UMN alum preserves Operation Metro Surge stories through her storytelling website
Sabrina Rucker builds an anthology of first-hand ICE accounts on her website “Storyforge.”
On a cold Wednesday in early January, Sabrina Rucker decided not to respond to an ICE rapid response group chat alert. She was tired and had just returned home to Apple Valley from a trip. It was the first call she had ever missed.
Renee Good responded to the same alert that day, Jan. 7, before Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed her. Nearly half an hour after Good was shot, Rucker was in her car, driving toward the scene.
“I was driving into danger with nothing but a whistle and a camera,” Rucker said.
When Rucker arrived, she took photos of ICE agents tear-gassing people at the SWAT car-surrounded intersection where Good had been killed. Throughout the next several weeks, Rucker wrote in depth about that experience in a personal journal.
Later, however, Rucker found herself upset after talking with a city-dwelling cousin, who told her people who live in the suburbs couldn’t understand what it was like to live with ICE on their streets.
“I was so angry with her,” Rucker, a suburbanite, said. “Like, you have no idea what I’ve lived. You don’t know.”
This conversation sparked an idea. Rucker realized that many people likely had moments from the surge they wanted to share if someone would listen.
So Rucker, a University of Minnesota alum, who is now CEO of a publishing company called Storyforge, collected as many stories as possible from Twin Cities residents to publish in an anthology series about the ICE surge on her website and in book form.
She wants to give the people affected an opportunity to tell their stories and for people outside of Minnesota to hear them. Her goal is to get the anthology into large-scale distributors like Barnes & Noble.
“I think it’s something a lot of people outside of the state would be interested in reading about,” Rucker said. “In terms of real-life testimonies of folks who are on the ground, especially because a lot of the resistance efforts that happened here in Minnesota were of great inspiration to other places around the country. I think it could be used as a sort of manual, for lack of a better word, showing this is what they did here. This is what happened.”
Telling untold stories
Rucker founded Storyforge in 2022 as a community-driven publication to combat inaccessibility in the publishing industry and the high price tag of self-publishing. Its mission is to tell stories that would otherwise go untold.
Today, Rucker oversees a team of 16 people who have published 20 stories on the website so far, keeping the company alive through bootstrapping, ad revenue, and subscriptions at different price points.
“So kind of a write-for-fun, read-for-money, publish-for-free situation,” Rucker said.
Rucker majored in history at the university and said her studies informed her approach to publishing the anthology. Her love for preserving stories that tell people’s lived experiences has made the project especially exciting.
“Particularly when talking about impactful current events, it’s very easy for people to tune out when the lens is too broad,” she said. “We’re not well built to understand the scope of an impact. But we are well-suited to understand personal stories.”
Storyforge’s anthology will feature first-hand accounts of what Department of Homeland Security officials called “the largest immigration enforcement operation in history.” The surge only occupied the general public’s awareness for a couple of months, but its effects will continue for far longer, Rucker said.
Rucker is aiming for a variety of perspectives. With 50 submissions so far, the team has collected accounts from students, business owners, immigration lawyers, and first-hand witnesses. She’s missing testimonies from people who have been detained or were in hiding. Those are two groups she doesn’t want to omit.
“There are all these different stories, and if you can compile them into one spot, then you can give people a better understanding of the very broad effect that this ICE occupation has on Minnesota and Minneapolis,” Rucker said.
After the ICE surge, people in and out of Minnesota have a new awareness of how the Twin Cities community shows up for each other, Rucker said. While Minnesotans aren’t always welcoming on the surface, they are quick to help each other out in times of need.
“People will move heaven and earth to make sure you’re safe in the winter,” Rucker said. “We might not invite you to the house, but we will go out in the streets and risk our lives for you. That’s something that’s always been prevalent in the culture, but it’s on display in a way that it hasn’t been before.”
An outspoken fixer
Questioning authority comes naturally to Rucker, her childhood friend Lily Nestor said. When a boss or teacher’s rules didn’t make sense, Rucker was the first to call it out.
“She’s always been an outspoken kind of person,” Nestor said. “She’s someone who is aware of the privilege she has and wants to use that to help others.”
Since bonding over sci-fi and fantasy books on the middle school playground, Rucker and Nestor’s friendship has lasted over 14 years. Nestor watched Rucker struggle to get her work published; she submitted many manuscripts, but none were taken up.
Forming Storyforge is a classic Rucker response to meeting a dead end with publishers, Nestor said
“In classic Sabrina fashion, she was like, ‘Whoa,’ that’s something I’m frustrated by. Let me fix that,” Nestor said.
Before collecting stories for the anthology, Rucker made sure the Storyforge team felt comfortable pursuing a project about the ICE surge.
“She was very deliberate about wanting to help but also wanting to keep people safe,” Nestor said. “When she sees people around her being hurt in ways that she can’t understand, she wants to help as much as she can and wants to contribute to her community.”
Rowana Miller, the CEO of a storytelling education nonprofit in New York, said despite the obstacles small businesses face, Rucker is determined to help others get published. Miller and Rucker meet monthly one-on-one to talk about the challenges facing online publishers.
“Sabrina personally experienced the problem Storyforge is solving, and that positioned her really well to know her audience,” Miller said. “She cares very deeply about doing right by people, which makes her a good manager.”
Rucker said she believes community stories matter. Even if people are initially hesitant to share their experience with ICE, they often appreciate that someone is listening, she said.
“It’s been really heartening to see how many folks are not just excited about the project, but grateful that it’s being done,” Rucker said. “They’re really, really glad someone is telling their story.”
