Last year, as federal agents descended upon cities across the United States, immigration rights advocates in the Twin Cities prepared for the threat of large-scale immigration enforcement closer to home.
Now, following months of sustained Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) presence in Minnesota, they are pivoting again. In the aftermath of Operation Metro Surge, organizers, legal groups and elected officials are assessing how to respond to the community disruption and economic damage it caused.
“Businesses are struggling, families are struggling, there has been just so much damage done financially to our communities,” said Kevin Huynh, organizing director of immigrant rights group Minnesota 8.
Community groups move forward
For community organizers in the Twin Cities, rebuilding efforts must be balanced with the ongoing threat posed by remaining ICE agents in Minnesota. Huynh said that while the more violent and visible operations seen during Metro Surge may have subsided, immigrant communities are still vulnerable.
“They’re [ICE] not gone, it’s just a little bit more hidden, or the tactics have changed,” Huynh said. He said Minnesota 8 is working with a single mother of four children who was detained while driving. “So we know it’s still happening.”
Despite a more low-profile ICE presence, Huynh said it’s clear agents are likely to remain in Minnesota. He said that organizers have seen new vehicles arriving at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, and immigrants are still being detained.
Huynh added that the sustained ICE presence is not a new phenomenon in Minnesota, as immigration agents have been increasingly targeting immigrant communities since President Donald Trump returned to office.
“This has been happening before they sent thousands of agents to our state,” he said. “It was like this time last year.”
Other community groups in the Twin Cities have been adjusting to the challenges created by Operation Metro Surge as well.
Erika Zurawski, an organizer from the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC), said the ramped-up federal presence required the group to shift priorities from policy advocacy to direct action.
Zurawski said MIRAC began organizing to assist impacted families and monitor ICE activity on the streets.
“There was definitely those moments where I felt like if I wasn’t staring at my phone every second of the day, I might miss something important that might be happening,” she said. “Metro Surge basically threw everyone’s world upside down.”
Now MIRAC is returning to policy work. Zurawski said Minnesotans who organized and turned out to confront federal immigration agents on the streets want to see their local leaders take steps to protect immigrants and resist federal overreach.
“We were on the front lines; what the hell were they doing?” Zurawski said. “We still had that kind of push and pull politically while we were doing all this on-the-ground work as well.”
While MIRAC’s attention has returned to policy advocacy, Zurawaski said the organization still recognizes the pressing needs facing immigrant communities. With many afraid to leave their homes or unable to work over the past several months, the need for rental assistance and other support has expanded dramatically.
According to Zurawski, MIRAC has raised over $750,000 to support individuals impacted by Operation Metro Surge and has partnered with dozens of local organizations doing mutual aid work to distribute it.
“We’ve agreed and we’ve partnered with them so that all of the money that they receive from MIRAC won’t go to salary, but will go directly into the community,” she said.
Zurawski said that despite fewer agents in Minnesota, it is important that communities and organizations keep the pressure on local officials to protect immigrant communities in the future. She said MIRAC’s priority is now to lobby for statewide legislation to ban agreements between Minnesota counties and ICE, and pressure Gov. Tim Walz to demand charges against protestors and civilians who were arrested during the operations be dropped.
“We don’t want to just move on, we want to fight back,” Zurawski said. “That’s the important distinction that we need to be making. The only path forward is a path of continued resistance, that’s all we’ve got.”
Legal challenges remain
The explosion in arrests during Operation Metro Surge — as many as 5,000 between mid-December and March, according to recent New York Times reporting — also put Minnesota lawyers and legal groups on the front lines.
Julia Decker, director of public policy and public affairs at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM), said the organization had to adapt quickly to keep up with the wave of detentions happening across the state.
Decker said that ILCM was forced to quickly expand its legal team protecting detained immigrants in deportation proceedings.
“Everything immigration-related was about trying to respond to detentions and transfers out of state,” she said.
As immigration authorities rushed detainees out of state to detention centers primarily in Texas, attorneys across Minnesota began filing petitions for writs of habeas corpus — a legal action challenging the legality of immigrants’ detention — to grant their release. These petitions became the primary tool to free many from detention centers.
Decker said that while these legal battles were important for mitigating the harm caused by Operation Metro Surge, many immigrants still face increasing challenges as they navigate the immigration process.
“A lot of those people, they got out of detention, but they’re still in the immigration court process, and those processes are still being narrowed and restricted,” she said. “The administration is still doing all it can to make those processes as inaccessible and as hostile as possible for people who are in them.”
While the blitz of detentions and out-of-state transfers has subsided since the peak of the federal operation, Decker said many legal challenges still remain. For those still in detention in states like Texas, recent legal decisions in the Fifth Circuit have made their release less likely. In Minnesota, attacks on legal immigration processes have made asylum seekers’ path to permanent residency increasingly difficult.
Decker said it is important to continue supporting those proceeding through the immigration system.
“We no longer have people being dragged out of their cars, but that doesn’t mean that the broader harms are not still happening.”
Stuck in legislative gridlock
While community groups push local leaders for rental assistance, economic help for businesses and other aid to help impacted communities recover, lawmakers are encountering political resistance.
Minneapolis Council Member Jason Chavez said the most pressing need facing impacted communities after Operation Metro Surge is rent, as many were forced to stay home, or lost breadwinners in the family. He added that without community intervention, the consequences would have been far worse.
“Our community members in the city and in the state and across the country have been fundraising people’s rents, or else we would be in a way worse-off situation for many of our neighbors that would lose their homes,” he said.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey recently vetoed a measure that would have temporarily extended the pre-eviction filing notice period from 30 to 60 days. The St. Paul City Council is considering a similar measure.
Rental assistance is also a key issue at the State Capitol this session. A DFL-backed bill to provide $40 million in assistance to those affected by Operation Metro Surge passed the Senate, but faces resistance in the House, which is split 67-67.
Rep. Mohamud Noor, DFL-Minneapolis, one of the bill’s supporters, said legislative wins have been hard to come by this session.
“It’s difficult when we have a divided House to get anything done,” Noor said. “I think that has become an issue within the House as we speak.”
Still, Noor said he was hopeful Democrats and Republicans could find common ground. He said that issues like rental assistance and support for impacted businesses were bipartisan, and could potentially draw support from both parties.
“Those are just common, basic processes,” Noor said. “I think if we can act in a way that is more common-sense focused on Minnesotans, we will get it done. But if we politicize the issue, nothing will get done.”
Other key legislation the DFL has pushed this session includes requirements for immigration agents to produce judicial warrants to enter “sensitive locations” such as schools and places of worship, as well as a bill introduced by Jamie Long, DFL-Minneapolis, that would allow Minnesotans whose constitutional rights were violated by federal agents to sue in state court for monetary damages. The bill failed to advance out of committee however, rendering it dead for the time being.
Noor pointed to Mubashir Khalif Hussen, a U.S. citizen of Somali descent and one of Noor’s constituents, who in December was wrongfully detained and taken to the Whipple Federal Building as an example of someone who could have benefited from the bill.
“If there’s any remedy that he can get, it’s going to be coming from the state court system,” Noor said. “And that is something that’s unique that we’re trying to provide for citizens. Right now, that remedy does not exist.”
Sahan Journal reached out to several Republican communications staff members for comment, but did not receive any response.
Picking up the pieces
While Operation Metro Surge has wound down, officials and community members say the impacts will endure for months and years to come. At the same time, residents and officials are well aware that threats persist as ICE is still present in Minnesota.
“We’re still going to need people to patrol and observe,” Chavez said. “People should still be carrying their whistles in their key chains or [on] their neck or their car because the reality is, ICE is still going to be here no matter what.”
With the threat of heightened immigration enforcement and detention still present, organizers and officials say the rebuilding process will be slow, as vulnerable communities remain afraid to return to public life.
“We still have so many of our community members that are terrified to leave their homes,” Zurawski said. “That fear is not just something that goes away.”
That fear, Huynh said, will have impacts not visible in statistics alone.
“I don’t think that it is necessarily fair to just think of Metro Surge as numbers of enforcements or number of agents, because the damage has been done,” Huynh said. “Just because maybe a couple hundred of the agents left doesn’t mean that our communities are back to normal, or have healed from the harm that they’ve caused.”
