St. Paul poet Isa Lopez navigates art and life facing federal charges

When I met poet Isa Lopez at a coffee shop on East Lake Street, it was hard to reconcile the soft-spoken young woman sitting across from me with the reality that she is facing four federal felony charges. 

Before her arrest, Lopez – whose birth name is Isabel but who goes by her grandmother’s name, Isavela, or Isa – was working on a poetry manuscript, supported in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. 

Then on June 9, 2025, she was arrested following the raid led by federal law enforcement at Minneapolis’ Taqueria y Birrieria las Cuatro Milpas. She was charged with obstruction and assaulting federal officers.

As she awaits her trial originally set for early February but recently pushed to April, Lopez is reckoning with how the case has reshaped her life and her art.

“I feel like I had to start all over,” she said, her voice steady. “There’s just so much that I feel is missing now that I need to put in here.”

According to charges, Lopez allegedly punched, kicked and shoved agents and officers, and threw a softball at the back of a deputy from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota did not respond to my request for comment.

Lopez’s lawyer, Jordan Kushner, believes the charges were “done specifically for the purpose of intimidating people from protesting against the government’s actions.”

“We’ve got to resist this,” Kushner said, “because they’re going to do this to more people.”

Lopez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, began writing poetry in middle school in St. Paul. “I was a very shy kid, and I just didn’t have a lot of confidence,” she said. “I remember in sixth grade, I took a poetry unit and I just found a lot of freedom, and it just felt really natural to me.”

Her political activism came later, during the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd. “I was just feeling really inspired,” she said. She began writing poems about current events, including pieces responding to the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Vanessa Guillén.

In 2021, Lopez connected with a group of activists from Ecuador and Mexico, an experience she said reshaped her worldview. “That’s when things changed for me with how I saw the world,” she said. Through those relationships, she began learning about links between colonialism and the climate crisis. “It was just a whole other understanding of how I saw my identity,” she said.

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Local writer Erin Sharkey has known Lopez since the younger poet was in high school, when Sharkey encountered her as a dancer in an Aztec dance troupe run by Indigenous Roots in St. Paul. In 2023, both poets attended COP28 in Dubai, the United Nations’ annual climate summit. More recently, Sharkey has mentored Lopez through a program called Queer Voices.

Sharkey describes Lopez’s spoken-word poetry as rooted in lived experience. “It’s really thinking about power relationships and our responsibility to each other,” she said. “Passionate – I think that would be the best descriptor for her. She shows up intensely.”

While she awaits her federal trial, Lopez is working on a chapbook and has produced several zines about ICE whistles, in both Spanish and English.

“I have a couple poems that I’m trying to put together,” she said. “I also just want to talk about everything that’s happening, because there’s so much anguish right now. There’s so much anger. There’s so much fear. And I’m not the type of person to be afraid.”

Still, Lopez said the experience has left her carrying a new kind of anxiety.

“I think there is a part of me that’s kind of tired of feeling sad or scared or dark,” she said. 

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