The couches came first. Then the dressers and the beds, carried into an apartment on the near west side of Indianapolis by members of White Harvest United Methodist Church on Ditch Road, who had agreed to sponsor a refugee family they had never met. It was May 1981. I know this story as my parents tell it. My mother remembers the relief of having a place to start again. She also remembers how lonely she felt.
Forty-five years later, the president of the United States posted that Minnesota was being “taken over by Somali Immigrants,” that there was “Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State,” and that its people “must fight back.” He was describing a community of refugees and naturalized Americans. My family once belonged to such a community.
My father had taught nursing in Ethiopia and held a master’s degree from Cornell University. My parents fled the Ethiopian dictatorship and were forced to leave their 22-month-old son behind. They crossed into Sudan, and in March 1980 flew to Frankfurt, Germany, where I was born. Just after my first birthday, we arrived in Indianapolis.
My father took a late-shift job at a 7-Eleven while he applied for the Ph.D. program. In his first months at the register, he was robbed at gunpoint twice. Each time, he returned for his next shift.
In December 1982, my oldest brother arrived from Ethiopia. He had spent over four years without his parents. I was almost 3 and no longer an only child. I remember arguing with a family friend over the boy who spoke no English and had arrived that night. “He’s your brother,” one of us said. “No, he’s your brother,” the other answered.
The United States admitted 159,252 refugees in 1981. My parents and I were three of them. In fiscal year 2026, the United States admitted 16,292 refugees: 16,287 from South Africa and five from Afghanistan. None from Ethiopia or Somalia. For fiscal year 2027, the ceiling is set at 17,500, again prioritizing Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority from South Africa. The State Department argues these refugees will assimilate in a way that preserves taxpayer resources. That is a selection committee, not a refuge.
I thought about this when I read Katelyn Vue’s report about Fardowsa Abdi Aden’s family in the Sahan Journal. Fardowsa arrived at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in January 2025 with her husband and their eight children. She had spent most of her life in an Ethiopian refugee camp after her family fled Somalia’s civil war. Her sister, Amina, had reached the United States in 2011. Amina had lost her sight as a child, and Fardowsa had been her guide. “I felt like I lost my eyes,” Amina said of her first years in America without her sister. Fardowsa’s application stalled under the first Trump administration’s travel ban. The family was among the last refugees to resettle in Minnesota, arriving days before the 2025 inauguration.
At the airport Fardowsa hurried through the arrivals doors to embrace her sister after 14 years of living an ocean apart. Relatives had come with balloons and a sign reading “SooDahawoo.” Within days, the International Institute of Minnesota had found the family an apartment, furnished it, and stocked it with groceries and toys.
Operation PARRIS launched in January 2026, in what DHS called a fraud investigation initially focused on 5,600 Minnesota refugees who had not yet received green cards. ICE agents arrested refugees and transferred some out of state. Imam Yusuf Abdulle described the streets of Minneapolis: “The armed men and women, with their faces covered, roaming our streets and profiling us… We thought we had left all that behind.” A federal judge later barred arrests and detention based solely on lack of permanent-resident status and ordered those held released.
Between Aug. 30 and Sept. 3, ICE agents arrested 426 people across Indiana, most in the Indianapolis area. People were afraid to leave their houses. One west-side school’s attendance fell as low as 40%.
Minnesota is where Fardowsa Abdi Aden’s family was welcomed with balloons in January 2025. Indiana is where my family began in May 1981.
I remember my father’s colorfully adorned robe at his Ph.D. commencement in 1990. He went on to teach anatomy at Ivy Tech Community College for more than three decades. His night students were mostly working mothers taking the anatomy credit they needed to apply to nursing school. At the end of every term, he’d announce that anyone who brought freshly baked cookies would receive extra credit. He never once gave the extra points, but by Christmas, our pantry was full of them. Years later, he would run into former students earning more than he was, some working two nursing jobs, three 12-hour shifts at each.
I was 1 when the couches arrived. In high school, I would often drive past that church on Ditch Road.
I knew what it was.
The people who carried those couches into our apartment could not have known that hundreds of nurses throughout the Midwest would learn anatomy from a Dr. Bizuneh and laugh at his jokes. They could not have known that a hospital patient in Charlotte would be treated by the boy who arrived in 1982 with no English and became another Dr. Bizuneh, like his father before him.
They did not need to know.
In January 2025, the International Institute of Minnesota furnished an apartment for Fardowsa Abdi Aden’s family. I don’t know what has happened to them since. The people who welcomed them cannot know what the future holds for that family.
They do not need to know.
Fasil Bizuneh teaches at Kohala High School in Kapaau, Hawaii. A former professional long-distance runner, he finished fifth at the 2006 Twin Cities Marathon three places ahead of Jacob Frey, now the mayor of Minneapolis. Bizuneh was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to parents who fled Ethiopia and was raised in Indianapolis.
The post My family was given a chance. Who gets one now? appeared first on MinnPost.
