “criminals” and “enforcement.” But the data tells a different story: nearly 52% of those arrested have committed no criminal offense other than crossing a border. Mothers separated from children. Workers vanishing from job sites. Children watching agents take their fathers away. In Fridley, Minnesota, a school superintendent reports being followed by ICE — to her workplace, to a bingo night at a school.

This is not law enforcement. This is terror as policy. Fear as governance.

The Somali Community: Survival Upon Survival

My heart turns especially toward the Somali people of Minnesota — the largest Somali community in America. These are people who have already survived displacement, civil war, years in refugee camps, the long labor of building new lives in a foreign land. Now they are being pulled from cars, dragged from businesses, targeted in immigration sweeps through their shopping centers and neighborhoods.

Nearly 58% of Somalis in Minnesota were born in the United States. Of those who are foreign-born, 87% are naturalized citizens. Yet families are running out of food because they are afraid to step outside their apartments. Children are watching their parents worry about leaving the house. Parents have instructed their children on what to do if ICE agents come to their home. Even mosques report that attendance has fallen —people too frightened to gather in prayer.

As activist Amina Adan said: “The Somali community has always been resilient, but this feels different. We are not just fighting for our rights; we are fighting for our very existence in this city.”

The President called these people “garbage.”

I think of what it takes to survive war. To flee your homeland. To wait years in a refugee camp with your children. To learn a new language, a new climate, a new way of being in the world. To build businesses, raise families, become Americans. And then to be told by the leader of your new country that you are garbage, that you are not wanted, that armed agents will be sent to hunt you down.

This is the shadow projected onto a community that has already carried more than most of us can imagine.

For Those Who Cannot March: The Alchemy of the Inner Work

And what of those of us who cannot be in the streets today? The elders, the homebound, those whose bodies or circumstances keep them from the cold and the crowds?

We are not without power.

For those of us who cannot march in the literal collective, we can go inward.  

This is not escapism. This is soul work. This is alchemy.

The alchemists knew that transformation begins in the dark — in the nigredo, the blackening, when everything seems lost. They understood that you cannot make gold without first confronting the lead. The base matter. The weight of what is.

We are in the nigredo now. We are being asked to hold the unbearable — the images of families torn apart, of agents smashing car windows, of a man dragged away while his daughter cries for him in the street. This is the lead. Heavy. Toxic. Seemingly irredeemable.

But the alchemists also knew that the lead contains the gold. That the work of transformation is not to escape the darkness but to stay with it, to apply the heat of consciousness, the moisture of compassion, until something new emerges.

Today, if you cannot march, sit in stillness and imagine the future you want to manifest. This is the alchemical operation. This is how we participate in turning lead into gold.

See it clearly. Feel it in your body. A world where families are not torn apart. Where children do not learn to fear a knock at the door. Where the Somali grandmother can walk to the market without clutching her papers. Where the word “neighbor” means something again.

Jung understood that images have power — that the psyche does not distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a lived one. When we hold an image with enough intention, it begins to work on us, and through us, on the world. This is not magical thinking. It is the activation of what the mystics and alchemists have always known: consciousness participates in the creation of reality.

So hold the image. Breathe it. Apply the fire of your attention and the water of your tears. Let the transformation work in you.

The Rising

The shadow is real. But so is what rises to meet it. I see thousands braving subzero temperatures in Minneapolis to honor Renee Nicole Good — a 37-year-old mother of three, shot dead in her car. I see nurses and teachers and small business owners closing their doors in solidarity. I see ordinary people choosing to bear witness.

I see more than 500 people signing up to be part of rapid response teams — learning their rights, training to document raids, showing up when their neighbors are in danger. Everyday people: restaurant owners, teachers, nurses. “Minnesotans feel very targeted,” one organizer said, “because we love our Somali community.”

This is not politics. This is soul work on a collective scale. This is the opus — the great work — unfolding in real time.

Today I bring my morning words into this darkness: Equanimity. Vision. Wandering. Grace. Gratitude.

Equanimity to hold the horror without being consumed by it. Vision to see the possibility that lives beneath this nightmare.

Wandering — the willingness to move beyond certainty, to follow where soul leads.

Grace — which finds us when we least expect it.

And gratitude — for every person who shows up today, in the streets or in the silence of their own hearts, who refuses complicity, who says: Not in my name.

Whether you march or you sit in stillness and imagine — whether you carry a sign or carry a prayer — you are applying heat to the lead. You are part of the opus.

The shadow is real. But so is the gold hidden within it.

May we all be part of the transformation.