Each week, I drive my pickup truck through Memphis neighborhoods many people avoid. The truck bears a front plate that reads “Team Max” — a memorial to my son — and on these missions it becomes something else, a vessel of love, a bridge between my life and the lives of strangers I’ll never truly know.
I’m part of an underground network of mostly women who deliver groceries to immigrant families too afraid to leave their homes. Since federal agents and the National Guard arrived under the banner of “law and order,” the city’s Latino neighborhoods have been thrown into quiet terror. Families stay behind drawn curtains. Children no longer go to school. A knock at the door might mean deportation.
Our group, known as the Immigrant Pantry, operates through encrypted messaging on Signal. We’re teachers, mothers, social workers, and people who already live close to the edge. We collect food in garages and spare rooms, pack grocery lists at midnight, and drive into neighborhoods watched by federal patrols.
I joined in mid-October, volunteering first to move supplies between bases scattered across Shelby County. At the Collierville base, I met Sandy, one of the organizers, who stored hundreds of cans and bags of rice in her home. When I saw her expansive garage filled wall to wall with food, I felt the same reverence I feel in a chapel.
My first delivery was a family of five: two adults and three children. The list: ground beef, chicken, milk, potatoes, onions, bell peppers, cheese. The pantry provided the canned goods and toiletries. I added the rest.
When I arrived, the street was quiet. I knocked softly. A young woman answered the door, looking at me uncertainly until I said, “Immigrant Pantry.” I made six trips from the truck, unloading food onto her porch. She met my eyes and whispered, “God bless you.”
I drove away trembling, with gratitude, with anger, with awe.
I shop for these families the way I would shop for my own. I stand in the produce section holding avocados, testing their weight, and think about the hands that will slice them open. I buy the good tortillas, the ones that cost more. I add cookies, the ones that my own kids loved. I cannot stop myself from adding one more thing, then another. Juice boxes. Diapers. A bag of apples.
At the register, I watch the total climb past the $50 budget and I don’t care. I pay the difference without thinking. This is not charity. This is what you do when your neighbor’s husband has been taken and she’s alone with children to feed.
The drives to the houses fill me with a strange cocktail of purpose and dread. I’ve learned to notice things: streets where no one is outside, even on warm evenings. Playgrounds empty at 3 p.m. Curtains that don’t move. The neighborhoods feel like they’re holding their breath.
I’ve learned to watch for police cars. To note which corners they favor. To feel my own heartbeat spike when I see one idling a block away. I am a white woman in a pickup truck delivering groceries, and I am afraid. Not for myself, not really, but of what my presence might trigger. Of being watched. Of a patrol car following me to a house and waiting to see who answers the door.
When I knock, I knock softly. I’ve practiced this, not the sharp rap of authority, but something gentler. A request, not a demand. I step back from the door so they can see me through the peephole. I hold up a bag so they know why I’m there.
The door opens just a crack. Always just a crack. I say “Immigrant Pantry” and watch the fear in their eyes shift, from caution to relief. Permission to breathe.
I’ve started to recognize that look. The one that says: “You are not here to take something from me.”
Some of them cry. Some thank God. Some just nod and whisper “gracias” so quietly I almost don’t hear it. One little boy pressed against the window asked his mother something in Spanish. She told me in broken English as she opened the door, her voice soft, “He wonder if you police.”
I’ve learned to watch for police cars. To note which corners they favor. To feel my own heartbeat spike when I see one idling a block away. I am a white woman in a pickup truck delivering groceries, and I am afraid. Not for myself, not really, but of what my presence might trigger. Of being watched. Of a patrol car following me to a house and waiting to see who answers the door.
I am not the police.
I am someone’s mother. I am someone who has buried a son. I am someone who knows what it means to need help, to be too proud to ask for it, and to be broken open by the kindness of strangers.
I carry bags from my truck to their porches, and I think about all the ways we fail each other, and all the small ways we try not to.
Three weeks in, I was assigned a household of nine: two sisters and seven children. Their husbands had both been taken by ICE.
I bought what I’d want if I was alone with children to feed. Forty-seven items. Potatoes, tortillas, diapers, juice boxes, Mexican cookies. I moved through the store in a kind of trance, adding and adding, imagining the week ahead for this family. How do you feed nine people when you’re too afraid to leave the house? How do you tell your children their father isn’t coming home?
When we arrived, the house looked like all the others, small, worn, quiet. A chain-link fence. Peeling paint. Blinds drawn tight.
The young mother opened the door just wide enough to see us. “Immigrant Pantry.” Her shoulders dropped. “Gracias,” she whispered. “Gracias a Dios.”
Her children came to help carry bags. They were so small, struggling with the weight, but they smiled at us. One little girl, maybe six, waved as we got back in the truck.
I thought of that wave for days. The unselfconscious trust of it. The way she didn’t yet understand that the world had decided she didn’t belong here.
The women running this operation are not heads of foundations or large nonprofits. They are teachers and single mothers, people with cracked driveways and broken fences who still find ways to feed others.
I’m learning that real leadership means staying small enough to be useful. To serve without being seen as the one who saves. To let the work speak.
Every week I drive home with an empty truck bed and a full heart. I think about what it means to show up. To be a body that says: “You are not alone. You are not forgotten.”
A gallon of milk, two dozen eggs, a bag of onions and potatoes — this is the language of love. It will not change federal policy or dismantle cruelty, but it keeps children fed. It reminds families that they are seen.
You can be that person too.
Find your local mutual aid network. Text a friend and start one. Buy extra milk. Knock on a door.
In Memphis, we meet in encrypted messages and unmarked garages. We’re teachers, mothers, retired executives, people who drive pickups with front plates honoring their son’s unfinished work. We’re ordinary people refusing to accept cruelty as normal.
The question isn’t whether your small act matters.
The question is: when they came for your neighbors, what did you do?
