The unmarked SUVs rolled through an Augsburg University parking lot on a chilly Saturday in early December, and masked federal agents with long guns poured out.
Students watched in horror from nearby dorms as the agents pointed guns in the faces of their classmates and staff before detaining education major Jesus Saucedo Portillo.
The Dec. 6 scene, caught on video, reverberated throughout the diverse, tight-knit campus. It was the second arrest of an Augsburg student by immigration agents that semester and came just days into Operation Metro Surge.
Augsburg knew it faced unique risks when Donald Trump was elected for a second term. The school sits squarely in the middle of a neighborhood with a high population of immigrants. And it has the highest percentage of students of color of any private college in the state.
By December, the Trump administration had already arrested international students around the country, including three in Minnesota, and revoked visas for many more. It had also cut funding for university grants that prioritized equity and inclusion — including an Augsburg program that provided funding for first-generation graduate students.
School officials had prepared for the possibility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents coming to campus, and followed the protocol they’d developed, asking for a judicial warrant. But agents did not show a warrant and detained Saucedo Portillo anyway.
Ellie Olson, director of the university’s Center for Wellness and Counseling, recalled students feeling scared and confused, “reckoning with the feeling of, ‘we handled this according to our policies, and the bad thing still happened.’”
School officials braced for a drop in enrollment when the spring semester started in January, as Operation Metro Surge escalated all around Augsburg’s campus. They scrambled to provide personalized support to hundreds of students so they could continue their education — finding ways for them to take classes online, live on campus, or use underground tunnels to travel between classes.
In the end, despite the escalating ICE presence, the drop in enrollment never came. In fact, about 60 more students enrolled that semester than Augsburg had projected.
A diverse campus in the crosshairs
Saucedo Portillo’s arrest came just before the end of the fall semester. That night, the school sprang into action to support its students. The student government organized a pizza night where students could stop by to process their feelings. Counseling staff mobilized to campus on a Saturday to help triage student mental health needs.
The shift in the mood on campus was like “night and day,” said Aidan Wippich, the student government president.
“It genuinely felt like someone really important on campus died,” he said. “The grief, the emotions — it was palpable in the air.” Wippich spent much of the last week of the semester strategizing more know-your-rights sessions and helping steer the university to make campus safer: for example, making all building doors accessible only via a fob.
At that point in the semester, just a week of classes remained before finals. Many professors allowed flexibility with assignments that last week, with some moving classes online.
Amanda Lape, a political science major who had mutual friends with Saucedo Portillo, recalled a surge in text messages. “Everybody was checking in on everybody,” she said. “Everybody was texting their friends.”
She was alarmed to see ICE spreading lies about her classmate, claiming that he had a past drunk driving conviction and that he was a registered sex offender. Minnesota court records and both state and national sex offender registries do not show any such offenses for Saucedo Portillo.
“What is the school going to do about this?” Lape remembered thinking.
In the last two decades, under Pribbenow’s leadership, Augsburg has transformed over the from a predominantly white institution founded by Norwegian Lutherans into Minnesota’s most diverse private college.
Now, the school serves more than 3,200 students, including about 2,300 undergraduates. Two-thirds of the undergraduates are students of color, and more than half are the first generation in their family to attend college.
Immediately after the 2024 election, Augsburg created a working group dedicated to studying Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation plan for the next Republican presidency.
“We believed that if that was the blueprint for what was going to happen, we had the potential to be a target for that, just because of who we are, what we care about, and who our students are,” Pribbenow said.
Months into Trump’s second term, Pribbenow’s fears began to come true. In August 2025, the first of three Augsburg students was detained by ICE. Kevin Murillo Lucero, then 19, was on his way to a job site when ICE pulled him over, looking for someone else with a deportation order. Murillo Lucero, who came to the United States at 14 as an unaccompanied minor, ultimately agreed to self-deport to Ecuador in hopes that would make it easier for him to return on a student visa.
But his student visa was denied, his godmother, Lidia Margarita Riera Alvarado, told Sahan Journal. Murillo Lucero remains in Ecuador.
Then in September, Augsburg received word that its McNair Scholars Program, designed to support graduate degrees for first-generation students, had been eliminated in federal grant cuts. The U.S. Department of Education told Augsburg that the grant’s priorities did not align with the current presidential administration — specifically mentioning anti-racism training Augsburg had previously offered faculty and staff.
By late November, Michael Grewe, the dean of students, began to hear stories from staff and students about being pulled over or detained by ICE. Trump had begun to escalate his rhetoric against Minnesota’s Somali community — many of whom live in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood where Augsburg is located.
In early December, Trump announced an increase in immigration activity in Minnesota, focused on the Somali community. Steve Peacock, Augsburg’s director of community relations, attended a neighborhood response meeting in early December. He expected a small gathering, but more than 100 people turned out, planning rapid response networks and the need to combat negative narratives about the Somali community.
“From there, things just accelerated very quickly,” he said. ICE agents began to patrol the neighborhood, “showing up in very visible, aggressive ways.”
When Saucedo Portillo was arrested on campus, university administrators followed their protocol.
“All of those protocols came into play immediately, and none of them worked, because they didn’t care about our protocols,” Pribbenow said. “We had to pivot.”
Educating through chaos
As January began, it became clear that the ICE operation was not winding down anytime soon. On Jan. 7, an ICE agent killed Renee Good, less than three miles from the Augsburg campus. By then, thousands more agents had been deployed. In mid-January, ICE detained a third Augsburg student, this time off campus.
Augsburg declined to provide information about the three students detained, citing privacy concerns. David Wilson, a lawyer for Saucedo Portillo, said he secured his release through a habeas corpus petition.
Meanwhile, more than 3,000 other students were due to return to campus later in January.
“These students are here to get an education,” Pribbenow recalled thinking. “That’s what we do. What can we do to make it possible for them?”
Najeeba Syeed, an Augsburg professor, described high stakes for students — more than half of whom are the first generation in their families to attend college.
“Once you obtain a college degree, it opens up a much more robust avenue to upward social mobility,” she said. “If students didn’t return or are not here for a semester, that derails their education in a really significant way.”
Grewe asked professors to refer students who had safety concerns to his care team. He heard from students who had been racially profiled by ICE, who had to take care of their siblings after their parents had been detained, whose family lost their income and faced eviction because they could not go to work during the ICE surge. Augsburg helped connect students with mental health and legal support as needed. Grewe did his best to connect their families with resources as well.
“The first and foremost thing I think about is listening to our students and responding to our students’ needs,” Grewe said.
Over two weeks, the care team triaged concerns from about 350 students. Augsburg expanded the number of classes available online for the spring semester, which some students preferred.
Wippich recalled some students pushing to move all classes online. He explained to them that not all students could take their classes online — for example, if their major required science labs, or their visa required in-person classes.
Some students had safety concerns about commuting to and from campus. So Augsburg expanded a housing program typically meant for students experiencing housing instability to include students who didn’t feel safe commuting to campus. An additional 22 students signed up for the housing program after the school expanded it to these students, Grewe said, more than doubling the program’s participation.
Listening and responding to students’ needs was key, Grewe said. For example, some students reported concerns about going outside after ICE agents approached them on the public streets running through the campus. So Augsburg publicized its existing but often underutilized skyway and tunnel system, printing new signs and giving campus tours, to minimize the time students had to spend outside.
“They’ve done a really good job at highlighting some unknown ones,” said Devon Standingstrong, a history and religion major. “We could see them from outside, but it was just difficult to navigate inside the building.”
Some students had concerns about coming to campus at a particular time of day, so the care team worked with them to change their schedules. The student government implemented a buddy system so students could walk to their cars together.
Still, about 60 students opted for a leave of absence during the spring semester — nearly twice as many as last year.
Move-in weekend coincided with a planned Cedar-Riverside march led by Jake Lang, a right-wing activist for his antisemitic and Islamophobic conspiracy theories who was indicted for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol before Trump pardoned him.
“There were staff that were scheduled off, but they all volunteered to be on campus to greet students and to communicate a presence of care and safety,” said Babette Chatman, director of campus ministry.
Staff were carrying trauma, too, Chatman added. But they wanted to be present so that students didn’t have to face any potential chaos without them.
And they weren’t just protecting students — they were protecting their neighbors. Peacock recalled seeing people in fluorescent yellow vests — including volunteers from Augsburg — on every corner that day, watching to make sure their neighbors were safe.
Strengthening community ties
As ICE escalated its tactics and agitators like Lang descended on the neighborhood, more and more Cedar-Riverside residents stayed home in fear. Augsburg stepped up its community response.
Peacock was in close communication with organizations throughout the neighborhood, and saw food access emerge as a major issue early on in the surge. Augsburg already partnered with neighborhood food shelves — but the ICE presence left many neighbors afraid to leave their homes.
Peacock helped mobilize Augsburg students and staff as volunteers: escorting food shelf clients back to their apartments, delivering food to people’s homes, and watching for ICE outside of food distribution centers. He also organized an effort to support the local businesses that struggled as many customers and staff stayed home. And he worked with a neighborhood church and mosque to set up coffee and tea outside Friday prayers, providing a visible protective presence.
Dante Vancourt, a 34-year-old senior psychology major, wanted to support his classmates and neighbors as a “person of safety.” Vancourt, who is African American, felt confident he would not be profiled as an immigrant, and reached out to classmates he thought might need support. He drove around trying to identify ICE agents and began grocery shopping for his neighbors. He found it harder and harder to concentrate on his schoolwork.
“You could feel the tension, but also the sense of community,” he said.
Syeed shifted the community service learning program she leads, because it didn’t feel as safe to take students into the community as it had before.
“If I don’t feel myself safe as a professor being in the neighborhood, it feels very difficult to ask my students to travel extra time and space outside of campus,” she said.
Some students told Sahan Journal they stayed in their rooms more than usual — and people from many ethnic backgrounds felt they could be a target for ICE. Megan Gwinn, who is white, realized she could be at risk after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed. Standingstrong avoided going outside after ICE arrests of Indigenous men.
Syeed arranged community service activities on campus that students could participate in safely, like making hygiene kits for unhoused people. Still, she noticed some students who did not feel targeted choosing to volunteer in the community.
Lape helped distribute food, despite her Filipino mother’s worries about her going too near an ICE agent.
“It felt like I could do something,” Lape said. “Everything that’s been happening really beats you down, because it feels like you are just such a small person in such a large system and that you can’t really do anything to actually help out. But these efforts to actually show up for everybody — I would honestly cry about it so often, because I was just so overwhelmingly proud of how the community came together.”
Lessons from Metro Surge
Over the last few months, Pribbenow has been sharing the story of Augsburg’s response to Operation Metro Surge — supporting both students and the larger community — with university presidents throughout the country.
“I’ve been very careful to say, we’re hoping you don’t have to face this,” Pribbenow said. “But there still are important lessons here about how a community can come together no matter what the challenge is.”
He noted that students came back at a time when it would have been easy to stay away, and the school was able to continue its mission of education.
“It’s not just what we did on campus, but it’s also how we embraced our neighbors,” he said. “It could have gone in very different directions if people had not been supported, or they were too frightened to be here.”
Standingstrong said he saw continuing his education during this time as a form of resistance.
“Even if we were hiding on campus, it was still so much more important for us to remain on campus,” he said. “I felt like it really allowed Minneapolis students who were fed up with ICE to just show we are here, we are educated, we know our rights, and there’s nothing that you can do about that — that you will not scare us into submission.”
